By Siddharth Cavale
BENTONVILLE, Arkansas (Reuters) – The initial public offering of Walmart’s (NYSE:) Flipkart marketplace and digital payments platform PhonePe could take a few years, a Walmart executive said.
“This is something we’ll be looking at over the next few years,” Walmart’s vice president of corporate affairs, Dan Bartlett, said late Thursday on the sidelines of the company’s shareholder meeting near its headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas.
Walmart could place an IPO of PhonePe ahead of Flipkart even though Flipkart is a more mature company, Bartlett told Reuters.
PhonePe, based in India, is “one of the largest payment platforms” in the country, he said. He mentioned PhonePe’s tie-up with India’s instant money transfer system, Unified Payments Couple (NASDAQ:) (UPI), which allows users to transfer money to multiple banks without revealing account information.
“There are a lot of processes that need to be put in place before we go public,” Bartlett said, referring to PhonePe. “Clearly, the question of Indian stock market versus others” is “being taken into consideration” for the future IPO, he added.
Walmart’s Flipkart marketplace and PhonePe payments businesses in India could be $100 billion businesses backed by strong growth, the retailer’s chief financial officer said at an investor conference a year ago.
Executives at the time cited the two companies as key drivers that could help Walmart achieve its goal of doubling the gross merchandise volume it sells in foreign markets to $200 billion in five years.
PhonePe said in October 2023 that consolidated revenue for fiscal 2023 rose 77% as more customers used the platform to send and receive money in India’s booming digital payments market.
With over 490 million registered users, PhonePe had a nearly 51% share of the value of transactions on India’s UPI as of March 2023.
