Adyen: Filtering through the noise
After looking in-depth into the reasons for the plunge, guidance for 2025 and 2026 levers, I determine if this brings an opportunity to investors.
Adyen’s stock plunged 19% after the earnings report and the headlines seemed bad.
However, as fundamental investors, we focus on the facts and the fundamentals of the company before making a decision.
I look into why the stock underperformed after the earnings release, including what was controllable and what was not.
Thereafter, I looked deeper into the guidance to look at what it is pricing in and determine which parts of it may be conservative.
Thereafter, I looked further out to 2026 to see if there was risks to the 2026 guidance.
Lastly, I quantify and go deeper into the levers that Adyen can pull in 2026 to re-accelerate growth.
I end off with the financials and valuation for Adyen and offer my thoughts on whether this brings an opportunity or not.
Here’s what I am covering in the article below:
Uncontrollable factors
Conservatism in the guidance
Reiterating 2026 guidance
Levers for 2026 growth
Valuation
Conclusion
Uncontrollable factors
At the net revenue level, Adyen’s net revenue increased by 20% in 2Q25, slightly below consensus expectations of 21.5%.
Take rate was 16.7 basis points, which was ahead of consensus expectations of 16.5 basis points, which means that the weakness came from processed volumes.
What was the reason for the weakness?
In the second quarter of 2025, management shared that the tariffs imposed by the US affected a portion of its merchants that were based on APAC but were trading into the US.
The area in its business which grew slower than expected in 2Q25 was described as a small subset of customers and characterized as market volume growth.
In my view, it is positive that the weaker 2Q25 net revenue growth was due to the small subset of customers seeing weaker market volume growth.
Firstly, it seems that this is an isolated group of customers and not due to broader market weakness.
Secondly, this was due to these customers transacting less in the market rather than due to share loss with Adyen or loss of business with Adyen.
Of course, Adyen growing 20% in the second quarter despite this weakness was still quite impressive, with the majority of the growth coming from share expansion with current customers.
As such, apart from the weakness in this small group of customers, Adyen continues to execute well to both gain wallet share with existing customers and win new customer logos into the platform.
From a regional perspective, EMEA was Adyen’s fastest growing segment at 21% and North America was the second fastest growing segment at 20% growth for the first half of the year.
Within pillars, Digital net revenues grew 10% in the first half of 2025, while Unified Commerce and Platforms net revenues grew 31% and 55% respectively.
In the Digital segment, the APAC based online retailers headwind affected growth here, while other verticals saw strength.
Unified Commerce saw strength in the retail group of customers, along with verticals like F&B, hospitality and entertainment, with a growing diversification of revenues in the segment.
Strength in the Platforms segment was largely driven by SaaS platforms and Adyen now has 32 platforms that are processing more than EUR 1 billion annually. Embedded payments products are also a key product driving growth.
Management commented that despite the weakness in this small subset of customers, they are executing in-line with their plans and are confident in executing well for the second half of 2025.
Conservatism in the guidance
Because of what has happened in the second quarter with weakness in the APAC merchants trading in the US, Adyen has decided to guide 2H25 net revenue growth to be similar to the 1H25 net revenue growth.
This is based on the assumption that this group of customers continue to see weakness through the rest of 2025.