If you weren’t paying close attention, you might have expected a different result from Paytm’s IPO. After all, the company is incredibly well funded by investors that you know by name, and the Indian fintech giant has sufficiently scaled into a global brand.
The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.
Read it every morning on TC+ or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.
And yet.
After debuting last Thursday, Paytm has notched two double-digit declines, measured in percentage terms, during its first two days of trading. As far as going public is concerned, seeing your share price fall 27% and then 13% is about as bad as it can go.
So, what happened? To understand the lackluster Paytm IPO — technically the public offering from One 97 Communications, Paytm’s parent company — we’re going back to the company’s IPO filing, which we’ll augment with a new filing that dropped today containing a few more data points concerning its performance.
What we want to know is whether we can spot in the numbers enough reason to understand the company’s awful post-IPO performance. Was Paytm simply mispriced in its public debut? If so, we don’t have to spend as much time wondering if the larger Indian stock market is less than welcoming toward tech unicorns.
Thanks to TC’s Manish Singh, we also have some analyst numbers to lean up against for support. Into the breach!
Paytm’s IPO filing
To avoid this post going on for more words than you want to read, we’ll skip a deep dive into what Paytm offers the market. Let it suffice to say that it offers payments, bill pay and loans to the Indian market, among other efforts.
So how good of a business is fintech in India? Let’s take a peek at the company’s IPO filing.
