Klarna third-quarter revenue beats estimates in first earnings report after IPO

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By Supantha Mukherjee

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) -Growth in U.S. markets helped Swedish fintech firm Klarna to achieve a 26% jump in third-quarter revenue, beating expectations in its first report as a public company and forecasting revenue above $1 billion in the current quarter, the company said on Tuesday.

The buy now, pay later lender, which went public in September in New York, reported revenue of $903 million, beating analysts’ expectations of $882 million, according to data compiled by LSEG.

“To a large degree, AI is accelerating our ability to ship new features and products,” CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski told Reuters.

Klarna had been an early adopter of AI and used the technology to help customers and merchants cut jobs, create marketing campaigns and improve products.    

However, Siemiatkowski expressed some nervousness about the huge spending on building data centres.

While there will be an uptick in demand for AI in both the consumer space and enterprises, there will be more compression of data in businesses, hitting future compute demand, he said.

Tech companies have announced massive spending plans this year for building data centres as they expect AI to fuel demand. 

Klarna’s gross merchandise volume (GMV), a commonly used e-commerce metric for measuring sales, rose 23% to $32.7 billion in the quarter.

In the U.S., Klarna’s largest market, GMV grew 43% and revenue rose 51%.

Active customers rose 32% to 114 million from a year ago.

The company, however, reported a net loss of $95 million, compared with a profit of $12 million in the year-ago period, which it said was partly due to a shift to U.S. accounting principles following its New York listing.

In the current quarter, the company expects revenue of $1.07 billion, compared with expectations of $1.06 billion.

(Reporting by Supantha Mukherjee in Stockholm, editing by Terje Solsvik; Editing by Aidan Lewis)