Digital payments company PhonePe has reported a revenue of ₹690 crore in FY 21, which is about an 85.5 per cent jump from ₹372 crore revenue reported in FY20, according to the company's recent regulatory filings.
Majority of the company’s revenue has come from payments and allied services. PhonePe claims to have a 45 per cent market share in digital payments, and a 300 million user base.
Further, the company’s net loss during the period stood at ₹1,727 crore as compared to ₹1,771 crore in FY20. A major part of the company’s cost this year was on employee benefits.
Excluding the ESOPs allocated by the company in FY21, PhonePe’s costs during this period stood at ₹884.4 crore, which is about 44 per cent less than costs incurred last year.
Reduced expenses
The company reduced various costs during this period, including the marketing and promotional expenses which stood at ₹535 crore in FY 21, as compared to ₹1,016 crore in FY 20, about 47 per cent drop in these costs. Further, costs like payment processing fee and customer support also were brought down by 28 per cent and about 34 percent respectively.
PhonePe is digital payments platform with over 300 million registered users. Using PhonePe, users can send and receive money, recharge mobile, DTH, data cards, pay at stores, make utility payments, buy gold and make investments.
PhonePe forayed into financial services in 2017 with the launch of gold category, providing users with an option to buy 24-karat gold securely on its platform. PhonePe has since launched several mutual funds and insurance products like tax-saving funds, liquid funds, international travel insurance, life insurance, and insurance for the Covid-19 pandemic among others. PhonePe is also accepted at 20+ million merchant outlets across India.
Also read: PhonePe and NBBL partner to launch ClickPay
The most frequent use-cases on the PhonePe app are said to be digital money transfers, bill payments or recharge, and offline transactions at stores through PhonePe. In an earlier conversation with BusinessLine , PhonePe co-founder and CTO Rahul Chari said going forward, PhonePe will be focusing more on the financial services space and collaborating more with the BFSI sector across insurance, investments, and lending. In the past few months, PhonePe has got its insurance broking license and an in-principle approval to operate as an account aggregator.
It had also launched ClickPay for its customers in association with NPCI Bharat BillPay Ltd.(NBBL), which is a payment link that enables customers to make recurring online bill payments(electricity, water, gas, loan, etc) and removes the need to remember tedious account details associated with each biller/service.