BENGALURU: Chinas Alibaba Group has actually offered its remaining stake in Indian digital payments firm Paytm for about 13.78 billion rupees ($167.14 million) through a block offer, stock market information showed on Friday.
The exit comes days after Paytm posted its first-ever quarterly operating earnings as a noted company, nine months ahead of its own target.
Alibaba.com Singapore E-Commerce Pvt Ltd sold 21.4 million shares of Paytm on Friday at 642.74 rupees each, a 9% discount to Thursdays close, NSE stock market information revealed.
Paytms stock tumbled nearly 8% on Friday to close at 650.55 rupees, however it is still up almost 23% so far this year.
Morgan Stanley Asia (Singapore) Pte purchased 5.42 million shares of Paytm at 640 rupees on Friday, the data revealed.
It was not instantly clear why Alibaba sold the stake.
Paytm and Alibaba did not right away react to Reuters requests for remark.
In January, Alibaba offered a 3.1% stake in the company through a block deal worth $125 million.
Prior to that, the Chinese company had a 6.26% stake in Paytm.
Paytm, which is likewise backed by Chinas Ant Group and Japans SoftBank Group Corp, has been under pressure to turn lucrative ever since its dismal listing in November 2021.
The stock has actually decreased around 70% because listing, and toppled 60% in 2022.
Previously this week, Macquarie Research double-upgraded the stock to exceed from underperform , and bumped up the price target by around 80% to 800 rupees.
Perhaps the last bear on the stock on sell side, we change our view and we double upgrade PayTM to outperform, Macquarie analyst Suresh Ganapathy said.
We see a really visible modification in technique of the management to deliver earnings as evidenced by core EBIDTA profitability reported recently.
We were earlier expecting losses to continue but at existing rate of profits and operating take advantage of kicking in, we anticipate accounting revenues to be delivered by FY26.