BREAKINGVIEWS-Walmart's India payments IPO has too much swagger

The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.

By Ujjaini Dutta

BENGALURU, Jan 22 (Reuters Breakingviews) - PhonePe was an afterthought thrown into Walmart’s WMT.O purchase of a majority stake in Indian e-commerce platform Flipkart in 2018. Now the U.S. retailer led by Doug McMillon is listing the payments giant that boasts some 240 million monthly active customers. It's a business with enormous potential but PhonePe's prospectus published on Wednesday suggests a conservative valuation is merited.

The company boasts an impressive 46% share in transactions passing through India's homegrown bank-to-bank mobile payments system, where its closest competitor is an application owned by Alphabet's Google GOOGL.O. Yet PhonePe's slowing growth and widening losses come as a surprise ahead of its Mumbai initial public offering.

PhonePe's topline will grow 10% to 78.4 billion rupees ($856 million) in the year to the end of March 2026, based on annualising results for the first half of the financial year. That's a sharp slowdown from the 40% growth in the previous full year. On the same basis, net losses are set to grow 67% to 28.9 billion rupees. The company is spending on everything from marketing costs to IT infrastructure.

To profit, PhonePe needs to gradually convert its network of users and merchants into customers of financial products, from loans to insurance and mutual funds. It's a promise that PhonePe is starting to realise. Lending and insurance distribution services generated 11.6% of its revenue from operations in six months to the end of September, up from less than 1% in 2023. But there's still a long slog ahead.

After trimming some of its 72% stake, Walmart will retain a controlling stake in the business. Having a deep pocketed shareholder will comfort incoming owners. Yet a $15 billion valuation, as previously mooted by local media, looks punchy. That would imply a multiple of 18 times PhonePe's sales in the current financial year, compared to 8 times for One 97 Communications PAYT.NS , owner of rival Paytm, which is profitable.

PhonePe's dominance is also a risk. A proposed 30% cap on transaction volumes on India's bank-to-bank small payments system has only been deferred until December and would hurt the company's ability to onboard new users. Paytm achieved a dizzying multiple in its 2021 debut but its shares are yet to recover to their IPO price. After that bruising episode, frothy valuations for payments companies ought to be handled with caution.

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CONTEXT NEWS

Walmart, Microsoft and Tiger Global will sell shares in PhonePe's initial public offering in Mumbai, according to a prospectus for the Indian payments company dated January 21.

The transaction could raise up to 120 billion rupees ($1.31 billion), Reuters reported, citing unnamed people familiar with the transaction.

According to the filing, the IPO will be comprised entirely of existing shares. Walmart currently owns 71.8% of PhonePe. Walmart will remain the controlling shareholder after the offering.

There are eight bookrunners on the deal; Axis Capital, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Jefferies, JM Financial, JPMorgan, Kotak and Morgan Stanley.

(Editing by Una Galani; Production by Aditya Srivastav)

((For previous columns by the author, Reuters customers can click on DUTTA/ujjaini.dutta@thomsonreuters.com))