Klarna plans to lay off ten percent of its employees

According to the Swedish payment service provider, it employs around 5,000 people, quite a few of them in Germany. In future, there are to be fewer.

Klarna is planning to lay off around ten percent of its global workforce, as reported by CNBC. CEO and co-founder Sebastian Siemiatkowski is said to have announced this in a video message to his employees on Monday. Employees in Europe are to be offered packages with "appropriate severance pay". These offers would vary depending on where they work.

The company, which was founded in 2005, benefited greatly from the increase in online shopping during the coronavirus pandemic. "When we drew up our business plans for 2022 last fall, it was a very different world to the one we find ourselves in today," Siemiatkowski is quoted as saying on CNBC. Due to the war in Ukraine, inflation, a volatile stock market and a possible recession, the market would currently look much worse.

The announcement of the redundancies could be a reaction to a new financing round, in which Klarna could lose a third of its value according to various media reports. The company was most recently valued at 46 billion US dollars in a round led by Softbank.