The company is currently valued at around $15 billion.
“The outcome of the IPO was not in doubt,” Madhur Deora, the president and group CFO of Paytm, told CNN Business last week. The former investment banker has been with the company for five years.
But the amount of attention it drew took him by surprise.
India has been churning out billion-dollar startups for years, but the rush for those unicorns to go public started only a few months ago.
At the listing ceremony on Thursday, an emotional Sharma called the company’s purpose of bringing millions of Indians into the mainstream economy “pious.”
Mixed signals
However, the response at home has been different.
“I think the real story here is that someone aimed to do something that had not been attempted before and many thought could not be done in the Indian capital markets,” Deora said, in reference to the challenge of launching such a large IPO before the company has turned a profit.
Paytm’s losses have analysts in India worried about whether the company can justify its share price. The company, based in the New Delhi suburb of Noida, posted a loss of 17 billion rupees ($230 million) last year on revenue of 31.86 billion rupees ($430 million). Profits aren’t on the horizon any time soon.
“We expect to continue to incur net losses for the foreseeable future and we may not achieve profitability in the future,” it said in its IPO filings, adding that the company will continue to spend heavily on hiring, marketing and building infrastructure.
“Two years ago, we were in this super high investment phase where we were creating a lot of consumer and merchant traction on the platform,” Deora said. “We have found that it is easier — much easier — than two years ago to acquire and retain customers, hence, we are spending a lot less.”
Having said that, he added, “our aim is to reach 500 million Indians … So we would continue to spend on marketing.”
As the cost of data and internet in India falls, its population of 1.3 billion is coming online at a rapid pace. Paytm expects the number of smartphone users in India to hit 800 million in the next five years, giving a significant boost to its business.
Next phase of growth
Deora said he is not worried, as UPI-based payments make just one “chunk” of Paytm’s business, which has now expanded into commerce, lending and other sectors.
While financial services are a relatively new part of the company’s business, Deora said he is excited about the opportunity to be “democratic” with lending, and reach everyone from the self-employed to the daily-wage laborer. The company plans on strengthening this business with the money it has raised.
“A vast majority of Indians do not have access to formal credit …. They just don’t have a credit history,” he said. “So there’s a lot of what we call [India’s] underserved or unserved.”
“There’s a huge market in providing access to credit,” he added. Paytm has partnered with banks — including the country’s largest private lender, HDFC — to provide services ranging from personal loans to buy now, pay later options.
“Pay later really suits the needs of younger millennials in the country, because many of them just find the process of getting credit anywhere else not suitable for them,” Deora said.