Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO and co-founder of Swedish fintech company Klarna, shows a thumbs up at the company's IPO on the New York Stock Exchange in New York City, the United States, September 10, 2025.
Brendan McDermid | Reuters
Klarna After debuting on the New York Stock Exchange in September, the company beat Wall Street's third-quarter sales expectations in its first earnings report.
Shares fell 9%.
Here's how the company performed compared to LSEG estimates
- Revenue: $903 million versus expected $882 million
Revenue rose 26% from $706 million in the year-earlier period. The company reported a net loss of $95 million, or 25 cents per share, down from a year ago when it had net income of $12 million, or 5 cents per share.
The buy now, pay later company said it was buoyed by outsized growth in the U.S., where gross merchandise volume grew 43% year over year. Gross merchandise volume, which measures goods sold, rose 25% to $32.7 billion from $26.2 billion last year.
The introduction of features such as Klarna Card and Fair Financing, which offer longer installment options for larger purchases, contributed to US gains. The feature offers different interest rates and was able to more than triple the gross merchandise volume compared to the previous year.
The fintech company said the Klarna Card had reached more than four million customers since its launch in July and accounted for 15% of transactions through October.
CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski said Fair Financing doubled the number of users compared to last year, but only reached about a fifth of merchants. This creates “countless opportunities” for Klarna, he told CNBC.
“We want to be the one that helps you save time and money and stay in control of your finances, and that's obviously not necessarily what we're associated with,” he said, adding that Klarna will continue to work to gain that reputation.
Klarna also said Elliott Investment Management had agreed to buy $6.5 billion of its fair funding loans so it could focus on U.S. growth of the product.
The number of merchants rose 38% to 850,000 from 616,000 in the same period last year, but average sales per active customer fell. Total customers were $114 million.
For the fourth quarter, Klarna expects gross merchandise volume between $37.5 and $38.5 billion and sales between $1.065 and $1.08 million. Both beat FactSet estimates.
Transaction margin, a measure of core business profitability, is expected to be between $390 million and $400 million. In the third quarter, the total was $281 million.
In a note to customers, Bank of America said the focus on fair financing had weighed on Klarna's expected transaction margin, with fourth-quarter guidance consistent with the Street.
“Based on our discussions, we expect investors to remain cautious about credit-led growth,” the bank said.
JPMorgan called its forecast for “sequential improvement” in transaction margins for the fourth quarter “encouraging.”
Klarna opened on the NYSE about two months ago after the company postponed its IPO plans in April as President Donald Trump's aggressive tariff plans rattled financial markets.
Stocks have plummeted in recent weeks as concerns grew about a possible AI bubble with stretched valuations. Concerns about a slowdown in consumer spending have also increased.
Klarna shares have lost more than a third of their value compared to their highs.
Siemiatkowski said the company is not yet seeing “significant differences” in payback or spending habits due to the microenvironment, but is monitoring the AI wave that is expected to impact more white-collar jobs.
Over the years, Klarna has relied heavily on artificial intelligence. Siemiatkowski told CNBC in May that technology, along with attrition, helped the fintech company shrink its workforce by 40%.
He said the natural turnover rate is up to 20%.
Klarna is not alone. Palantir, Salesforce And Amazon They have all warned that they plan to cut staff or slow down hiring due to the introduction of AI.
Siemiatkowski said AI fits the company's “customer-obsessed” mentality and has reduced the average time to resolve a customer service issue to under two minutes.
Companies that only use AI or robots to deal with customers are making a “big mistake because you want to have a human connection,” Siemiatkowski said. “There’s this tremendous value.”