We believe the market will reward us if we're doing well here: PhonePe Sameer Nigam on India IPO plans

Sameer Nigam, PhonePe

PhonePe co-founder Sameer Nigam said that they always wanted to be in India after the company moved its domicile from Singapore to India. The company also coughed up Rs 8,000 crore in taxes for the same.

Speaking to Moneycontrol’s Chandra R Srikanth at the CNNNews18 Townhall, Nigam said that given the fact that India is their home market and where their customers and employees are located, it is the right market for PhomePe to be domiciled in for the next few years.

“We want to go public here. We believe the market will reward us if we're doing well here,” he said.

While he ruled out any listing by the company in the next two years, he said that the company wants to list in India.

“We may have 250 million users or close to it in India. There's no point listing in the US — their entire population is 350 million and they wouldn't know PhonePe. If you can't make it in the home market, I don't think you're playing the game right,” he added.

Nigam said that the company was incorporated in India, and when it merged with Flipkart, it merged back into a subsidiary abroad.

“We've always wanted to be here because we're in a highly-regulated space, and we see this play out in every fintech sector. We can't be sitting on multiple regulatory licenses, processing almost a trillion dollars in monetary flow to our pipes and not expect to have friction with the government regulators. The right answer for PhonePe was to be in India. It cost a lot more than I like, but I think we've done the right thing,” he added.

PhonePe, the Walmart-backed startup, is the most-valued fintech in India with a valuation of $12 billion.

In October 2022, the Walmart-owned company announced that it completed the process of moving its domicile from Singapore to India.

In January, during a company YouTube Live session, Nigam said that when one wants to move from any other market to India as a domicile, it is treated as a capital gains event for existing investors “so they have to make a fresh mark to market valuation, you have to pay tax on the delta”.