One of India’s biggest financial platforms, PhonePe, stated today that Walmart has provided an extra $200 million in primary funding, valuing the company at $12 billion before the money was invested.
In order to raise up to $1 billion in the capital, PhonePe is continuing its ongoing capital-raising efforts after moving its domicile to India last year. This latest funding is a part of that effort. The business has now raised $650 million from a number of international investors with this tranche. Further investments are anticipated by the company and will be disclosed when they become available.
“We are enthusiastic about PhonePe’s future and have faith in its ability to broaden its offerings and give Indians access to financial services on a large scale. In a statement, Judith McKenna, president, and chief executive officer of Walmart International, stated that India is one of the most digitally advanced, vibrant, and rapidly expanding economies in the world. “We are thrilled to have the chance to continue supporting PhonePe,” she added.
With a $12 billion valuation, PhonePe is the fintech firm with the highest value in India. It competes against Google Pay and Paytm. The current market capitalization of Paytm is less than $5 billion, and by March of this year, it hopes to generate $1 billion in sales.
In terms of mobile payments via the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) network, which was developed by a group of Indian retail banks, PhonePe is without a doubt the market leader. UPI is presently India’s most popular form of online commerce, handling more than 8 billion transactions each month.
Over 50% of these transactions are made via the seven-year-old PhonePe. Last week, PhonePe announced that it was on track to conduct transactions totaling $1 trillion on an annual basis. The separation of Flipkart and PhonePe is “quite akin to eBay and PayPal, where each of them running separately may pursue their own efforts,” Walmart, which now owns a portion of the e-commerce behemoth Flipkart, said last month.
The Indian regulator’s requirement that each participating firm have a minimum market valuation was a problem for PhonePe’s expansion, but its recent extension of the deadline until 2025 has allowed the business to continue its rapid growth for an additional two years. Almost 80% of UPI transactions are being processed by Google’s GPay and PhonePe.
With its 300 million users, PhonePe is gradually transforming into a distribution engine as well, using them to cross-sell things like insurance. The business stated that it also planned to use the funds to increase the scope of its account aggregator, loan, stockbroking, and wealth management services.
Specialists in the field contend that PhonePe’s ultimate objective—becoming a bank—justifies the company’s expensive pricing. Over the first nine months of 2022, PhonePe generated $234.3 million in revenue.
The company expects revenue of $325 million for the calendar year 2022 and $504 million for 2023, according to a valuation assessment produced by the auditing firm KPMG and provided by PhonePe in January.
According to KMPG’s valuation study, the company doesn’t expect to be EBIDTA positive, a critical profitability metric, until the calendar year 2025. The financial information and indicators from PhonePe’s valuation study have not yet been made public.
We are grateful to Walmart, which continues to support our long-term objectives as our major stakeholders. The co-founder and CEO of PhonePe, Sameer Nigam, issued a statement. “We are excited about the next stage of our development as we create new products and services for Indian consumers and businesses and promote financial inclusion all over the country.
