The initial public offerings of Walmart's Flipkart marketplace and digital payments platform PhonePe could take a couple of years, a Walmart executive said.
“This is something we're looking at over the next couple of years,” Walmart executive vice president of corporate affairs Dan Bartlett said on the sidelines of the company's shareholder meeting near its headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas. Thursday afternoon
Walmart may put an initial public offering of PhonePe 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, the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), which allows users to transfer money to multiple banks without revealing account details.
“There are a lot of processes that need to be put in place before we go public,” Bartlett said, referring to PhonePe. “Obviously, the question of India's stock market versus others” is “under consideration” for the future IPO, he added.
Walmart's Flipkart marketplace and PhonePe's payments operations in India could be $100 billion (roughly Rs. 8,35,200 crore) businesses, driven by strong growth, the retailer's chief financial officer said a year ago in an investor conference.
At the time, executives cited the two companies as key drivers that could help Walmart reach its goal of doubling the gross volume of merchandise it sells in foreign markets to $200 billion (roughly 16,70,300 rupees) in five years.
PhonePe said in October 2023 that its consolidated revenue for the 2023 financial year rose 77 percent as more customers used its platform to send and receive money in the booming digital payments market. India
With over 490 million registered users, PhonePe had a share of close to 51 percent of India's UPI transaction value as of March 2023.
© Thomson Reuters 2024
