Indian FinTech unicorn Paytm lost $549m in the financial year ending in March.
The digital wallet company announced the losses in its annual report, according to TechCrunch. At the same time, Paytm’s debt rose to $96m even though its revenue had increased from $423m in 2018 to $448m this year.
Part of the reason to the company’s struggles are due to increased competition in the Indian payments sector. As FinTech Global has previously reported, the surge of mobile adoption has meant a sharp rise in digital payments in India. The rise is also due to the progressive thought of the country’s central bank, government, industry associations and the different companies in the sector.
For Paytm, the maturing market means more competition both from startups that the company cannot fight off as easily as before and tech titans like Google Pay increasingly offering their services in India. Similarly, WhatsApp is also looking to offer its payment services in the near future.
Moreover, the nine-year old FinTech enterprise also have to deal with the fact that many users are emigrating to the government’s UPI infrastructure.
The news about Paytm’s losses comes about a week after its CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma said he wanted to take the company public within the next two years.
Paytm has received investments from Alibaba and Softbank in the past.
The company said it would invest $3bn in the business over the next two years.
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