Tencent offloads 2% stake in PB Fintech for Rs 562 crore

Chinese technology behemoth Tencent on Friday offloaded a 2.09% stake in Gurugram-based financial services company PB Fintech for Rs 562 crore through bulk deals, data from BSE stated.

Tencent sold the shares for Rs 596.6 a piece, roughly 39% below PB Fintech’s IPO price of Rs 980. As per the latest transaction, Tencent’s shareholding in PB Fintech has reduced to 6.28% from 8.37% (as of March 2023).

Alternately, French financial services major Societe Generale has bought a 0.5% stake in the fintech, data from the exchanges showed. Societe Generale has bought 2.2 million shares for Rs 596.3 apiece.

Tencent first invested in the company in 2019 as a part of its secondary round, valuing the insurance aggregator at roughly $1.5 billion. It had bought a 10% stake in Policybazaar, almost half of Tiger Global’s stake in the company.

This comes months after Softbank sold a 5.1% stake in PB Fintech for Rs 1,043 crore through open market transactions.

Shares of PB Fintech closed at Rs 604.85 apiece on Friday, down almost 3% in the day’s trade.

Earlier this week, PB Fintech announced its financial results and reported a significantly narrower net loss for the fourth quarter at Rs 9 crore compared with Rs 220 crore a year earlier. Operating revenue for the March quarter grew 61% from a year ago to Rs 869 crore, the company said.

While the group’s existing business lines including Policybazaar and Paisabazaar contributed Rs 504 crore to the revenue, the rest came from new initiatives. The new initiatives include PB Partners, a platform to enable independent insurance sellers, and operations in the UAE.

The company said that it was looking to clock a profit after tax (net profit) in FY24. Even Paisabazaar cofounder and chief executive in a recent interaction with ET said that the credit distributor was looking to record net profits in FY24.