Vikrant Shekhawat : Jan 02, 2021, 08:32 AM
New Delhi: Walmart’s PhonePe, which was recently spun off partially from the Flipkart Group, has reported its losses narrowing for the first time since its launch in December 2015. The e-commerce payment and digital wallet company PhonePe saw a 7 per cent decline in net loss from Rs 1,904 crore in FY19 to Rs 1,771 crore in FY20, according to the regulatory filings sourced from business intelligence platform Tofler. From Rs 4.06 crore in FY16, the losses exploded to Rs 129 crore in FY17, and further to Rs 791 crore in FY18. However, revenues also for the Paytm and Google Pay rival continued to improve year-on-year. For FY20, PhonePe earned Rs 427 crore in total revenue, up 74 per cent from Rs 245 crore in FY19. Since Rs 273 crore revenue in FY16, the jump in four years has been over 156 times. On the other hand, PhonePe’s expenses were also up, though marginally, by 2.3 per cent to Rs 2,202 crore in FY20 from Rs 2,153 crore in FY19.In a recent board rejig exercise by Flipkart enroute to its expected IPO by late next year or early 2022, the company had moved Flipkart’s independent director Rohit Bhagat to Chair the PhonePe board to squarely focus on growing the payments business. PhonePe, valued at $5.5 billion, has so far raised $1.6 billion including $700 million it received from Walmart and other existing Flipkart investors earlier this month and another round of around $20.3 million in December from its Singapore-based parent company PhonePe Private Limited earlier known as Flipkart Payments Private Limited. The company, which now also has WhatsApp Payments as its latest competitor, claims over 250 million registered users on its platform and accepted at 15 million merchant outlets across 500 cities in India. The company had announced in February that it would spend around $111 million (Rs 800 crore) on marketing in the calendar year 2020.Both Flipkart and PhonePe, which saw ‘all-time high’ monthly active users, have helped Walmart’s international businesses to post $29.6 billion in net sales in Q3 ended October 31, according to a company statement. “Flipkart and PhonePe had strong results for the quarter. The number of monthly active customers for these platforms is at an all-time high,” Walmart President, CEO, and Director C Douglas McMillon had said during an earnings call.PhonePe remains among the leader UPI players in the country. The company processed 868.4 million transactions worth over Rs 1.75 lakh crore in November, according to NPCI data, in comparison to 960.02 million transactions worth more than Rs 1.61 lakh crore done on Google Pay. IN contrast, Paytm’s UPI transactions stood at 260.09 million worth Rs 28,986.93 crore. WhatsApp Pay had managed 3 lakh transactions worth Rs 13.87 crore.