Adyen Executives Shed Stake as Company Growth Slows

Dutch payments company Adyen has announced on Thursday that its four top executives – CEO Pieter van der Does, CTO Arnout Schuijff, CFO Ingo Uytdehaage, and CCO Roelant Prins – are selling a total of 507,631 company shares, corresponding to approximately 15 percent of their holdings in the fintech.

The company cited the reason behind this sell-off as reducing single stock risk in their investment portfolios. The clarification was necessary as the total stock to be sold is approximately 1.7 percent of outstanding share capital in the company.

To protect the share prices in the public market, the bulk deal will be made in a private placement and will be offered to institutional investors.

Growth slows, but the business looks lucrative

This came the same day the payments company published its financial results for the first half of 2020, showing the slowing growth in its business.

Though the company showed an 11.9 percent year-on-year increase in the before-tax half-yearly profits to 141 million euros ($167 million), the growth of the company went down from 16 percent recorded in the previous quarter.

The half-yearly revenue of the company also went up by 27 percent to 280 million euros, compared to the 34 percent uptick in the first quarter.

The impact of the slowing growth was reflected in the market as the share price of the company went down by 5 percent before showing some recovery.

The company shares rallied over 500 percent since its public market debut in 2018 and almost doubled this year alone.

The announcement stressed that the liquidation of the executives’ stake in the company does not reflect on their changing views on the company and all of them have agreed to a lock-up commitment on their remaining Adyen shares for 180 days.

Adyen processes payments for Uber, Facebook, Netflix, and KLM airline, and 80 percent of its growth came from its existing customers. The fintech also benefited from the collapse of Wirecard as it gained customers.