The digital payments and transaction and wallet service- Paytm has finally received an in-principle approval from the company board to raise almost around ₹22,000 Crore by means of an initial public offering during the months to October to December, which is the third quarter of a fiscal year, said an industry source to the media.
The company is eyeing an enterprise value of worth over ₹2 lakh crore for the IPO.
The person familiar with the matter told the media- “The board of directors of Paytm has given in-principle approval for the mega IPO planned to be launched in October-December quarter. The company expects to raise around ₹21,000-Rs 22,000 crore from the IPO. This will also give some of the existing investors to offload some of their stake”
The meeting of the board of the company to finalize and pass the approval was held on May 28, Friday.
When the spokesperson from Paytm was asked to comment on the matter, the request was rejected. Now that this is finally approved, this is probably going to be one of the largest IPOs in the country, if the online transaction company is able to fulfil the amount and meet the target that the company had planned. The share-holders of the company include Alibaba’s Ant Group which holds 29.71%, SoftBank Vision Fund who holds 19.63% of the company shares. Saif Partners, which holds 18.56% and Vijay Shekhar Sharma, the founder and CEO of the company itself who holds the acquisition of the 14.67% of the company’s shares.
Other share-holders include AGH Holding, T Rowe Price and Discovery Capital and Berkshire Hathaway who hold the acquisition of less than 10% of the company stakes.
The company claims that it is larger than other mobile apps in the category by almost 30 to 50 percent, with more than 1.4 billion transactions that happen each month.
The reports by company said that the losses had been narrowed down by 40% and the revenue was increased to ₹3,629 crore on year-on-year basis in the fiscal year before the last fiscal year i.e.- 2019-2020.