Sayan Sen ( )
Paytm is inching closer to its goal of $1 billion annual turnover as the payments aggregator posted a 61% rise in revenue in FY23 from the previous fiscal year. The company earned Rs 7,990 crore in revenue as it cut down its losses by 26% to Rs 1,776 crore.
For the fourth quarter ended March 2023, Paytm’s revenue rose by 51% to Rs 2,334 crore from Q4 FY22, while net payment margin also improved by 158% to Rs 687 crore year-on-year.
It improved EBITDA before ESOP by Rs 602 crore for Q4 FY23 over the comparable quarter previous fiscal year, valuing it at Rs 176 crore for FY23.
Paytm achieved operational profitability almost 17 months ahead of its target of September 2024, which the company pins on “increased pace of monetisation, better cost management, and higher operating leverage.”
“During second half of this year, we achieved operational profitability (EBITDA before ESOP) and we believe we can continue our growth momentum and improve our profitability further. We have made significant investments towards sales manpower, improvement of technology platform, marketing spends etc., which will help us carry this momentum,” Paytm said in a statement.
Motilal Oswal analysts told YourStory last month they expect Paytm’s pre-tax earnings to break even by FY25. They suggested that Paytm is set to benefit from surging mobile payments, which are projected to grow ~5x to $3 trillion by 2026.
The popularity of unified payments interface (UPI) has soared to an annualised transaction value of $1.7 trillion and a merchant transaction value of $380 billion in FY23. This is almost double the amount transacted on credit cards, as per a Bain & Co study on ‘The Future of India Retail Payments’.
Non-cash transactions over UPI are expected to grow by 50% to reach ~$1 trillion by 2026.