Paytm founder and CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma has said that the company has no plans to leave its online marketplace, Paytm Mall. However, he said that the newly launched online wholesale business is expected to generate about 15% of the Paytm Mall .
He said the marketplace is doing well and the platform is expected to grow 50% to double the GMV to $2 billion by fiscal year ending March 2019.
Three people close to the Noidabased mobile payments and ecommerce firm, however, said Paytm is looking to exit, or at least scale down, its marketplace business due to intense competition from larger rivals, Flipkart and Amazon.
“They have figured out that they are not acquiring loyal customers in the B2C space,” one of the person related to Paytm said. “Now they will completely focus on the B2B space.”
According to reports, the employees of Paytm have been given options to move to other verticals of the company. Vojay Sharma has also added that Paytm Mall is a pure marketplace and doesn’t hold any inventory or have stakes in its sellers, and is compliant with India’s latest FDI regulations in e-commerce. The company has recently rejigged its team to focus on “offline to online.”
