With stock markets in meltdown around the world following President Donald Trump’s rollout of punishing trade tariffs last week, Swedish payment giant Klarna’s plans for a long-awaited IPO remain in flux.
Klarna was expected to float on the New York Stock Exchange later this month, but abruptly put those plans on hold as Trump’s sweeping import taxes on foreign goods played havoc with the stock market, bringing the IPO of one of Europe’s most hyped startups to a sudden halt.
Experts tell Sifted it may be some time before Klarna gets back on track. “The IPO window is as closed as it can be. Right now, you simply can’t price a company,” says Richard Goldman, chairman of the executive transaction group at the investment firm Redeye.
Amid the biggest economic downturn since the pandemic, onlookers say Klarna had little choice but to postpone. “These are the two worst days in the market since COVID,” one person close to the company tells Sifted. “Nobody was trying to go public then either.”
Nonetheless, Klarna’s investors were expecting an exit opportunity — with some waiting until details of its pricing became available at its IPO roadshow to decide whether they would liquidate their stake, according to the source. With the market in turmoil, they’re now in the dark, with LPs still waiting on returns.
Sifted has contacted a Klarna spokesperson for comment.
“We’re in the eye of the storm. It’s a binary outcome,” Goldman says,“Either the consequences become dramatic and the market drops further into a deep recession, or the big bank CEOs call the finance and trade ministers and manage to get through a U-turn.”
On Monday, JP Morgan’s CEO Jamie Dimon was the first of a major Wall Street bank to publicly address Trump’s tariff policy. He said that they will likely boost prices on both domestic and imported goods, weighing down a U.S. economy that had already been slowing.
Adam Kostyál, the Nasdaq’s head of listings in Europe, tells Sifted: “We had an incredibly good start of this year and we had, and still have, a strong pipeline. Now it’s going to become much more cautious,” he says.
With the rest of the world, including the EU, deciding whether to counter the US with tariffs of their own, Kostyál says the markets will remain unpredictable. “It adds another layer of complexity — another level of uncertainty,” he says.
Even if there was some kind of miracle U-turn, Goldman doubts Klarna could IPO later in April. “It’s not possible to IPO a company in the next three weeks.”
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/klarna-ipo-delay-analysis/
