PhonePe, the Walmart owned payments company, reported a net loss of 2,792 crore rupees for the last financial year, 62 percent wider than the year before, according to regulatory filings sourced from Tofler. Operating revenue grew 11 percent to 7,920 crore rupees.
The growth line is the part worth reading twice. Revenue rose 40 percent the year before and 74 percent in FY24. A drop from 74 to 40 to 11 percent over three years is a different kind of signal from a single soft year, particularly for a business whose core product moves an enormous volume of transactions at no charge to the user.
Total expenses rose 13 percent to 10,588.5 crore rupees, which the filings attribute mainly to higher other expenses including advertising. Spending more to grow less is a defensible position when the spend is buying a market position that can be charged for later. It is a harder position when the underlying rail is free by design.
That is the structural question behind the numbers. UPI made India's payments infrastructure ubiquitous by removing the merchant discount rate, and the companies that built distribution on top of it have to find revenue in adjacent products rather than in the transactions themselves. This set of results is what that search looks like from the outside.