Japanese conglomerate SoftBank will sell 50% of its stake in listed insurance aggregator PolicyBazaar, owned by PB Fintech in a block deal tomorrow (2 December), for an amount of $130 million, according to a person aware of the development.
The investment management giant will divest 5% stake (around 2.2 crore shares) out of the total 10% stake in PolicyBazaar at a floor price of Rs 440 apiece, the individual cited above added. The floor price is set at a 5% discount to PB Fintech’s closing price.
Shares of PB Fintech ended Thursday’s trading session with gains of 2% at Rs 461.55 apiece on BSE.
SoftBank is set to clock an internal rate of return (IRR) of 38% along with a multiple on invested capital (MOIC) of 2.5 times. The conglomerate initially invested nearly $200 million in PolicyBazaar in 2018, from its Vision Fund I.
Citi is the sole banker for this deal, according to the individual cited above. Queries sent to the international banker remained unanswered till press time. SoftBank and PB Fintech declined to comment on the development.
Founded in 2008 by Yashish Dahiya and Alok Bansal as a price-comparison platform, PolicyBazaar made its public market debut one year ago in November 2021 and had gained nearly 18% on listing. SoftBank had offloaded around 20% of its total stake in the insurance player during listing for a sum of $250 million.
However, being one of the initial new age companies to have listed on stock markets, PB Fintech, parent of PolicyBazaar has been no exception to the beating these stocks have taken in the last one year. PB Fintech. The stock is down nearly 62% since 1 December last year and has corrected 48.5% year-to-date.
Surprisingly, the stock has gained 20.1% since the end of its anchor investor lock-in period that ended on 16 November, 2022.
Earlier in November, US-based venture capital company Tiger Global divested a 3.57% stake in PB Fintech via open market. 1.6 crore shares worth Rs 606 crore exchanged hands in a secondary market transaction in the range of Rs 374-388 per share.
According to the shareholding pattern of PB Fintech, the company counts Steadview Capital, Falcon, Tiger Global, SVF Python, Tencent, Inventus Capital, True North and Mirae Asset among its multiple investors.
PB Fintech reported a net loss of Rs 186.6 crore for Q2FY23 compared to Rs 204.4 crore year-on-year. It’s revenue from operations for the period under review jumped 2x to Rs 573.4 crore from Rs 279.6 crore y-o-y.
