Report
Sumeet Singh
EUR 93.10 For Business Accounts Only

Kakao Pay IPO

Kakao Pay (KP), one of South Korea’s largest payment and financial services apps, aims to raise up to US$1.3bn in its South Korean IPO. Kakao held a 55% stake prior to listing, with Ant Financial holding the balance 45% stake.

As of 1H21, KP had a total of 36m users and around 20m monthly active users (MAU). It processed a total GMV of KRW66.9tn in 2020 and it had already generated KRW47.9tn GMV in 1H21 itself. As of the end of 1H21, it had dealings with more than 610,000 affiliated stores and 100 financial institutions.

KP began operation in Sep 2014 as a fintech division of Kakao to facilitate online payments. Ant Financial invested US$200m in the company in Feb 2017 and the division was spun out of Kakao in Apr 2017. Since spinning out, the number of MAUs have grown 14x from 2Q17 to 2Q21, while the quarterly transaction amount grew 61x from KRW0.4tn in 2Q17 to KRW24.5tn in 2Q21.

Over the past few years the company has been expanding its offering beyond payment processing to include other financial products. On the back of this, its revenue has been growing faster than its GMV.
Underlyings
Kakao Corp.

Kakao is engaged in the provision of Internet services to its users and advertisers. Co. provides its owned and operated online properties and services for its users. Co. provides a range of tools and marketing services designed to enable businesses to reach its users for its advertisers.

Provider
Aequitas Research
Aequitas Research

Aequitas Research is a leading ECM research firm with a focus on IPOs and placements/follow-on offerings across the Asia Pacific with deal size of over USD100m. 

Since 2015, we have covered 400+ IPOs and 450+ placements with a hit rate of 73% and 65%, respectively. We combine fundamental bottom-up views with our proprietary quantitative framework to provide a holistic analysis.
 
Our coverage includes pre-IPO notes before the deal is launched, follow-up analysis once the deal is live and post-listing trading analysis. We also provide a more quant driven analysis on placement/follow-on offerings.
 
Markets that we cover include:
Hong Kong,
China ADRs,
India,
Japan,
Australia, and
ASEAN.

Analysts
Sumeet Singh

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