Vijay Shekhar Sharma is an Indian billionaire businessman
Son of a schoolteacher from a small city in north India, Vijay Shekhar Sharma founded fast-rising mobile wallet Paytm in 2011.One of the biggest beneficiaries of India's 2016 demonetization, Paytm has notched up 400 million users and 25 million transactions daily.Sharma made a splash in August 2018 by getting Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway to invest $300 million in Paytm.Sharma has also created Paytm Mall, an e-commerce business and the Paytm Payments Bank.Sharma is planning an IPO of Paytm to raise around $2.2 billion.IPO-bound Paytm's founder and CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma will get employee stock options for the first time as a reward to drive the company into a leadership position in the digital payments and financial services space, according to sources. The Esops for Shekhar comes when the company is wrapping up the final number of shares that will become part of its proposed ₹16,600 crore IPO.
Paytm is actually short for ‘pay through mobile’He had to work multiple jobs, which included some petty ones, to repay the loan and to make ends meet at the timeSharma’s an English music buff, and Bono, Chris Martin and Jim Morrison are some of his favourite artistsIn earlier interviews, he has acknowledged the role that rock music has played in improving his Englishfounder Vijay Shekhar Sharma could see his stake go up One97 Communications, the parent company of the digital payments platform. Sharma, who holds around 14.6 per cent in One97, could see his stake increase by another 2 to 4 per cent, said sources in the know.
“Vijay had in the past given 4 per cent of his equity before forming Paytm’ ESOP pool was created. So technically, till sometime back, people got his shares as their ESOPs,” said a source aware of the details on condition of anonymity.
In August this year, the company had doubled its ESOPs pool from 24,094,280 to 61,094,280, this was approved by shareholders earlier this month. “Vijay has never taken any ESOPs in the past. The existing shareholders see this as a reward for the incredible work he has done in creating a payments and financial services leader in Paytm,” said another source close to the development.
The Esops that have been allocated to employees is from 4 per cent equity holding of Sharma. This is the first time he will get Esop as a reward for taking the company to the leadership position in digital payments and financial services domain," a source aware of the development told PTI. However, it could not be ascertained if Sharma will convert the Esops into shares for monetising them. An e-mail query sent to Paytm did not elicit any reply. Paytm had last week given a final call to employees, key managerial personnel and shareholders to submit shares that they want to monetise in the upcoming issue
Comments
Post a Comment