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The Adyen logo displayed on a smartphone.

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Shares of Adyen, the European payments giant taking on U.S. titan Stripe, fell nearly 28% on Thursday after the company reported worse-than-expected sales and a profit drop in the first half of the year.

Here’s how the company performed:

  • Revenue of 739.1 million euros ($804.3 million) over January to June 2023, up 21% from a year ago. This came in below analyst estimates of 853.6 million euros of revenue and 40% of year-on-year growth, according to Eikon data.
  • EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization) of 320 million euros, down 10% from 356.3 million euros in the first half of 2022. The first-half 2023 result matches an analyst prediction of 320 million euros profit.

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

The company reported much slower sales growth than a year earlier — in the first half of 2022, the company said revenues grew 37% year-over-year.

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

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

Adyen is one of the biggest fintech firms in Europe, with a market capitalization of 35.4 billion euros. The company provides payment services to the likes of Netflix, Meta, Microsoft and Spotify.

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

It competes directly with online payment staples, such as PayPal, Stripe, Block — formerly known as Square — 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 negative 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 overall transactions charged to merchants’ bank accounts. Payments is an overall massive but incredibly competitive market, which hosts plenty of different players.

Adyen, identified among the top 200 global fintech companies globally by CNBC and Statista, is betting on the fact that a unified single payments platform gives merchants access to a variety of services, from debit cards and buy now, pay later options to mobile wallets like Google Pay and Apple Pay.

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CoreWeave shares rip 18% higher, rising above IPO price

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CoreWeave shares rip 18% higher, rising above IPO price

Mike Intrator, Chief Executive Officer and founder of CoreWeave, (C) rings the opening bell surrounded by Executive Leadership and family during the company’s Initial Public Offering (IPO) at the Nasdaq headquarters on March 28, 2025 in New York City. 

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CoreWeave shares rallied more than 18% on Tuesday and looked to bounce back from a lackluster second trading day on the public markets.

Shares of the artificial intelligence cloud company, which rents out access to Nvidia’s graphics processing units to other technology companies, dropped more than 10% on Monday and fell below the initial public offering price of $40. The stock opened at $39 on Friday and closed flat at $40.

CoreWeave opened on the public markets Friday in the biggest venture-backed tech IPO for a U.S. company since 2021. It served as a key test for a public offering market that came to a near standstill about three years ago in the face of high inflation and rising interest rates that shunned technology investors

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Many hoped that CoreWeave would usher in a more favorable period for IPOs as companies such as ticket reseller StubHub, Klarna and Hinge Health join a mounting list of names readying in the wings.

CoreWeave’s disappointing performance has failed to lift investor confidence.

Markets have also sold off against a backdrop of macroeconomic uncertainty spurred by President Donald Trump’s tariff agenda. CoreWeave lowered its offering price to $40 last week from an initial expected pricing range of $47 to $55 range. The company also downsized the offering to 37.5 million shares from 49 million.

CEO Mike Intrator told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Friday that the company had to “scale or rightsize the transaction for where the buying interest was” against a backdrop of macroeconomic headwinds.

The company, which counts Microsoft as its largest customer, last hovered near a $19 billion market capitalization. Its most significant competitors include MicrosoftAmazonGoogle and Oracle.

In its prospectus filed in March, the company reported a net loss of $863 million. CoreWeave said revenue grew more than 737% last year to $1.92 billion.

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TikTok creators, partners remain optimistic ahead of app’s second ban deadline

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TikTok creators, partners remain optimistic ahead of app’s second ban deadline

Photo illustration shows the TikTok logo displayed on a mobile phone screen.

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For the second time this year, TikTok is staring at a deadline that could determine its fate in the U.S. and that of numerous creators and brands that have built businesses on the Chinese-owned social app.

The sense of urgency that led some creators to post wistful goodbye videos in January has shifted to a more cautiously optimistic outlook, with creators and firms saying they believe TikTok will remain in the U.S. They are, however, hedging their bets. 

