[ad_1]
Ecommerce firm Flipkart and payments services provider PhonePe are “on their path to profitability”, said John David Rainey, chief financial officer at American retailer Walmart that owns both Indian companies.
Flipkart’s losses in the ecommerce segment have been improving, Rainey said at an investor conference in London on Tuesday, adding that this “gives us a lot of confidence in what the overall financial profile of this business looks like a few years from now”.
Earlier in the month, he had said Flipkart’s profitability path would influence the timing of its initial public offering.
During its latest quarterly analyst call in May, Walmart executives had said that they were evaluating the right time to take Flipkart public. At the time, Rainey had said Flipkart had seen double-digit growth for the quarter ended April 30.
Last month, ET reported that Flipkart had closed a funding round of about $1 billion that included $350 million from Alphabet-controlled Google, at a $35-36 billion valuation. The firm has been expanding and quickening its deliveries across the country, and is set to launch its own quick-commerce service next month.
In January, Flipkart group chief executive Kalyan Krishnamurthy told employees in a town hall that the firm was close to hitting profitability, helped by a significant reduction in monthly cash burn, ET had reported. Flipkart was also in talks to move its domicile back from Singapore to India as part of its listing plans, ET reported on May 13.
Referring to PhonePe in Tuesday’s investor conference, the Walmart CFO said the platform has been doing about $1.5 trillion worth of total payment volume annually. “Total payment volume is the equivalent metric of GMV (gross merchandise value) in the payments business. That has got to be up there as large as any payment company in the world, certainly outside of China… So, to be the largest payment provider in the largest market of the world, that’s exactly where you want to be,” Rainey added.
In late 2022, PhonePe separated from the Flipkart Group and moved domicile back to India from Singapore.
[ad_2]
Source link
