Pine Labs Makes It Back To Loss Gang For FY18 With 64.6% Increase In Expenses

New Delhi-based digital retail payments platform Pine Labs Pvt. Ltd., popularly known as Pine Labs, announced its financial performance for the fiscal year 2017-18 reporting a 55% increase in revenues and 64.6% increase in expenses.

According to the Ministry of Corporate Affairs filings accessed by Inc42, PineLabs further recorded a loss of $342.8K (INR 2.51 Cr) in FY18. In FY17, Pine Labs had marked its entry into the profitability club with a net profit of $518.4K (INR 3.8 Cr). It had been recording high losses since FY15 but its association with big corporates had finally started paying off, however, not for long.

The company’s other financial performance’s highlights for FY18 are:

• The Sale of Products gained the company a revenue of $1.73 Mn (INR 12.58 Cr), against $1.66 Mn (INR 12.18 Cr)
• The company earned $39.01 Mn (INR 286.59 Cr) from the sale of services, making 95.7% of total revenue of $41.24 Mn (INR 302.97 Cr), a jump of 55% from the previous year
• Pine Labs’ total expenses for the year were $43.74 Mn (INR 321.3 Cr), an increase of 64.6% from FY17
• The Advertising promotional expenses fell 21.7% reaching $178K (INR 1.3 Cr)
• Pine Labs’ cut down marginally on its Employee Benefit Expenses by 95.7% reaching $489K (INR 3.5 Cr)

Founded in 1998 by Lokvir Kapoor, Pine Labs delivers active point-of-sale payments in India through its smart cloud-based payments platform, claims to be processing about 450 Mn transactions worth over $15 Bn annually, as of March 2018.

Till date, the company has raised $223 Mn from investors like Temasek, PayPal, Sequoia Capital, Madison India Capital among others.

In What The Financials series, Inc42 Datalabs noted that Pine Labs uses payment partners to provide integrated payment gateway services and enables merchants to connect their respective bank accounts to provide an end-to-end service to their customers.

Pine Labs earns its revenue by leasing its devices and from subscription charges, while its payment gateway partners and merchant banks impose transaction charges.

In the Indian POS terminal market, which is pegged to reach $450 Mn at a CAGR of over 10% from 2017 to 2024, Pine Labs continues to be one of the major players against newbies like MSwipe, Esetap etc.

However, lessons of FY17 had helped the company control its expenses but at the same time, burn down its profit to the loss club back again.

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