With the $2.5 billion IPO of One97 Communications, the parent company of fintech startup Paytm, around 350 of its former and current employees would likely become millionaires, with a net worth of Rs 1 crore each.
According to Reuters, some of these individuals started working for Paytm seven or ten years ago, when the company had only 1,000 employees. Paytm currently employs more than 10,000 personnel.
Paytm, the digital payments and financial services company has placed an initial share-sale price of Rs 2,150 per share. Paytm’s shares are slated to begin trading on stock exchanges in India from November 18 (Thursday), according to the company’s final prospectus submitted with the Registrar of Companies on Friday.
Siddharth Pandey, an electronics engineer who joined Paytm nine years ago, much to his father’s great surprise, is one among those likely to become millionaires when the company goes public next week. Remembering a conversation with his father, he said, “My dad was very demotivating. He said, ‘What is this Paytime?!’ ‘For once work in a company people know about’. Now he (my father) is obviously very happy. He has just asked me to stay grounded.”
Despite the fact that Pandey, exited Paytm as he has joined another startup, claims to have amassed tens of thousands of shares over his seven years with the company.
Paytm has priced its shares in a price range of Rs 2,080-2,150 each share, valuing the startup at Rs 1.39 lakh crore at the upper end of the pricing range. Paytm now has become the Asia-Pacific region’s biggest fintech IPO, with an Rs 18,300-crore share sale.
It is also the world’s second-largest fintech IPO in 2021, trailing only the Allfunds IPO in Spain. Paytm will be the fourth largest fintech stock to go public in the world. Paytm’s initial public offering (IPO) was oversubscribed by 1.89 times.
Vijay Shekhar Sharma led fintech giant aims to use the funds raised from the IPO for a wide range of purposes, including strengthening its retail and merchant infrastructure, as well as investing in new business ventures.
As of March 31, 2021, Paytm had 333 million active users and 21.1 million merchants. The market share of payments transaction volume and wallet payments activity is 40 percent and 65 to 70 percent, respectively. Its merchant base increased twofold from 11.2 million in March 2019 to 21.1 million in March 2021. Its banking vertical, Paytm Payments Bank has a 17.1 percent market share. The total outstanding fixed deposits as of March 31 stood Rs 1750 crore.
Paytm, on the other hand, is envisions to be more than just a digital payment intermediary. The company is focusing on a “super app,” which it hopes to introduce before the end of the year. It follows Tata, Reliance, and Adani in attempting to create a single app that can be used by its customers to make payments, book flights, order food, handle financial services, and much more. The super app concept has been especially successful in China, where WeChat and AliPay have become ubiquitous.
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