The initial public offerings of Walmart’s Flipkart marketplace and digital payments platform PhonePe could take several years, a Walmart executive said.
“This is something we’re looking at over the next few years,” Walmart’s executive vice president of corporate affairs, Dan Bartlett, said on the sidelines of the company’s shareholder meeting near its headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, late Thursday.
Walmart may put PhonePe’s initial public offering ahead of Flipkart, even though Flipkart is a more mature business, Bartlett told Reuters.
Based in India, PhonePe is “one of the largest payment platforms” in the country, he said. He cited PhonePe’s tie-up with India’s instant money transfer system, Unified Payments Interface (UPI), which allows users to transfer money across multiple banks without revealing account details.
“There are a lot of processes that have to be put in place before we go public,” Bartlett said, referring to PhonePe. “Obviously the question of Indian exchange versus others” is “under consideration” for a future IPO listing, he added.
Walmart’s Flipkart marketplace and PhonePe payments business in India could be $100 billion (roughly Rs. 8,35,200 crore) deals, driven by strong growth, the retailer’s chief financial officer said at an investor conference a year ago.
Executives at the time cited the two businesses as key drivers that could help Walmart meet its goal of doubling the gross volume of merchandise it sells in overseas markets to $200 billion (roughly Rs. 16,70,300 crore) in five years.
PhonePe said in October 2023 that its consolidated revenues for the 2023 financial year grew by 77 percent as more users used its platform to send and receive money in India’s growing digital payments market.
With over 490 million registered users, PhonePe accounted for nearly 51 percent of India’s UPI transaction value as of March 2023.
© Thomson Reuters 2024
