PayPal India posts 12 times increase in revenue for FY18, loss up a bit

PayPal Payments Pvt. Ltd, the Indian arm of US-based digital payments company PayPal Holdings Inc., posted a little over 12 times year-over-year increase in standalone operational revenue to Rs 258.5 crore for the 12 months ended March 2018.

The Mumbai-headquartered company’s total expenses also grew 12 times from Rs 21.2 crore to Rs 260.8 crore during the period, according to filings with the ministry of corporate affairs. As a subset of total expenses, employee-related costs doubled to Rs 32.6 crore from Rs 15.2 crore during the period.

Net loss increased slightly to Rs 2.3 crore from Rs 2 crore during the period.

PayPal India declined to comment on the financials when contacted by TechCircle.

In November 2017, PayPal Holdings Inc. had launched its domestic operations in India.

Some of the features PayPal offers include buyer and seller protection, refund/return facility, and 180-day dispute resolution window.

PayPal had set up a customer service centre in India with multi-lingual support capabilities and an on-ground sales team to drive customer engagement and education.

The firm had also partnered the government and state-owned banks for initiatives such as the digital financial literacy programme and eTourist Visa.

PayPal is in a crowded payments space in India. It competes with digital wallet companies such as Paytm, MobiKwik, and FreeCharge.

E-commerce giants Flipkart and Amazon India have their own payment wallets indicating a sharp focus on payments.

Besides e-tailers, global tech giants like Google offer digital wallets. In September 2017, Google had launched its Unified Payments Interface (UPI)-based mobile payments app Tez, now renamed as Google Pay.