MobiKwik eyes Rs 500 cr revenue in FY20, IPO in 4 years

Digital payments company MobiKwik on Tuesday said it has turned cash-flow positive and is confident of clocking Rs 500 crore in revenue this fiscal on the back of strong uptake of financial solutions on its platform. The company, which competes with fintech players like Paytm and PhonePe, is also looking at an initial public offering (IPO) in about four years' time.

"We have successfully crossed the first hurdle of hitting cashflow positive in August this year. Our next goal is to achieve annualised revenue of Rs 700 crore (USD 100 million) run rate in March 2020. We will double down our fintech scale in 2020 to make FY2021 our first full year of profitable growth," MobiKwik co-founder Upasana Taku told PTI. MobiKwik's revenue before venturing in fintech was about Rs 100 crore, and the company is looking at a revenue of over Rs 500 crore in FY2019-20, she added.

"Once we hit this landmark milestone (Rs 700 crore revenue run rate), we will march forward towards an IPO in 2023-24. We aspire to become the first Indian fintech and first Indian payments company to get listed in India," she said. Revenue run rate is a term used in online retailing to indicate total sales value of merchandise sold through a marketplace over a certain period of time.

Revenue run rate of MobiKwik in January this year was Rs 218 crore. The company had been active as a mobile payments platform in India but despite having 50 million users (around May 2017), it was nowhere close to making profits and neither was any competitor.

"Competition was intense and the market was flooded with too many cashbacks and discount offers at the time. Meanwhile, banks like HDFC and Kotak with lesser customer base were highly profitable and listed on the stock exchanges. We decided it was time to find a way to increase our revenue per user to make the business profitable," she said. It was then that MobiKwik decided to tap into data to profile users and merchants on more than 1,000 variables that helped served them better, Taku explained.

"In January 2018, we launched our first fintech product - a Digital Credit Line linked to user's MobiKwik account, followed by 'sachet-size' insurance products. We also have wealth management and digital gold products... All these fintech products put together now contribute 25 per cent to our revenues," she said. The company - which now has about 110 million users in India - aims to also continue growing its payments platform to reach 250 million users and its financial products reaching at least 30 per cent of that base.

"We will launch more innovative products in all financial services catering to the diverse needs of users and merchants. We will also geographically expand by replicating our Indian success story in multiple South Asian countries," she said.

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