Walmart CEO Reiterates Flipkart, PhonePe IPO Plans After Spin-Off

US retail giant Walmart CEO Doug McMillon has reiterated the company’s commitment to seeing Indian ecommerce major Flipkart go for an initial public offering (IPO) overseas. 

“As we invested we did mention that our plan is to IPO and that hasn’t changed,” McMillon said at an event on Thursday. 

The Walmart chief executive also noted that with both Flipkart and its digital payments company PhonePe growing at a quick pace, both companies have room for more investors, and could diversify in several ways, including IPOs. 

Bengaluru-based Flipkart’s IPO could value the company at $50 Bn, according to a Reuters report. 

Last week, Flipkart had announced a partial spin-off of PhonePe, partially selling its stake in the fintech company to Walmart. PhonePe has raised $700 Mn in primary capital from the divestiture, which will give the company more autonomy over its operations. The divestiture has bumped up PhonePe’s post-money valuation to $5.5 Bn.

Media reports suggest that PhonePe is also working aggressively to go public by 2023 as a separate entity in the US or India, eyeing a valuation of $7 to $10 Bn. 

PhonePe is one of the earliest apps in India’s digital payments landscape, currently dominating the UPI segment alongside Google Pay. 

 In the data for payments made through the unified payments interface (UPI), released by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) for November, PhonePe recorded 868.40 Mn UPI transactions worth INR 1,75,453 Cr, coming in second after Google Pay, which recorded 960.02 Mn transactions worth INR 1,61,418 Cr. Thus, while Google Pay has recorded the most number of transactions, PhonePe has recorded the highest value transacted through a third-party payment app (TPAP) on the UPI network. 

Besides UPI, PhonePe has recently added investments to its platform and is also building up its merchant ATM play to compete with the likes of Paytm and others in the retail fintech space.