The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.

By Shritama Bose

MUMBAI, March 10 (Reuters Breakingviews) - Walmart WMT.N is looking for a cashback too soon. The U.S. retailer is preparing a Mumbai listing of PhonePe, India's leading facilitator of consumer mobile phone-based payments. But a mooted $15 billion valuation looks punchy, and will draw unflattering comparisons to the disastrous initial public offering of Paytm-owner One 97 Communications PAYT.NS.

The Bentonville, Arkansas-based company picked up PhonePe as part of its 2018 purchase of Flipkart, a deal that valued the e-commerce rival to Amazon AMZN.O at $21 billion. The payments business emerged as a market leader, ahead of Alphabet's GOOGL.O Google Pay and smaller rival Paytm. Through India's Unified Payments Interface channel, PhonePe boasts 530 million customers and a 48% market share, equivalent to $137 billion worth of monthly transactions.

That may not justify an IPO valuation of 25 times sales for the year ended March 2024, however. The multiple is six times its top listed rival: Paytm debuted at 44 times sales in 2021 but the stock has crashed below its IPO price.

True, PhonePe is a superior business in some ways. It has a deep-pocketed American parent and none of the geopolitical worries Paytm suffers as a result of its Chinese backing. An affiliate of Ant Group, a Hangzhou-based financial firm, continues to own almost 10% of the company. PhonePe also has had less trouble with regulators than its rival.

Yet while revenue is growing quickly, PhonePe is unprofitable like Paytm despite slashing the incentives it offers to retain customers. The company generated a net loss of $134 million in the year ended March 2024, financial filings show. That is hard to reverse because New Delhi keeps fees on UPI transactions at zero and is committed to low-cost payments. The government compensates service providers but that is just 10% of PhonePe's revenue.

PhonePe can cross-sell products including consumer loans and insurance but the company could easily lose its edge in the payments market too if India implements a longstanding plan to cap the individual market share of UPI apps at 30% of overall transaction volume.

Minority investors in PhonePe may be impatient for an exit. Plus Walmart paid India about $1 billion in tax in 2022 to redomicile to the country from Singapore. But Indian investors are impatient with lossmaking companies and they will ask why Walmart is testing its luck when memories of the Paytm disaster remain so fresh, instead of waiting for its payments business to prove itself.

Follow @ShritamaBose on X

CONTEXT NEWS

Walmart-backed financial technology startup PhonePe plans to seek a valuation of up to $15 billion in an initial public offering in India, news website Moneycontrol reported on February 25, citing unnamed industry sources.

The digital payments firm is working with Kotak Mahindra Capital, JPMorgan, Citi and Morgan Stanley on the deal, the report addded.

(Editing by Una Galani and Ujjaini Dutta)

((For previous columns by the author, Reuters customers can click on BOSE/shritama.bose@thomsonreuters.com))