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Global shares mostly rose Wednesday, echoing record rallies on Wall Street after the latest update on the job market bolstered hopes the U.S. Federal Reserve will cut interest rates.France’s CAC 40 rose 0.8 in early trading to 7,809.80. Germany’s DAX edged up 0.6% to 23,856.74. Britain’s FTSE 100 rose 0.2% to 9,263.14. U.S. shares were set to be mixed with Dow futures down 0.1% at 45,700.00, while S&P 500 futures gained 0.3% at 6,537.75.Japan’s benchmark Nikkei 225 gained 0.9% to finish at 43,837.67. Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 added 0.3% to 8,830.40. South Korea’s Kospi jumped 1.7% to 3,314.53.Hong Kong’s Hang Seng rose 1.0% to 26,200.26, while the Shanghai Composite edged up 0.1% to 3,812.22. Uncertainty is still in the air over U.S.-China tariff issues as bilateral talks continue.U.S. President Donald Trump has raised taxes on imports from China, triggering a tit-for-tat tariff war. The U.S. is currently charging an additional 30% tariff on Chinese goods and China is charging a 10% tariff under a de-escalation deal reached in May.Investors are also watching for the U.S. Federal Reserve possibly cutting its main interest rate for the first time this year at its next meeting in a week, in order to prop up the slowing job market. A report on Tuesday offered the latest signal of weakness, when the U.S. government said its prior count of jobs across the country through March may have been too high by 911,000, or 0.6%.That was before President Donald Trump shocked the economy and financial markets in April by rolling out tariffs on countries worldwide.The bet on Wall Street is that such data will convince Fed officials that the job market is the bigger problem now for the economy than the threat of inflation worsening because of Trump’s tariffs. That would push them to cut interest rates, a move that would give the economy a boost but could also send inflation higher.“The broader narrative is increasingly anchored on expectations that the Fed will deliver a rate cut at next week’s meeting,” said Ahmad Assiri, research strategist at Pepperstone.In energy trading, benchmark U.S. crude added 58 cents to $63.21 a barrel. Brent crude, the international standard, rose 56 cents to $66.95 a barrel.The rise in oil prices came amid escalation of tensions in the Middle East. Israel struck the headquarters of Hamas’s political leadership in Qatar on Tuesday as the group’s top figures gathered to consider a U.S. proposal for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip.In currency trading, the U.S. dollar inched up to 147.53 Japanese yen from 147.37 yen. The euro fell to $1.1695 from $1.1714. Yuri Kageyama is on Threads Yuri Kageyama, AP Business Writer
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E-Commerce
Today, one of the most closely watched fintech initial public offerings of the year takes place. Shares of the buy now, pay later (BNPL) juggernaut Klarna Group make their stock market debut. Heres everything you need to know about Klarnas IPO. What is Klarna? Klarna Group is a Swedish fintech company founded in 2005. It’s headquartered in Stockholm. Klarna is one of the largest players in the buy now, pay later (BNPL) space, which has revolutionized the consumer financial landscape over the past few years. BNPL allows consumers to buy itemseverything from computers to burritosin installments, instead of paying a single total fee upfront. The installments are repaid over a period of weeks or months and are interest-free, provided payments are made on time. But while BNPL services allow consumers to fund purchases they may not otherwise be able to afford upfront, the financing option has been met with much criticism, one of the biggest ones being that BNPL can be a debt trap to consumers, particularly younger Gen Z ones who dont have a lot of experience in financial planning or literacy. Klarna by the numbers According to Klarnas Form F-1 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the companys key metrics include: Gross merchandise volume (GMV) of $105 billion in 2024 (up from a GVM of $53 billion in 2020). Operations in 26 global markets. 