 "MobiKwik")
MobiKwik, a payments and digital banking fintech, posted a second consecutive quarter of profit, clocking Rs 5 crore in profit after tax (PAT) in Q2FY23, as compared to Rs 3 crore in the previous quarter.
With this, the company has posted a total of Rs 8 crore in PAT for the first half of FY23.
The company will start posting stronger profit margins in the next year, said Upasana Taku, COO and co-founder of MobiKwik, in an interaction with Business Standard.
“We should be able to achieve at least Rs 20-25 crore in profit (PAT) for the ongoing financial year. Out of which, we have already posted Rs 8 crore PAT. We are going to grow slightly everystart quarter. The growth is not going to be flat,” Taku added.
The Gurugram-based fintech has a registered base of 140 million users and over four million merchants. Taku explained that the company has initiated the engagement of its customer and merchant base with the fintech’s financial products.
“We have a large base of customers and merchants, and they have had a payment relationship with us for a decade now. We have started engaging some of them with financial products, and we will keep adding these products for them. So, the incremental cost of servicing them is not increasing. My fixed costs are going to remain the same,” she observed.
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She added that while payments were traditionally a one per cent take-rate business, other financial products have a higher margin profile.
“The profitability emanating from those financial products is higher, and that is what is called operating leverage. This means that I have done all the hard work and now as I scale up the distribution of financial products. This is going to flow down to my bottom line,” she added.
MobiKwik’s revenues grew 17.5 per cent to Rs 208 crore in Q2FY23 from Rs 177 crore in the previous quarter. In Q1FY24, the company had announced a 68 per cent quarter-on-quarter growth in revenue to Rs 177 crore.
The company offers credit products such as ZIP-EMI loans and ZIP-Pay later. It also provides a soundbox device.
In the soundbox space, MobiKwik’s peers, such as Paytm and PhonePe, have over 80 lakh and 40 lakh devices deployed in the market, respectively. While Taku did not mention the number of the company’s soundboxes deployed in the market, she stated that the number was a small one.
In a previous interaction last month, Taku said that the company would take a shot at the bourses after demonstrating three to four quarters of profit, after the company had deferred its IPO in November 2021.
“When we were pursuing it (the IPO) last time, we were at the end of the queue in terms of the approvals from Sebi. Before us, there were multiple IPOs, and at the end of it, you could see the waning of the market’s appetite," she had said.
