Month: November 2024

Klarna has filed for a proposed IPO in the US in H1’25 and Swedish online pharmacy Apotea has announced its intention to IPO in Sweden in the next couple of weeks. That is positive news that could hopefully change sentiment and see more private technology companies go public.

Startup investing stops working if founders, employees and investors don’t make money from exits (regardless of IPOs on the stock market, secondary sales or private M&A transactions), and the last 3 years have not had many exits. A change to that is very welcome.

Spotify had a really strong Q3’24 report.

Growth in users to 640 million (especially outside Europe and the US) and subscribers to 252 million combined with price increases and cost control drove strong financial results, including 300 million euros in net income after tax (well above 1 billion euros in annual net income, which is a big number).

For the quarter I found passing 252 million subscribers (likely matched only by Netflix) and having the gross margin (i.e. Spotify’s share of revenue) above 30 % to be the two most noteworthy metrics.