“I’m trying to be optimistic and hope that they keep it, but as a creator, I have to be prepared either way,” said Gianna Christine, a creator with 2.7 million TikTok followers. 

TikTok could be effectively banned in the U.S. on April 5 because of a national security law originally signed by former President Joe Biden that requires its Chinese parent ByteDance to divest the app’s American operations. ByteDance originally faced a Jan. 19 deadline to sell TikTok, but Trump signed an executive order instructing the attorney general to not enforce the law, granting the Chinese company 75 more days to divest the U.S. portion of its business.

Gianna Christine makes lifestyle videos about living in New York City to her nearly 3 million followers on TikTok.

Gianna Christine

Like others who spoke with CNBC, Christine said she hasn’t received any direct updates from TikTok about its future. Christine said she’s staying positive about TikTok’s chances of remaining in the U.S. but she’s also expanding her presence on platforms like Snapchat and YouTube as a precaution.

“You never know what will happen,” Christine said.

Throughout his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump said many positive comments about TikTok and used the app as a campaign tool. Trump said Sunday that he is “pretty certain” that a TikTok deal will be reached before the April deadline, according to AFP. Last week, Trump said he may extend the deadline if a deal isn’t reached and that he may reduce tariffs on China to help facilitate a transaction.

“I really don’t see TikTok getting banned,” said Olivia Plotnick, the founder of the Wai Social marketing and consultancy agency. “Trump really is going to want to show how amazing he is, and make a deal happen.”

TikTok and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.

Whatever is in store for TikTok, the company is acting like business as usual.

Current and former TikTok workers said they have received no communication from management about its future in the U.S. Brands and creators said they have received no updates from the company either.

That lack of communication and the uncertainty of the app’s future hasn’t stopped TikTok from moving forward with new partnerships. 

Marketing firm Meltwater, for example, announced that it joined TikTok’s marketing partners program in March. Aditya Jami, Meltwater’s tech chief, said that his TikTok contacts seemed to be “in the dark” about the app’s future, but they went ahead with the partnership, which will require deep integration between the two companies.

 “They are actually going to do more and more things that we can build together and then expose to our customers, so I feel like it’s going business as usual,” Jami said.

TikTok creator Alyssa McKay has more than 10 million followers, but she’s been proactive about diversifying her following across more platforms.

“If you’re not already posting on Snapchat, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, that’s where you need to be,” said McKay, adding that her efforts to get ahead of a potential ban have resulted in her already earning more revenue from other platforms than she does on TikTok.

Alyssa McKay is a content creator with over 10 million followers on TikTok.

Alyssa McKay

The first TikTok ban deadline didn’t significantly alter the social media postings from creators and brands, according to data provided to CNBC by Later, a social media and influencer marketing firm.

Social media users increased their posts on Threads and YouTube by 10% and 6%, respectively, the week of the TikTok ban in January compared to the week prior, according to Later. Still, the general posting habits of brands and creators during the week after the January deadline compared to the week preceding it were nearly identical, a spokesperson for Later said. 

Throughout March, creators and brands steadily reduced the number of scheduled TikTok posts they plan to publish during the weeks leading up to the April deadline while increasing their scheduled Instagram posts, Later data showed. The March data suggests creators and brands are “reallocating content to Instagram as a safer or more stable alternative,” the Later spokesperson said.

For a brief moment, the Chinese social media app RedNote rose to the top of Apple’s app store during the week leading to the January deadline. Known as Xiaohongshu in China, that app has similar short-video features as TikTok, but it has a user base comprised mostly of women from more affluent Chinese cities that embraced the sudden influx of American users, Plotnick of Wai Social said.

“They were super welcoming, and it was a really fun time,” Plotnick said.

RedNote’s moment in the sun won’t likely repeat. The app is no longer a priority now that TikTok has resumed normal operations, creators and brands said. 

