Adyen shares soar 78 percent on first day of trade in $8 billion IPO

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.

Source: CNBC

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