Payment systems company Adyen lost €17.5 billion in value on Thursday as its share price plunged almost 40% in Amsterdam.

The company fell a further 5% in early Friday trading, indicating that investors are still not yet over their shock, the Financieele Dagblad said. Thursday’s decline was the biggest hit taken by an AEX share since 2003 when Ahold lost 63% of its value after a bookkeeping scandal.

The company and its shareholders have been dealing with the intense competition between payment systems, and Adyen being punished for its poor first-half results, the paper said.

Trading in Adyen, which was launched on Euronext Amsterdam in 2018, was suspended for a time.

“The pricing pressure in this market is not going to go away and the macro-economic situation is also more difficult for Adyen,” Jefferies analyst Hannes Leitner told the paper.

In particular, Adyen has admitted its growth in North America is below expectations – 23% this year compared with 52% in 2022. “It will be difficult to speed up that growth, Leitner said, referring to the competition between payment systems.

The decline was largely due to “increased wages and salaries stemming from Adyen’s investments into scaling its global team for the long term,” the company said.

The company processed payments totalling €426 billion in the first six months of the year, for companies such as Mango, Uber and H&M. That was up 23% on a year ago but still below expectations.