PhonePe revenue grows 74 percent in financial year 2020, losses fall amid IPO talk

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. The e-commerce payment and digital wallet company PhonePe saw a seven percent 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 expanded 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 percent 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 percent to Rs 2,202 crore in FY20 from Rs 2,153 crore in FY19. Employee benefit expenses were the only expense item to see a decline in the year 2020, while every other expense increased. Employee benefit expense fell to Rs 479 crore from Rs 531 crore for FY20. In terms of income, Rs 371 crore came through revenue from operations, making up the bulk of the overall revenue for PhonePe in FY20. 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 and another round of around $20.3 million in December 2020 from its Singapore-based parent company PhonePe Private Limited earlier known as Flipkart Payments Private Limited. (Also Read: PhonePe raises $700 million in a new funding round led by Walmart, becomes a separate entity) PhonePe remains among the leading 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.