By Nishit Navin and Siddhi Nayak
(Reuters) -Paytm expects to become profitable from the first quarter of the current fiscal year, it said on Tuesday, after posting a narrower sequential loss excluding a one-time charge.
“We are at the verge of PAT (profit after tax) profitability… I’m very sure that in (the) next quarter onwards, if everything goes as we are seeing, it could very well be a profitable quarter,” Founder and CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma said in a post-earnings call.
Earlier in the day, the digital payments company reported a loss of 5.4 billion rupees ($64.03 million) for the three months ended March 31 compared with a loss of 2.08 billion rupees in the previous quarter, hurt by a charge from employee stock options.
Sharma gave up ESOPs in the reported quarter, triggering a one-time charge of 4.92 billion rupees.
Excluding the one-time charge, Paytm’s loss narrowed to 230 million rupees, it said in a statement.
The company, one of India’s first fintech firms to go public, expects ESOP costs to decline to between 750 million rupees and 1 billion rupees for the April to June period, compared to 1.69 billion rupees in the January-March quarter.
Sharma’s move came months after India’s market regulator determined that the grant of 21 million ESOPs to him violated its rules governing share-based employee benefits.
Paytm said its EBITDA – or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization – excluding the cost of employee stock options, was 810 million rupees, compared to a negative 410 million rupees in the previous quarter.
Its revenue from operations rose 4.6% sequentially to 19.12 billion rupees as the company continued to recover from the winding down of its payments bank unit.
Revenue from financial services, which includes its loan business, rose 9%, and payment services business climbed 4%.
($1 = 84.3370 Indian rupees)
(Reporting by Nishit Navin; Editing by Nivedita Bhattacharjee and Pooja Desai)
