Ant Financial said it would not comment.
This is the third time Ant Financial has invested in Paytm.
According to Bloomberg News, Paytm, India’s largest mobile payment and business platform, is currently valued at about $16 billion and is expected to receive $2 billion in financing from Softbank and Ant Financial. People familiar with the matter said that the company raised half of its financing through stocks and debts, negotiations are in the final stages, and the terms may still change.
In this regard, ant Jinfu said that he would not comment.
Paytm is an Indian mobile shopping and payment platform headquartered in Noida, India, with the parent company One97 Communications. At the beginning of the company’s establishment, it provided services such as mobile phone charging, online payment, and online shopping.
It is worth mentioning that this investor is not a new face. According to Tianyue data, as early as 2015, Ant Financial has participated in Paytm’s A and B rounds of financing, and the equity ratio has accumulated to 40%. The capital injection of Ant Financial has brought many Alipay technical cooperation to Paytm at that time. Ali and Softbank subsequently joined the investment series, and Softbank took up 20% of the shares. If the financing is completed successfully, Ant Financial and Softbank will remain the largest investors of Paytm. In addition, eBay, Buffett investment is also a Paytm shareholder.
Public data shows that the number of Internet users in India is second in the world, second only to China. By September 2018, the number of Internet users in India has increased to 560 million, which is one of the main reasons why Paytm is optimistic for investors.
In addition, in November 2016, India implemented a “waste order”, forcing Indians to deposit cash into banks, which greatly reduced the flow of money outside the national regulatory system, which gave Paytm an opportunity. According to the statistics of the Central Bank of India, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the use of mobile wallets increased by 104 months after the implementation of the “waste order”. %, By June 2017, Paytm has grown rapidly, and the number of users has increased to 225 million.
In addition, Paytm has obtained a license approved by the Reserve Bank of India in January 2017 to access Payment Banks to pay for banking, which allows Indian non-bank institutions to have certain functions of banks (opening banks) Accounts, debit cards, etc.), which enabled Paytm to further expand its local business. At this point, Paytm looks more like Alipay, both as an e-wallet and as a savings management function.
At the Alibaba Investor Conference held in September this year, Ant Jinying Chairman and CEO Jing Xiandong announced that as of June 2019, Alipay and its local wallet partners have served more than 1.2 billion users worldwide. . And at the same time already at India, Thailand, South Korea, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Bangladesh launched a local version of Alipay.
After the completion of this financing, it is still unclear what kind of cooperation will be carried out between Alipay India and “India Alipay”.