CHINA’S Alibaba Group has sold its remaining stake in Indian digital payments firm Paytm for about 13.78 billion rupees (S$221.9 million) through a block deal, stock exchange data showed on Friday (Feb 10).

The exit comes days after Paytm posted its first-ever quarterly operating profit as a listed firm, nine months ahead of its own target.

Alibaba.com Singapore E-Commerce sold 21.4 million shares of Paytm on Friday at 642.74 rupees apiece, a 9 per cent discount to Thursday’s close, NSE stock exchange data showed.

Paytm’s stock tumbled nearly 8 per cent on Friday to close at 650.55 rupees, but it is still up nearly 23 per cent so far this year.

Morgan Stanley Asia (Singapore) bought 5.42 million shares of Paytm at 640 rupees on Friday, the data showed.

It was not immediately clear why Alibaba sold the stake. Paytm and Alibaba did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.

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In January, Alibaba sold a 3.1 per cent stake in the company through a block deal worth US$125 million. Before that, the Chinese firm had a 6.26 per cent stake in Paytm.

Paytm, which is also backed by China’s Ant Group and Japan’s SoftBank Group, has been under pressure to turn profitable ever since its dismal listing in November 2021.

The stock has declined around 70 per cent since listing, and tumbled 60 per cent in 2022.

Earlier this week, Macquarie Research double-upgraded the stock to “outperform” from “underperform”, and bumped up the price target by around 80 per cent 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 very visible change in approach of the management to deliver profits as evidenced by core EBIDTA profitability reported recently. We were earlier expecting losses to continue but at current rate of revenues and operating leverage kicking in, we expect accounting profits to be delivered by FY26.” REUTERS