Paytm shares gain 3% on surge in loan disbursement

Shares of One 97 Communications, which owns Paytm, rose nearly 3% on Wednesday after the payment solutions company reported strong operating performance for the first two months of the current financial year (FY23). The fintech company in an exchange filing says that its lending business continues to register significant growth, both in terms of value and volume, in two months ending May 2022.

Cheering the news, the share price of the parent company of digital payments major Paytm surged as much as 2.9% to hit an intraday high of ₹624 after opening higher at ₹616, against the previous closing price of ₹606.4 on the BSE. The stock has been gaining for the last two sessions and has risen over 6% during this period, taking its market cap to around ₹40,212.4 crore.

Paytm shares traded 71% lower than its initial public offering (IPO) issue price of ₹2,150. The stock has been continuing under stress after it made a weak public market debut on November 18, 2021. It has fallen 54% in the calendar year 2022 so far, with the share price dropping from ₹1,340 on January 3 to ₹620 on June 15. Bucking the trend, the stock has risen 5% in the past one month.

Backed by Japanese multinational conglomerate SoftBank, One 97 Communications’ lending business grew 471% on an annualised basis, with loan disbursals rising to 5.5 million during the two months ending May 2022. This aggregates to a loan value of ₹3,576 crore ($476 million) in the first two months of the quarter, up 829% YoY.

“We are also seeing increases in average ticket size due to the scale-up of the personal loans business in particular,” said Paytm in an exchange filing on Tuesday.

As per the company, the merchant gross merchandise value (GMV) processed through its platform aggregated to around ₹1.96 lakh crore ($26.2 billion) in the April-May period of 2022, marking a YoY growth of 105%.

“The Paytm Super App with its comprehensive offerings is the one-stop destination for diverse payment needs of millions of users in India. This has also led to new milestones achieved in user engagement, with the average monthly transacting users (MTU) for the two months ending May 2022 at 74.3 million, registering a growth of 48% Y-o-Y,” it said.

The company said that its offline payments leadership also continued to grow stronger as it deployed 3.4 million devices at merchant stores across the country. The strong adoption of devices also has a correlation with the rise in merchants eligible for loans from our platform, it said.