PhonePe is planning an initial public offering (IPO) by 2023. The Walmart-owned digital payment company headquartered in Bangalore eyes a valuation of $7-10 billion. The firm plans to bring out an IPO as a separate entity. It is likely to go public either in the US or India. PhonePe competes with Paytm, Amazon Pay, and Google Pay.
A Morgan Stanley report released in 2019 valued PhonePe at $7 billion. According to reports, e-commerce major Flipkart is also planning an IPO in the US by 2022.
"The Walmart leadership has told PhonePe and Flipkart about building the 'path to profitability' and PhonePe has set a target to be profitable by 2022," Business Standard reported citing an unidentified source.
"All employees at PhonePe have started working towards that goal. The company is partnering and providing value-added services to kiranas and on-boarding merchants," the daily also reported citing the source.
PhonePe currently has around 23 crore-plus users and the monthly active users stand at around 9 crore. The company has recently strengthened its financial services portfolio by launching six insurance and mutual fund products over the past four months with mutual fund investments coming from over 15,000 pin codes across tier-1,2 and 3 cities and towns.
"We entered COVID-19 with 11 million merchants having substantial presence over 500,000 cities now," Sameer Nigam, founder & CEO, PhonePe, had recently told BusinessToday.In.
The company had lately entered into a few partnerships with some government agencies and telecom operators. "We were looking to get to 20 million merchants by 2020-end; realistically we may reach 15-16 million merchants," Nigam had also said.
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