The founder of the short message service Twitter, Jack Dorsey, is strengthening himself in Australia: With his financial services provider Square, he is taking over the Australian payment service Afterpay for 29 billion dollars (around 24.4 billion euros).

The company, which was only founded in 2014, lets customers shop in stores and allows them to defer their payments, for example by extending them to four weeks and thus to four installments.

Christoph Hein

Business correspondent for South Asia / Pacific based in Singapore.

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Afterpay's stock shot up by almost 30 percent on the Sydney stock exchange in the morning and is thus roughly at the level of the offer price.

It is the largest acquisition in Australian corporate history.

The two Australian founders of Afterpay will not only get around 2.7 billion Australian dollars (€ 1.67 billion) richer each with the sale, they will be paid out in Square shares.

They don't want to let their "baby" go either: Anthony Eisen, 49 years old, and Nick Molnar, 31, will be responsible for afterpay at Square.

The brand is also retained.

Afterpay wants to go to America

The purchase price for Afterpay is 42 times the sales of Afterpay in the past financial year (June 30).

Sales had increased by 78 percent year-on-year to 925 million Australian dollars.

Afterpay was listed on the Australian stock exchange in 2016.

The major shareholders had announced that they wanted to examine an IPO in America.

Goldman Sachs and Qatalyst Partners are now advising Afterpay on the takeover, while Morgan Stanley serves Square, which was founded in 2009.

A year and a half ago, Afterpay's share price in Sydney fell 90 percent.

It recovered significantly, but had fallen by 20 percent since the beginning of the year.

“Square and Afterpay have a common goal.

We built our company to make the financial system fairer, more accessible and more inclusive.

Afterpay has created a trustworthy brand based on these principles, ”said Dorsey on Monday.

Afterpay had tried hard in the past few months to penetrate the American market.

However, larger providers such as Apple, Klarna and Paypal defend this with similar business models.

Under the Square umbrella, Australians have much better opportunities to move forward quickly.

The number of Afterpay customers rose in the past financial year by 63 percent to 16.2 million.

For comparison: Square has 70 million customers.

Almost eleven million Australian customers are Americans.

Afterpay works with nearly one hundred thousand stores, 77 percent more than the year before.