Infibeam Avenues consolidated revenue declines by 6% in Q3 FY20

Infibeam Avenues today announced its standalone and consolidated financial results for the quarter ended December 31, 2019. Continuing its profitable momentum, the company has posted another profitable quarter.

Though, Infibeam's third-quarter of financial results for FY20 saw 0.7% decline in consolidated net profit and 5.9% slide in revenue from the previous quarter.

The Ahmedabad-based company posted total revenue of Rs 158.3 crore for the quarter whereas profit came down by marginally (about Rs 20 lakh) to Rs 25.9 crore in compared to last quarter.

Infibeam said the third-quarter revenue and profit was marginally seem affected as it does not include the revenue of non-core businesses such as online e-commerce marketplace, and technology platform solutions for small & medium enterprises.

Infibeam claimed to have done successful digital payment processing volume of Rs 15,900 crore despite intense competition and an overall slowdown in
the economy.

Last year, the company has increased its focused on the core business of digital payments, data centre infrastructure and technology platforms for government and enterprise clients.

“We will continue to invest and build cutting edge technology and innovate in digital software and payments that will improve the way merchants and customers trade and transact thru digitization and democratization of Commerce,” said Vishal Mehta, Managing Director, Infibeam Avenues Ltd.

It also claims to have over 1 million merchants using payment & software web services.

In 2019, Infibeam had invested in Go Payments, which offers prepaid cards to corporates and SMEs, for 48% stake. It plans to increase its stake in the firm to 52.38% making it one of the subsidiaries.

For the next quarter, Infibeam aims to process digital payment transactions worth Rs 18,000 crore through the addition of new merchants, new geographies and volumes from existing merchants on the platform.

Infibeam also plans to enter into the card issuance business.

The company believes that with the end of MDR cap on debit cards, except Rupay cards, on below Rs 2000 transactions will reduce pricing pressure on them.

All debit cards including Visa, Master, Maestro, etc. will now be chargeable for transactions below Rs 2,000, which was zero from 1 Jan 2017 to 31 Dec 2019.

In 2019, it also divested from its non-core businesses including e-commerce marketplace, product retail and platform solutions for SMEs, to focus on digital payments space. And strong transaction growth in the digital payments was the reason behind the improved Q1 FY20 result, said Infibeam in a press statement.

Primarily started as an e-commerce firm, it had pivoted to B2B services such as payment gateway (CC Avenue), bill payments (Bill Avenue), and data center services.

In October 2018, Infibeam had lost Rs 92,00 crore in company’s market capitalisation. Since the crash at the stock market, the share price of Infibeam Avenue has not been able to recover.