According to Vijay Shekhar Sharma, the company is still on track to achieve operating profitability by September 2023.
One97 Communications Ltd, which operates under the Paytm brand, will sharpen its focus on payments and lending product distribution, according to founder and CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma, even as he reiterated the company’s target of turning an operating profit by September next year.
Paytm’s core business model is to acquire consumers and merchants for payment services and upsell their financial services by leveraging distribution, collections, transactional, and behavioral insights, he wrote in a letter to shareholders included in the company’s first annual report as a publicly traded company.
Sharma added that the company’s focus remained on buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) offerings and assisting financial partners in leveraging credit distribution via mobile payments.
“We have sharpened our focus on payments and lending product distribution, and we have prioritized these businesses in our resource allocation… Our emphasis is also on demonstrating how creditors can use this mobile payments relationship to lend. “BNPL, which enables our partner financial institutions to issue a credit to consumers at the point of sale,” Sharma wrote.
He stated that the company was still on track to achieve operating profitability by September 2023. He had previously written to shareholders in April, stating that the company hoped to achieve operational breakeven by the end of September next year. In his April letter, he also stated that his stock grants would become vested only after Paytm’s shares consistently exceeded the IPO price.
On the BSE, the shares closed 0.28 percent higher at Rs 715.65 on Thursday. The IPO price for the Noida-based company was Rs 2,150 per share.
“I believe that our team has done an excellent job over the past year in significantly increasing our revenues and contribution profits, allowing us to invest in our payments and credit businesses while reducing our Ebitda (operating) losses.” “We are seeing excellent momentum in our businesses and are on track to achieve operating profitability (Ebitda before ESOP cost) by the third quarter of 2023,” Sharma said.
One97 reported a consolidated loss of Rs 2,396.4 crore for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2022, compared to Rs 1,701 crore the previous year.
Consolidated revenue, on the other hand, increased by 65 percent to Rs 5,264.3 crore from Rs 3,186.8 crore in fiscal 2021, the company told stock exchanges earlier this year. Revenue from operations increased by nearly 78 percent to Rs 4,974.2 crore.
The total expenditure for FY22 was Rs 7,601.1 crore. Payment processing charges and employee benefit expenses remained two of the One97 group’s major expense line items.
