After Adyen’s huge debut on the public markets in June that saw the stock go up 92 percent on its first day of trading, the company today published its first earnings as a publicly listed business. The figures underscore to how Adyen — which provides services to merchants and others to power both online and offline transactions — continues to charge ahead in its growth. In the first half of the year, Adyen made revenues of €256.4 million ($298 million), up 67.3 percent compared to a year ago, with net income of €48.2 million, up 74.6 percent.
For some context, in the year that ended December 31, 2017, Adyen generated net revenues of €218 million, up 38 percent compared to 2016. In other words, in the first half of this year, Adyen has already made more than it did in all of the year before.
The stock is currently trading at €574 per share, versus a close of €548.10 the day before.
Adyen said it processed €70 billion in transactions in the period, up 43.1 percent compared to the same period a year ago. This puts it on track to grow processed volumes by about 50 percent for the full year. (Last year’s processed volume was €108 billion.)
Ebitda was €70.3 million, up 83.1 percent, with a margin of 44.9 percent. This was down slightly on last year’s margin, which Adyen ascribed to “continued investment in global team and marketing.”
As we’ve described before, Adyen’s business is predicted on the continued growth of e-commerce, and also the the increasing digitisation of in-person payments that link up data between offline and online transactions.
In each of these cases, merchants or others taking payments — Adyen’s customers include the likes of Netflix, Uber, eBay and Dunkin’ Donuts — potentially have to string together a number of different pieces to not only take payments, but to process them and use the data from them to inform wider business decisions. Adeyn’s solution essentially is to handle all of that for its customers, in order to make the process of taking payments from customers more efficient.
“Through our single platform, we provide a holistic view of payments, regardless of sales channel, delivering unique shopper insights while combating fraud and improving payment authorization rates,” the company notes.
The company was built originally on solving the hurdles around digital payments — an area that still has a long way to go, considering that e-commerce is still around 10 percent or less of all transactions across many key markets. But Adyen’s more recent move into physical transactions has been a large boost to business, with point-of-sale processed volumes up 120 percent year-on-year to €6.6 billion. Nevertheless, POS payments accounted for just 9.4 percent of total processed volume, the company noted.
Adyen has been one of the most successful IPOs of the year, and is a reminder that, despite Square still yet to post a net income, there is a lot of opportunity for strong business models in financial services that disrupt existing providers. (And that goes for Square too, despite its profitability for now.) Adyen still has a long way to go before it’s the category leader. While it gave a less positive outlook for future quarters, PayPal in the last quarter alone noted $139 billion in payments processed, as well as $3.86 billion in revenue, on net income of $526 million.
