Paytm reports an increase of over 21% in average loan ticket size

• Vijay Shekhar Sharma-led Paytm today revealed that its average loan ticket size has surged by over 21% in the September quarter.
  
• The company, whose shares are down by over two-thirds from its issue price of ₹2,150 since debuting in November last year, disbursed over 1 lakh loans every day during the quarter.
  
• Reacting to the news, Paytm’s shares gained even as the broader markets were in the red on weak global cues.
  

Paytm today reported a 21% quarterly growth in its average loan ticket size from ₹6,551 to ₹7,956 in the September quarter. It also disbursed over 1 lakh loans per day during the period, the company said in an exchange filing.

The Vijay Shekhar Sharma-led company has reported that its pace of loan disbursals has increased from the previous quarter. At this rate, it would end up issuing loans worth ₹34,000 crore by the end of FY23, up from the ₹24,000 crore as estimated in the previous quarter.

The surge in loan disbursals that Paytm is seeing should not come as a surprise. Analysts have observed a strong growth in retail loans in the banking and financial services sector. HDFC Bank, the largest private sector lender witnessed a 24% year-on-year growth in loans in its Q2 update, driven by corporate-rural, retail and wholesale segments.

Paytm’s improved performance should come as a relief to the company’s investors, who have seen over two-thirds of their investment erode from the issue price since its listing in November last year. The company’s shares were up 0.9% as of 10:30 am today even as the benchmark Nifty50 index was down 1.2%.

Apart from this, Paytm also reported healthy growth in its offline payments business. The total devices deployed increased from 3.8 million in Q1 to 4.8 million in Q2.

It is worth noting that this number includes the point-of-sales and soundbox devices only, not the dynamic QR codes that merchants can additionally deploy.

Despite a healthy growth in devices deployed, the gross merchandise value, or GMV – which is essentially the value of total transactions carried out through these devices – registered a relatively slower growth.

Sequentially, on a per user basis, the GMV was barely up, too, with an increase of a meager 0.7%, down from the 8.2% surge reported in the previous quarter.

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