Paytm Mall hopes to turn profitable in 2 years

• Paytm Mall has released its monthly spends by ₹400 million and aims to turn profitable in two years.
• The company aims to rake in a ₹170 billion GMV by 2022.
• Paytm Mall has had multiple problems since its inception, where there were also rumours that the company might not see the light of the day.

Paytm Mall, the e-commerce subsidiary of One97 communications which owns Paytm, is aiming to turn profitable in the next two years.

The company said that it reduced its monthly spends by ₹400 million, is targeting an EBITDA breakeven by 2021-22. EBIDTA is earnings before interest, depreciation, tax and amortization.

The company ended the last financial year with a Gross Merchandising Value (GMV) of ₹130 billion and is now aiming for ₹170 billion GMV by 2022.

“We do not lose money on any order we ship. More than GMV, we are focused on increasing revenue and factors contributing towards it. We expect 70-80% of the orders being shipped from the same city. We would be happy to be a cost attention company rather than no attention at all,” said Srinivas Mothey, Sr. Vice President – Paytm Mall.

This is good news for the company, as its prospects did not look very good a while back and reports said that it might close down.

Online to Offline

Yet its fortunes changed by May 2019 as the company said that it grew by 200% in six months, and hired 200 people.

In an earlier interview with Business Insider, Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma shared what worked for them. “Paytm Mall is a business that has learnt that Online to Offline (O2O) is the best business model. Our attention on partners keeping items in warehouses has now significantly reduced, and we have offloaded many partners," he had said.

Today, the platform has 100,000 sellers and is planning to scale up by three times.

It also plans to piggyback on the success of Paytm, whose monthly transactions are as much as 400 million transactions per month, to drive demand.