Sweden's Klarna surpasses $1 billion in fourth-quarter revenue as US growth speeds up

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Swedish "buy now, pay later" services provider and online bank Klarna reported a 38% year-on-year jump in fourth-quarter sales on Thursday, just beating expectations, as it added more banking customers and grew in the United States.

Quarterly revenue at the fintech group, which went public in New York in September, crossed the billion-dollar mark for the first time, reaching $1.08 billion. Analysts polled by LSEG had on average forecast sales of $1.07 billion.

Klarna said users of its banking services doubled to 15.8 million.

"It's showing that we can really do what we set out to do, which was (to) first create a global payments network, and then create a true banking relationship," CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski told Reuters.

Klarna has said early adoption of AI across operations has helped it shrink its workforce despite rapid expansion, and it has used part of the savings to raise wages. Siemiatkowski said on Thursday the average employee compensation had risen 60% since 2022.

"More and more of the jobs at Klarna that will exist even in an AI-powered world will be about human relationships, whether it's a relationship with our merchants or relationship with our consumers," Siemiatkowski said, adding that a growing share of Klarna's staff will be supporting customers.

Klarna's gross merchandise volume (GMV), a commonly used e-commerce metric for measuring sales, rose 32% to $38.7 billion in the quarter. In the U.S., its largest market, GMV grew 43% while revenue rose 58%.

Klarna is due to publish its full fourth-quarter earnings report on February 26. In the third quarter, it made a net loss of $95 million.