Vijay Shekhar Sharma says Paytm expects to be profitable in 2 years

Paytm has charted out its path towards profitability, which it hopes to achieve in two years. According to a report in PTI, Paytm founder Vijay Shekar Sharma said that the company is betting big on monetising its existing customer base and its financial services business segment to propel its growth.

Sharma said in an interview that the growth of Paytm the digital wallet and payments app and the other ventures built around it has to be seen in a different perspective. He says there are three distinct phases of growth: Finding the right product-market fit, revenue and monetisation, and the last phase will be about profitability and free cash flows. According to him, the company is currently in its second phase of revenue and monetisation and going ahead the profitability phase will also come.

The company now plans to expand its financial services business in the next two years for it is aiming to make investments to the tune of 10,000 crore.

Having built a solid customer base, the strategy was to retain that base while keeping the profitability factor at the back burner. Once the consolidation takes place, profits will automatically accrue says Vijay Shekar Sharma.

He says monetization has helped Paytm achieve some level of profitability at the pre-tax stage. Of the different verticals, Paytm Payments Bank, commerce and cloud were already profitable, while Paytm FirstGames and Paytm Mall is "close to profitability".

With regard to funding, Paytm raised Rs 7,000 crore ($1 billion) last year. Apart from the existing marquee investors like SoftBank and Alibaba, T Rowe Price was a new investor from the US to have taken a major portion of this funding. The company was valued at $16 billion when the last fund-raising was carried out.