India’s digital payments market is expected to grow five times to reach $1 trillion by 2023. Following the acquisition of Flipkart, digital payment company Paytm has become the most valuable startup among Indian Billion Dollar Unicorns despite struggling with profitability. 

Paytm’s Journey

Paytm’s parent company One97 Communication was founded in 2000 by Delhi College of Engineering graduate Vijay Shekhar Sharma. Initially, the company offered live astrology services for a GSM operator in Delhi. Soon after, it launched SMS-based applications, gaming applications, and subscription-based content services.

By 2010, Vijay had figured out the importance of mobile phones in the country and launched Paytm as an online recharge portal that allowed subscribers to purchase pre-paid recharge cards for their mobile phones. Inspired by the initial success, Paytm started offering recharges for Datacards and even tickets for the Delhi Metro. Within a year of its launch, the company was handling over 500 million subscribers per day.

To leverage its user base, Paytm launched an e-commerce platform Paytm Mall and Paytm Wallet for online payments. It was the first company to popularise payment using QR code and when digitization was forced on an unprepared Indian market, Paytm took off in a big way.

Today, Paytm has over 320 million users and 7 million offline merchants. It allows consumers to make payments for their mobile phone, electricity, gas and water bills, book bus tickets, train, and movie tickets, pay fees for associated schools and colleges, book amusement park tickets, and even make purchases from its online marketplace. It processes over 1 billion transactions per quarter and adds 10 million new users every month. About 50% of its transactions are from small towns and villages. Looks like the demonetization opened up this market for Paytm in a big way.

Paytm’s Expansion

Last year, the Paytm Payments Bank Ltd was launched. Following this, One 97 Communication transferred the Paytm wallet business and all the wallet accounts to the bank. Paytm Payments Bank was India’s first bank with no charges for online transactions and minimum balance requirements. From June this year, the RBI has prohibited Paytm Payments Bank from opening any new accounts and wallets on account of violation of certain licensing conditions and operating guidelines. However, no restriction has been placed on the bank for servicing its existing customers.

Last month, the Paytm Money app was launched to offer mutual fund products to its clients and over 1 million customers have already registered for the service.

Paytm is now looking to consolidate the space. In 2016, it acquired consumer behavior prediction platform Shifu for $8 million, education marketplace EduKart, and hyperlocal fashion platform Shopsity. In 2017, it followed these up with the acquisitions of Mumbai-based event ticketing platform Insider.in for $350 million and deal platforms Little and Nearbuy and merged them. This year, it has acquired Chennai-based movie ticketing platform TicketNew for $40 million, Delhi and Santa Clara-based UI startup Cube 26, Delhi-based last minute hotel booking app NightStay for $20 million, and Bangalore-based saving app Balance.

Paytm’s Financials

Paytm charges merchants a 4% fee for facilitating payments into their accounts. It also generates revenues from advertisements and paid promotional content.

For the fiscal year 2017, Paytm’s parent company One97 Communications reported revenue of INR828 crore ($111 million), up 38.6%. In order to reduce losses, the company has restructured its business. It spun off its e-commerce platform into Paytm Ecommerce. Net loss narrowed down to INR 879 crore ($118 million) in 2017 from INR1,510 ($203 million) in 2016, INR372 crore ($50 million) in 2015. It had reported a profit of $800K in 2014.

Its legacy mobile value-added services business generated profit of INR49 crore in 2017, up 122% from 22 crore in 2016. The legacy business offers services like mobile marketing, caller tunes, and talk-time recharges and accounts for 45% of revenue. Paytm E-commerce reported losses of INR13.63 in 2017 and Paytm Payments Bank reported losses of INR30 crore.

A recent report says that despite the restructuring efforts, losses have increased to INR1,604 crore ($216 million) in FY18 and employee benefit-related expenses doubled to INR625 crore ($84 million). It ended the year with cash reserve and surplus of INR7,600 crore ($1.02 billion). The report did not give out revenue details but says that its founder and CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma took a pay cut for FY18. His annual salary went down from INR3.47 crore ($468K) in 2016-17 to INR3 crore ($405K) for 2017-18.

One97 has been venture funded so far with $2.8 billion in investments from Alibaba’s ANT Financial, Intel Capital, SAIF Partners, Sapphire Ventures, Silicon Valley Bank, SoftBank, and Berkshire Hathaway. Its last funding round was in August this year when it raised $356 million from Berkshire Hathaway at a valuation of $12 billion. In May 2017, Softbank invested $1.4 billion in Paytm at a valuation of $7 billion. In March 2017, One97 raised about $200 million in funding from Alibaba and Saif Partners for its de-merged e-commerce business, Paytm Ecommerce. In August 2016, One97 was valued at about $5 billion when it raised $60 million from MediaTek. An earlier round in 2015 for $550 million had valued One97 at $1.5 billion.

In the Valuation Analysis in my last post, I had said that

“A $7 billion valuation on $90 million revenue is exorbitant. The total amount of capital raised at $2.46 billion is also extremely high. You could argue it is justifiable. I would agree if in the next 12 months, the revenue starts to kick in gear to justify this level of capital raise and valuation. Going public with such wide losses would be very difficult, and valuation would get a dramatic haircut.”

While the revenue levels are still low and profitability is still to be attained, the valuation has skyrocketed amidst regulatory hurdles and rising competition from Flipkart-backed PhonePe and Google’s Tez. And it is bound to get even tougher as international players plush with funds are lured by India’s digital payments market. Amazon recently launched a pilot for Amazon Smile code, a take on QR code. Facebook’s WhatsApp is testing its payments application is expected to launch soon.