Klarna plans to lay off ten percent of its employees

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

Klarna plans to lay off about ten percent of its global workforce, CNBC reports. CEO and co-founder Sebastian Siemiatkowski is said to have announced this in a video message to his employees on Monday. Employees in Europe would reportedly be offered packages with "appropriate severance pay." Depending on where they work, these offers would vary.

The company, founded in 2005, had benefited greatly from increased online shopping during the Corona pandemic, he said. "When we set our business plans for 2022 last fall, it was a very different world than the one we're in today," Siemiatkowski is quoted as saying by CNBC. With the war in Ukraine, inflation, a volatile stock market and a possible recession, the market would currently look much worse.

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