“I don’t foresee buzz around alternative apps like RedNote,” Later CEO Scott Sutton said. “Those were a blip and lacked the staying power of other platforms.”

It’s unclear whether lawmakers who are concerned about the Chinese Communist Party  or TikTok-competitors like Meta or Google would take to the courts to enforce the national security law, said Neil Chilson, a former chief technologist at the Federal Trade Commission who now heads AI policy at Abundance Institute non-profit. Taking that kind of legal action carries the risk of upsetting TikTok’s giant user base and Trump, Chilson said.

“Trump likes this sort of leverage that the law provides him,” Chilson said. “He’s obviously using quite aggressively — not quite in the text of the law — his latitude to make deals to continue to string this along.”

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Amazon resumes drone deliveries after two-month pause

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Amazon resumes drone deliveries after two-month pause

Amazon has restarted drone deliveries in two states after a months-long pause, the company confirmed.

In January, Amazon halted Prime Air deliveries in College Station, Texas, and Tolleson, Arizona, the two U.S. markets where it’s testing the service, as the company rolled out a software update to its drone fleet.

Amazon discovered an abnormality with the drone’s altitude sensor, caused by dust in the air, that could have caused its system to produce an inaccurate reading of its position relative to the ground, the company said. Amazon “never experienced an actual safety issue,” but said it opted to suspend deliveries while it corrected the issue.

The company brought drone deliveries back online last week after it completed the software update and received approval from the Federal Aviation Administration, Amazon spokesperson Av Zammit said in a statement.

“Safety underscores everything we do at Prime Air, which is why we paused our operations to conduct a software update on the MK30 drone,” Zammit said. “The updates are now complete and were approved by the FAA, allowing us to resume deliveries.”

An FAA spokesperson didn’t immediately provide a comment.

Zammit said Prime Air has seen “unprecedented levels of demand” since it resumed service. David Carbon, an executive who oversees Amazon’s drone program, wrote in a LinkedIn post last week that the company dropped a bottle of ZzzQuil sleep medicine at an Arizona customer’s home in “31 minutes and 30 seconds.” Carbon didn’t say how far the drone had to fly and Zammit declined to provide details.

For over a decade, Amazon has been working to bring to life founder Jeff Bezos’ vision of drones whizzing toothpaste, books and batteries to customers’ doorsteps in 30 minutes or less. But progress has been slow, as Prime Air has only been made available in the U.S. in College Station and Tolleson. A test site in Lockeford, California, was shuttered last April. The program was also hit with layoffs in 2023 as Amazon CEO Andy Jassy cut costs across the company.

Amazon has set a goal to deliver 500 million packages by drone per year by the end of the decade. The company last year notched a critical regulatory milestone that could enable it to accelerate deliveries. It’s eyed international expansion to the U.K., and recently welcomed Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy in a visit to a Prime Air facility.

The company also introduced a new version of its delivery drone, called the MK30, which is designed to be quieter than previous models and can fly in light rain.

Customers in College Station, a quiet suburban town that’s about 100 miles northwest of Houston, had previously complained about the drones’ noise levels. After rolling out the MK30, the company is also taking steps to relocate its drone hub farther away from residents’ homes later this year.

Before Amazon suspended drone deliveries, the MK30 crashed in two separate incidents during test flights at the company’s facility in Pendleton, Oregon. Last December, a software issue caused two drones to crash, according to Bloomberg. And in September, a pilot mistakenly caused a “mid-air collision” between two drones after he tested how the MK30 would perform when faced with a failed propeller, according to a federal crash report.

Another crash occurred on Feb. 21 during tests at the Pendleton site, which resulted in a drone sustaining substantial damage, according to a report compiled by the National Transportation Safety Board.

Amazon said the crashes were unrelated to its decision to halt drone operations. The company has said these kinds of incidents, which have also occurred with other models in previous years, are part of the testing process, as it pushes drone systems “up to the limits and beyond.”

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