Originally published in Svenska Dagbladet by Björn Jeffery, September 10, 2025
Klarna opens with a surge on the American stock exchange. Billions in market value are added immediately. But the listing is more of a new start than a finish line.
Sweaty palms, elation, nerves. Putting your life’s work on the stock exchange is a big day for an entrepreneur. That is where Klarna and its CEO and co-founder Sebastian Siemiatkowski find themselves now.
When the opening bell rang on Wednesday, a new era began for Klarna. With the listing in the United States, the Swedish company has left much of its history behind.
On the pink banner hanging outside the New York Stock Exchange, the words read “Pay your way.” The irony in that phrase will likely be lost on most people. “Pay your way” originally means to pay for yourself, and not let anyone else do it. Klarna’s history suggests almost the opposite. But the stock market listing is a new start — and everything that matters now lies ahead of the company.
The start of a stock market journey is not particularly indicative of how things will go forward. In May 2012 it was Mark Zuckerberg’s turn, when his Facebook — now Meta — listed on Nasdaq. There it began with serious technical problems and the trading start was delayed while exchange staff frantically tried to fix them. The chaotic opening was followed by three months of tough trading where the share price almost halved.
If you look at Meta’s historical share price, you see none of that. What must have been an incredibly tough period for Zuckerberg is now a microscopic bump on a curve that shoots upward. Today — around thirteen years later — Meta’s share price is up over 1,900 percent. None of this was readable on that first day on the exchange.
To find the opposite, we need look no further back than this past summer. Design tool Figma had priced its shares at 33 dollars for its IPO in late July. The first trade on the exchange was at 85 dollars. A success! There and then, at least. Just over six weeks later, Figma had lost over 56 percent of its value.
We should therefore view Klarna’s listing with interest, but with caution. An initial increase of 30 percent in the first trade on the American exchange implies a market cap of around 177 billion kronor. But that does not actually say very much. Nor does wherever the share closes in a week’s time. Both the crises and the successes during the company’s first twenty years now form little more than a prologue to what is to come.
The transformation is logical. It is the United States that is the most important market, and that is where growth lies going forward. The many Swedish shareholders in Klarna — mainly among the staff — will likely make their presence felt more in other business contexts than in the parent company itself. A potential wave of investment into smaller startups is one conceivable outcome. That would be good for Stockholm and Sweden. But that is probably where Swedes will mainly feel the effects of this listing.
The success that Sweden has produced in Klarna becomes, in all essential respects, American. The company gains a new shareholder base that will begin to shift when many lockup periods expire in six months’ time. If we look a year ahead, it may be an entirely different type of owner that dominates. But they are unlikely to be primarily Swedish. The company has had international owners and customers for a very long time. The focus moving to the other side of the Atlantic is a natural continuation of something that started long ago. Sweden and the Swedish stock exchange missed that train.
Klarna was founded on 10 April 2005. In many respects, however, it is 10 September 2025 that the world will remember as “Day 1.” Klarna is now traded on the stock exchange and is beginning a new journey with its starting point at the New York Stock Exchange.
It is a new start, whether or not the company feels it needs one. The twenty years that preceded the listing become history. But that is true of every normal company that lists on the stock exchange. The story of the company will be written from here onward.
