Klarna lowers forecast: "The US is growing very strongly"

Well, we have a combination of factors. We have seen a strong increase in the card. We have also seen that we still benefit from a number of large merchants that went live in Q3 and Q4 last year, which are still ramping up to a 12-month cycle. And then generally, it was just a good month. So it's a combination of those things, and above all, the US is still growing very, very strongly.

No, we are very focused now on this metric we call transaction margin dollars, which is roughly equivalent to gross profit in Sweden. The reason we don't use gross profit is because of specific stock exchange rules and so on, which is why we call it transaction margin dollars. And since we, as a bank, turn over our balance sheet 10 times a year, we are more of a payments company than a classic lender, and therefore we talk less about return on equity and things like that compared to classic banks. But then you see that this transaction margin dollars has grown by 42% to 446 million dollars. Which is a combination of many things. But there is a huge focus right now on not just growing revenue or just growing volume, because seeing this figure go up is not as attractive. And then also finding new revenue sources. You can note, for example, that subscriptions, our subscriptions, have now reached two million and have increased significantly. And that is a good example of both good margin revenue and things that are not actually directly tied to our payment volume, but rather people starting to use our services in more ways than that. So that provides a return. And then we have generally worked a lot with costs. As we become a larger player in the US, for example, it's a lot about saying, okay, now we need new prices with suppliers and we need to improve margins. There is an incredible amount of that work to do after you've had this strong growth in these products. So that's what we are focusing on very much internally right now.

Well, there are two main things. One is the currency effect, which you have to live with when you have too many currencies under the hood. That's the one. And then the second thing is that we see, primarily in Europe and I should say especially in Germany, which is still our largest market in terms of volumes, that there is quite weak consumer sentiment or retail consumer sentiment. There are some official German statistics bureaus that have reported and seen that, I think, retail growth is now, I hope I'm not misquoting, but it's about one percent growth generally. So it's a big market for us in terms of volume but also revenue, so that's why we made that adjustment. At the same time, we are very happy that everything we have worked on when it comes to contribution margin dollars has had such a strong effect that we can actually raise guidance on contribution margin dollars despite seeing a certain dampening and adjustment in volumes and revenue linked to those volumes.