GCash Owner Mynt Prices Philippine IPO at 6.60 Pesos, Valuing It at About $7 Billion

Mynt, the owner of GCash, is set to list on the Philippine Stock Exchange with trading expected to start Tuesday, Oct. 20. It is the largest IPO in the Philippines' history and the biggest in Southeast Asia so far this year.

The offering will raise 60.9 billion pesos ($971 million) if Mynt sells all 9.23 billion shares on offer, including the overallotment option. The price is 6.60 pesos a share, which values the company at about $7 billion.

That price sits well below the prospectus guidance of up to 10 pesos a share.

A business with real numbers

GCash has about 41 million monthly active users, roughly a third of the Philippines' population. People use it to pay bills, move money and buy from millions of merchants. It also offers loans.

The company posted a net profit of $282 million last year. It is not a cash-burning startup that needs investors to take a leap of faith.

Existing shareholders include Ant International, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group and Globe Telecom.

Who is selling

Most of the base deal is not new money for the company. By Entrepreneur's reading of the offer documents, about four-fifths of the base transaction transfers existing ownership rather than financing expansion.

The draft prospectus names the sellers as funds including ASP Philippines (managed by Bow Wave Capital), Insight Partners, vehicles of Warburg Pincus and Advanced New Technologies, an Ant-affiliated vehicle. The Philippine exchange's final offer notice identifies the selling entities but gives no fund-by-fund breakdown.

Seven executives, including president and CEO Martha Sazon, are selling just over 1% of the secondary shares.

The strategic holders are staying put. Globe, Ant International, MUFG and AM 50 Ventures, an Ayala-Mitsubishi joint venture, are not listed as sellers.

The returns for early backers are large. Bow Wave's 2021 investment valued Mynt at close to $1 billion. Warburg Pincus and Insight Partners joined later that year in a $300 million round at a valuation above $2 billion. At $7 billion, the IPO values the company at about seven times Bow Wave's entry price and more than three times the 2021 round.

Demand and lock-ups

Mynt said institutional bookbuilding was oversubscribed multiple times. More than 20 international and domestic investors committed about 36.5 billion pesos ahead of the public offer, nearly 69% of the base transaction. The cornerstone group includes funds managed by BlackRock, Capital Research and T. Rowe Price, along with HSBC.

Under the exchange's listing notice, about 44.6 billion shares will be held in escrow for 180 days. Another 43.98 million shares will be held for 365 days, assuming the overallotment option is fully exercised.

The push to list took years. In 2024, chairman Ernest Cu, a former Globe chief executive, said there was no urgency to go public but that some investors wanted liquidity. Mynt also waited for regulators to cut the minimum public float for large listings, a change that, according to Reuters, spares existing shareholders heavy dilution.

Regional backdrop

The wider Southeast Asian market has been soft. Deloitte data show 71 listings in the first nine months of the year, 11% fewer than the same period last year. Those deals raised $3.6 billion, down 9%.

Deloitte Southeast Asia's Tay Hwee Ling said the region's IPO market is showing renewed momentum, though she described the recovery as selective. In her view, the return of larger and more mature candidates signals improving confidence among institutional and international investors.

Citi's Asean head of equity capital markets, Jingkai Yew, said investor appetite for regional offerings had improved this year, encouraging bigger groups to list.

Other IPOs above $500 million this year include Singapore's UI Boustead Reit, Malaysia's Sunway Healthcare Holdings and Vietnam's Dien May Xanh. Malaysia is the most active market by listing volume, with about two-thirds of regional listings, according to Deloitte.

In Vietnam, Dragon Capital director Thuy Anh Nguyen said the government wants to double the stock market's value by 2030. She said more listings would help, because the economy cannot rely on bank loans alone. She added that FTSE Russell's decision last October to upgrade Vietnam to emerging-market status had raised its appeal to foreign investors.

Entrepreneur's analysis frames Mynt as a test of public-market liquidity for private technology investors as much as a capital raise, in a regional industry that has struggled with weak exits.

The pricing discount to guidance, the secondary-heavy structure and the escrow schedule are all on the record. What the market does with the shares after Tuesday's debut, and again when the 180-day lock-up on the bulk of the escrowed stock expires, will show whether that test was passed.