Alibaba, Ant Financial Services invest in Paytm

In this round, Alibaba is a new investor and will take a 20 percent take though a fresh issue of shares by investing about $680 million, according to the Economic Times, citing two people familiar with the deal. “Investing in Paytm will enhance the ability of Alibaba and Ant Financial to tap opportunities in India’s fast-growing mobile e-commerce marketplace and digital finance industry”. “This investment will further expand Alibaba’s global footprint to India’s thriving mobile commerce market”, said Daniel Zhang, CEO of Alibaba. Paytm has recently crossed 100 million Paytm Wallet users who carry out over 75 million transactions every month, says the statement.

It comes as no surprise that Alibaba has made a strategic investment in Paytm.

With this, Alibaba will come to be the main strictly in the organization while it will maintain 40per cent by means of couple of establishments, and Paytm will just be its seo use in India.

Paytm, which first began life as a provider of value-added services to telecom firms and later adapted its business model to become one of India’s earliest mobile wallet firms, has been building on its latest pivot as an Internet retailer.

Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Paytm, said, “Paytm is building India’s most dominant mobile payment and commerce ecosystem”.

In February this year, Alipay invested an undisclosed sum in Paytm. With this major achievement, Paytm has inched closer towards its larger vision of bringing half a billion Indians to the mainstream economy. Smartphone maker Xiaomi Corp.is expanding its manufacturing into India, its largest market behind China, and Tencent Holdings Ltd. has invested in Indian healthcare startup Practo Technologies Pvt. Ltd. Ant Financial’s stake, on the other hand, will decline from 25 percent to 20 percent.

Paytm, which grew and was spun out of mobile content company One97, bears much similarity to Alibaba’s own constellation of businesses, albeit that it is far less developed. Noida-based Paytm is also backed by venture capital firm SAIF Partners.