August 21, 2023: The European payments firm taking on U.S. titan Stripe shares of Adyen have decreased nearly 39% after the company reported low sales and a profit reduction in the initial year.

Adyen attributed the tepid print to increased hiring, former wages, and a shift in its North American customers’ business prioritization from growth to cost savings.

The company reported much slower sales growth than a year earlier in the first half of 2022; the company said revenues increased 37% yearly.

“We’ve been quite open that since the beginning of 2022, we want to invest in the business, and to do that, we needed to grow the team,” Adyen’s CFO told on Thursday.

“We see a real opportunity in payments and financial services.”

Adyen is one of Europe’s major fintech firms, with a market capitalization of 35.4 billion euros. The company provides payment services like Netflix, Microsoft, and Spotify.

The firm also said that inventory write-offs led to a 6.3 million euro hit to EBITDA.

It competes with online payment staples like PayPal, Stripe, Block, and Fiserv.

Adyen and other payment companies benefited heavily in previous years from the rise in demand for e-commerce and digital payment options resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic and ensuing lockdowns.

More recently, these companies have been hit by a tidal wave of adverse economic events, including the Russia-Ukraine war, higher interest rates, rising inflation, and a slump in global equity markets. 

Investors have soured on fintech, as a high-interest rate environment decreases the appeal of growth-oriented companies that typically depend on raising cash.

The company primarily makes money off a small slice of the transactions charged to merchants’ bank accounts. Payments is an overall massive but incredibly competitive market with plenty of players.