93 million active consumers. A network of 675,000 merchants. $2.8 billion in total revenue in 2024 (up from $2.2 billion in total revenue in 2023). Net profit of $21 million in 2024 (up from a net loss of $244 million in 2023). !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r,i=0;r=e[i];i++)if(r.contentWindow===a.source){var d=a.data["datawrapper-height"][t]+"px";r.style.height=d}}})}(); When is Klarnas IPO? Klarnas IPO has been a long time coming. The company announced its intention to make its stock market debut in March of this year. But shortly after, President Trumps Liberation Day tariffs wreaked havoc on markets, causing Klarna to postpone its public offering plans. But earlier this month, Klarna began announcing details of its postponed IPO, suggesting a date was near. Klarna priced its shares on Tuesday and is expected to list today: Wednesday, September 10. What is Klarnas stock ticker? Klarnas shares will trade under the ticker KLAR. What exhcnage will Klarna trade on? Klarna shares will trade on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). What is the IPO share price of KLAR? Klarnas shares were priced at $40 each. Thats well above a target price range of between $35 and $37 that the company originally forecast. How many KLAR shares are available in its IPO? In total, there are 34,311,274 ordinary shares of KLAR available in the IPO. However, a majority of those shares are not being offered by the company itself. As a matter of fact, just 5 million ordinary shares are being sold by Klarna. The remaining 29.3 million shares are being sold by some of the companys existing shareholders. How much will Klarna raise in its IPO? Klarnas IPO raised $1.37 billion, according to Reuters. However, Klarna itself will not benefit from that total sum as the companys existing private shareholders sold a majority of the shares on offer. As Klarna stated in a press release, Klarna will not receive any proceeds from the sale of ordinary shares by the selling shareholders. How much is Klarna worth? Klarna is now worth around $15.11 billion after its IPO price of $40 per share, according to Reuters. While that valuation is nothing to sneeze at, it is still well below Klarnas estimated valuation of more than $45 billion back in 2021. Niklas Kammer, an analyst for Morningstar, sees a 12.5% upside to Klarna’s IPO price, according to a recent note. “We believe the offer price of USD 40 per share undervalues the substantial growth we expect these agreements to drive,” Kammer wrote, citing agreements with payment service providers that will expand Klarna’s reach. “Growth is what it is all about for Klarna. While its platform is currently just breaking even, starting to eke out a marginal operating profit, the company is poised for a big shift.” Klarna is the latest high-profile tech IPO in 2025 While Klarnas stock market debut will no doubt be closely watched by industry insiders and investors today, the tech company is by no means the only high-profile one to go public this year. Other major tech IPOs in 2025 have included Chime, Circle, Figma, eToro, and Bullish. In fact, Klarna isn’t even the only tech-focused company going public this week; others include Via Transportation, Legence Corp, and Gemini Space Station. Yet despite the relative success that some tech IPOs have enjoyed this year, the global tech IPO scene in 2025 is currently a far cry from the busy landscape a few years ago. Recent ata from CB Insights shows that in the second quarter of 2025, global tech IPOs generated $6.3 billion in proceeds. But that pales in comparison to the $34.9 billion that tech IPOs generated in the same quarter of 2021. That also happens to be the same time that Klarna had its sky-high valuation of over $45 billionthree times higher than now. Disclosure: Fast Company is owned by Morningstar founder Joe Mansueto.
