The Indian digital payments firm Paytm hopes to raise $268 million in a funding round as it gets ready to go public later this year, Reuters reported on Monday (July 12).
Sources told Reuters that the company also wants to issue 83 billion rupees worth of new shares, giving backers Alibaba and SoftBank the option to sell another 83 billion shares of stock.
Paytm’s parent company, One97 Communications, Ltd., was expected to file a draft prospectus for a domestic initial public offering (IPO) on Monday, Reuters said. The proposed $2.3 billion IPO would be the third-largest in India in terms of dollar amount, following the state-run mining company Coal India in 2010 and Reliance Power in 2008.
Sources told Reuters that Paytm has gained the approval of shareholders at the EGM to raise capital and sell up to 120 billion rupees worth of new stock. The company did not reply to requests for comment.
The Paytm IPO is being handled by J.P. Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, ICICI Securities, Goldman Sachs, Axis Capital, Citi and HDFC Bank.
PYMNTS previously reported that Paytm had planned the IPO to raise $3 billion at an estimated $29 billion. The company hadn’t turned a profit as of last month, despite becoming a dominant player in its sector in recent years.
“Paytm ruled India; it was in the driver’s seat,” Neil Shah, an analyst at technology research firm Counterpoint, told the Financial Times in a recent interview. “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.”
When PYMNTS’ Karen Webster spoke with Paytm President Madhur Deora last year, he said that the COVID-19 pandemic had made people in India more receptive to a cashless economy, a trend that helped make the company 15 times larger than it had been.
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