Alibaba Group, which is suffering from poor performance due to weak Chinese consumption, has disposed of its entire stake in India’s online payment platform investment, PayTM.
According to Reuters on the 13th, Alibaba disposed of a 3.16% stake in India’s online payment platform PayTM at 13.78 billion rupees on the 10th, the last trading day of last week.
On the day of the transaction, PayTM shares plunged about 8%.
Alibaba sold its 3.1% stake in PayTM for about 160 billion won last month and sold all of its remaining shares this time.
Alibaba seems to have been looking for opportunities to recover its investment. PayTM recovered its investment just days after it announced that it recorded its first quarter operating profit nine months ahead of its own target. It is also shortly after Macquarie Securities raised its investment opinion on PayTM from “below market returns” to “above market returns.”
Alibaba jointly invested in PayTM with Softbank in Japan in 2015. Its performance showed no signs of improvement, and its stock price has fallen 70% since its listing in November 2021.
Alibaba did not explain the reason for the sudden recovery of investment expenses. In addition to seeing the outlook for PayTM as dark, pressure to improve its own performance seems to have worked evenly.
Alibaba recorded 207.18 billion yuan in sales in the third quarter of last year, up 3% from the same period last year. Although it was not a bad performance, customer management sales, including commission income from sellers, fell 7%, the largest decline ever. Customer management sales account for about 30% of Alibaba’s sales. This is a phenomenon that occurs as consumption capacity decreases along with slow economic growth.
