Shares of Dutch fintech firm Adyen surged over 66 percent at the market open on their first day of trade on Wednesday in Amsterdam, in what is one of Europe’s biggest technology initial public offerings (IPO) in recent times.

On Tuesday, Adyen priced its shares at 240 euros ($281.6), which was at the upper end of the range the company had previously indicated in its prospectus. This gave the company a market capitalization or valuation of 7.1 billion euros ($8.3 billion).

But shares opened at 400 euro, marking a 66 percent rise from the 240 euro pricing. Shares hit a high of 427.9 euros, giving the company a valuation of 12.6 billion euros or ($14.8 billion).

The Dutch firm is not issuing new shares. Instead, it’s shareholders are selling their stock, which amounts to 13.4 percent of outstanding shares, to institutional investors.

Adyen is a payments processing firm that works with customers including Netflix, Facebook and Spotify. It also sells points of sales systems for physical stores and handles payments online and in-store. Adyen processed payment volumes of 108 billion euros ($127 billion) in 2017, up from 66 billion euros the year before, representing 63 percent growth. And this has been growing strongly each year.

The 12-year-old company has been profitable for some time. It recorded a net income of 71.3 million euros in 2017, though this was down from 97.2 million the year before. Revenues exceeded 1 billion euros for the first time in 2017.

“I’m very proud to be building this company with such a great team. This listing will only help us to continue to do what we are doing now: helping our merchants grow and reshaping the payments industry,” Adyen CEO Pieter van der Does said in a statement on Tuesday.

The IPO marks one of Europe’s biggest technology listings in recent times, behind Swedish music streaming service Spotify in April. Spotify’s IPO was not a traditional IPO however and it decided to list in New York.

Europe’s technology scene has been growing in recent years with a number of “unicorns” or companies with $1 billion valuations minted in recent years, particularly in the financial technology space. Swedish payments firm Klarna and British peer-to-peer lending firm Funding Circle are two such companies, with the latter rumored to be going public later this year.

Source: Tech CNBC
Adyen shares soar 78 percent on first day of trade in IPO as valuation tops billion