An initial public offering for Walmart’s Flipkart marketplace and digital payments platform Phonepe could take several years, a Walmart executive said.
“This is something we’re thinking about over the next few years,” Dan Bartlett, Walmart’s vice president of operations, said late Thursday on the sidelines of a shareholder meeting near the company’s headquarters in Bentonville, Ta.
Bartlett told Reuters that Walmart could pursue Fonpe’s IPO before Flipkart, even though Flipkart is a more mature company.
India-based PhonePe is “one of the largest payment platforms” in the country, he said. He pointed to PhonePe’s integration with Unified Payments Interface (UPI), India’s instant money transfer system, which allows users to transfer money between multiple banks without revealing account details.
“There are a lot of processes that need to go through before we can go public,” Bartlett said, referring to PhonePe. He added that “obviously issues related to Indian stock exchanges and other exchanges” are being considered to be listed in the upcoming IPO.
Flipkart’s Walmart payments business in India could be a $100 billion (around Rs 8,352 crore) business, the retailer’s CFO said at an investor conference a year ago.
At the time, executives identified the two companies as key players in helping Walmart achieve its goal of doubling the volume of goods sold in overseas markets to $200 billion (approximately Rs. 16.73 billion) within five years
PhonePe announced in October 2023 that its consolidated revenue for fiscal 2023 grew 77% as more customers used its platform to send and receive money in the fast-growing digital payments market in India.
With over 490 million registered users, PhonePe accounted for nearly 51% of UPI transaction value in India in March 2023.
Bhupendra Singh Chundawat is a seasoned technology journalist with over 22 years of experience in the media industry. He specializes in covering the global technology landscape, with a deep focus on manufacturing trends and the geopolitical impact on tech companies. Currently serving as the Editor at Udaipur Kiran, his insights are shaped by decades of hands-on reporting and editorial leadership in the fast-evolving world of technology.