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E-Commerce
PsiQuantum, the Palo Alto-based startup thats been tapped to build quantum computers in Chicago and Brisbane, Australia, has raised a $1 billion dollar Series E that values the 9-year-old company at $7 billion. The round was led by BlackRock, Baillie Gifford, and Temasek, and includes NVentures, the venture capital arm of chip maker Nvidia. The deal is one of the largest single private investments in quantum computing technology to date. While your average person would be hard-pressed to explain what a quantum computer does, or why youd want one, investors have decided that they want in. Since the start of September, the quantum computing industry has seen some of its largest funding rounds yet, including a $320 million Series B for Finnish company IQM and a $600 million capital raise for Quantinuum, a joint venture of Honeywell, at a $10 billion pre-money valuation. Also this week, Infleqtion announced plans to go public via special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC), targeting proceeds of about $540 million. An ‘aggressive road map’ to big systems PsiQuantum cofounder and chief science officer Pete Shadbolt says the new funding will help the company realize its plans to build a photonics-based, utility-scale quantum computer. (PsiQuantum has tested key components of its system but has not yet built a complete quantum computer.) PsiQuantum has been shifting from the centimeter scale work of chip and device design, Shadbolt says, to focus on the kilometer scale work of building out cooling cabinets and other infrastructure for data-center-size computing facilities. He says the new funds will also help PsiQuantum scale up its manufacturing of the bespoke parts and materials that will be used in intermediate-scale systems. We do have a very aggressive road map to get to big systems, but were not trying to do it all in one leap, he says. The round includes existing investors Third Point Ventures and T. Rowe Price Associates, along with newcomers such as Macquarie Capital, Qatar Investment Authority, Counterpoint Global (Morgan Stanley), and S Ventures (SentinelOne). PsiQuantum has now raised just over $1.8 billion, according to the company. AI exuberance meets quantum computing The AI-level influx of capital into quantum computing in recent weeks could be a sign of the technology maturing, or of investors with AI FOMO trying to catch the next big thing. Or both. “AI is built on classical computing, which has underpinned the last 50 years of technology, Tony Kim, head of the Fundamental Equities Technology Group at BlackRock, said in the funding announcement for PsiQuantum. Now, we are at the dawn of an adjacent computing platformrooted in quantum mechanicsthat will allow us to simulate the physical world with transformative accuracy. The tech stack of the future will integrate quantum computing and AI, paving the way for machine superintelligence.” Luke Ward, private companies investment manager at Baillie Gifford, an early PsiQuantum investor, said in the announcement, The company has consistently hit technical milestones while forging deep partnerships across industry and government. With a vision rooted in practicality, PsiQuantum is now positioned at the forefront of what could be a trillion-dollar industry, able to solve some of humanitys biggest challenges. This goes beyond what is possible with AI. Both statements help explain the entry of Nvidia into the space, which marks a remarkable turnaround. At his CES keynote talk in January 2025, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had suggested that useful quantum computers were still about 20 years away, sending publicly traded quantum-related stocks plunging. But he has apparently revised his assessment, declaring at the GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in Paris this June that quantum computing is reaching an inflection point. Now the company is putting money on it. NVentures investment in PsiQuantum is its third quantum deal since the start of the monthand its third quantum deal ever. NVentures also joined the latest funding round for Quantinuum, which uses trapped-ion technology in its computers. And yesterday, QuErawhich makes quantum computers that use so-called neutral atomsannounced an unspecified investment from NVentures to expand a $230 million Series B round announced in February. Collaborating with Nvidia In addition to the investment support from NVentures, PsiQuantum is collaborating with Nvidia across a broad range of development areas, including quantum algorithms and software, the integration of quantum processors and GPUs in so-called hybrid systems, and PsiQuantums silicon photonics platform. No quantum computer is going to be useful in a vacuum, says Shadbolt. Quantum computers are going to generate data [for AI] and they also need input from GPU clusters. So, thats a really natural place for Nvidia to get involved. Already in the Japanese quantum computing ecosystem there’s a big Nvidia GPU cluster plugged into a bunch of quantum computers. That’s sort of a growing trend around the world. PsiQuantums extensive work in photonicsthe transmission of information via lightmake it an appealing strategic partner, as makers of AI super computers are increasingly looking to integrate photonics to keeping up with the massive data transmission and energy demands of AI systems as they grow. Earlier, this week, chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) showed off its new COUPE (Compact Universal Photonic Engine) process for manufacturing densely layered chips that fuses photonic integrated circuits and electronic integrated circuits, at the Silicon Photonics Global Summit in Taiwan. Nvidias investments across three different quantum computing platformseach pursuing a different technology for generating qubits, the fundamental units of quantum informationsuggest that it is hedging its technological bets. The competition, says Shadbolt at PsiQuantum, is simultaneously frustrating and very exciting. Its frustrating that we all use different technologies and its vociferously debated. On the other hand, I think that’s a symptom of this being a journey that is just beginning, and I’d rather be on a journey that’s beginning than a journey that is coming to its end.
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E-Commerce
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