Paytm is looking to go public, according to a report from Bloomberg.
The target for the company is a round for 160 billion rupees, or $2.2 billion.
This would constitute the biggest-ever deal from India.
With the IPO, the share from Ant Group would now sink below 25 percent, Bloomberg writes. The price hasn’t been specified, but the company was reported to be offering an equal amount of new and secondary shares.
That, according to reports, could value Paytm at somewhere between $24 billion to $30 billion.
There’s a shareholder meeting scheduled for July 12, and it it goes the right way, the company might be able to raise its target to as much as $2.6 billion.
Bloomberg writes that the board has started smaller and may end up increasing its size based on the momentum of the investors.
Among the banks hired by Paytm are J.P. Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs to help handle its affairs.
An earlier PYMNTS report says Paytm had reportedly planned its IPO to raise $3 billion at an estimated $29 billion.
The company had yet to turn a profit in June 2021, despite its dominance starting as of around five years ago, according to analysts.
“Paytm ruled India, it was in the driver’s seat,” Neil Shah, an analyst at technology research firm Counterpoint, told FT. “But it is still bleeding money. This is the right time to do an IPO because the competition is rising fast and that preference for Paytm is declining; the IPO could make the difference for them to compete.”
In 2020, Paytm President Madhur Deora spoke with Karen Webster, finding that the pandemic had done a lot to reduce Indians’ appetite for the cash-based economy.
Instead, the global shift to contactless pay methods has done much to reduce reliance on cash.
Deora said the concurrence of factors had probably made the company 15 times bigger than it had been.
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