According to a Walmart executive, it might take a couple of years for the Flipkart marketplace and PhonePe digital payments platform to make their initial public offerings.
“This is something we’re looking at over the next couple of years,” Walmart’s executive vice president for corporate affairs, Dan Bartlett, said on the sidelines of the company’s shareholder meeting near its Bentonville, Arkansas, headquarters late on Thursday.
Flipkart is a more established company, but Walmart might prioritize PhonePe’s IPO above it, according to Bartlett, who spoke with Reuters.
He said that PhonePe, an Indian company, is “one of the largest payment platforms” in the country. He mentioned PhonePe’s connection to Unified Payments Interface (UPI), India’s quick money transfer system that enables customers to move money between banks without revealing account information.
“There’s a lot of a processes that have to be put in place before we go public,” Bartlett said, referring to PhonePe. “Obviously, the question about the Indian exchange versus others” is “under consideration” for future IPO listings, he added.
Strong growth may propel Walmart’s Flipkart marketplace and PhonePe payments operations in India to $100 billion in revenue, the retailer’s chief financial officer stated at an investor conference a year ago.
At the time, executives identified the two companies as key drivers to Walmart’s goal of doubling its gross merchandise volume sales in international markets to $200 billion in five years.
PhonePe announced in October 2023 that more users were using its platform to send and receive money in India’s burgeoning digital payments market, which resulted in a 77% increase in the company’s consolidated revenue for the 2023 fiscal year.
As of March 2023, PhonePe had over 490 million registered users and about 51 % of the value of transactions on India’s UPI platform.
