Adyen posts mixed H1 results as travel industry slowdown hurts growth

Since March the payments giant has seen the decline in payment volumes stabilise.

Despite a boom in online spending triggered by European lockdowns from Covid-19, payments giant Adyen saw its earnings growth slow in the first half of 2020.

The Dutch fintech which IPO’d in 2018 and saw its shares soar 90 per cent on its first day of trading, posted net revenue of €279m in H1 2020, up 27 per cent year on year.

But earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization grew just 12 per cent to €140.9m in the six months to 30 June, with a pronounced slowdown in the second quarter as a result of lockdowns hitting travel spending.

“As illustrated in our April Trading Update, we saw a dip in volume in March driven by the pandemic’s impact on the travel and in-store retail verticals,” wrote Adyen’s CEO Pieter van der Does and CFO Ingo Uytdehaage in a letter to shareholders yesterday.

“The decline in these volumes stabilized quickly, while online retail and digital goods volumes accelerated after global lockdown restrictions went into effect. Following the publication of the Trading Update, travel volumes have begun to slowly recover.”

Adyen’s customers include tech giants like Uber, Facebook and Netflix, as well as Brompton, Virgin Hotels, airline KLM and retailers like Zalando.

Overall Adyen processed some €129.1bn of payments in the first half of the year, an increase of 23 per cent year-on-year.

Most of Adyen’s revenue is still generated in Europe (63 per cent), but the company noted that net revenue growth is strongest in North America (58 per cent) and Asia-Pacific (28 per cent) where €51.1m and €26.7m worth of revenue was generated in H1.