Gaming firm VNG lowers Zalopay stake

The reduction of its shareholdings in Zion JSC, which owns e-payment service ZaloPay, happened in the third quarter of 2019, Vietnamese online gaming giant VNG Corp said in its financial report for 2019 released late last week.

According to Vietnam’s Registrar of Companies, Zion JSC registered to increase its charter capital from VND367.4 billion ($15.79 million) to VND612.3 billion ($26.32 million) at the end of July last year through an issue of shares, none of which were purchased by VNG.

Zion netted a total of VND464 billion ($19.94 million) from the share issue at a price of VND19,000 ($0.8) per share inclusive of premiums, but the identity of buyers was not disclosed in VNG’s cash flow statement.

Zion JSC was granted a payment intermediary license by the State Bank of Vietnam (SBV) in early 2016, and debuted ZaloPay shortly after. ZaloPay was then incorporated in most of VNG’s digital platforms, and now serves around 100 million customers, according to the gaming giant.

By the second quarter of 2019, ZaloPay was one of five of Vietnam’s biggest payment intermediaries, which collectively accounted for 95 percent of digital transaction value on Vietnam’s 28 licensed e-wallets, according to latest figures from the central bank’s Department of Payments (DoP). The DoP did not provide individual market share statistics.

However, because the company focused on expansion and increasing its customer base, Zion JSC had reported post-tax losses of VND21 billion ($902,330) in 2017, and this rose six times to VND133 billion ($5.71 million) in 2018.

Founded in 2004, VNG provides online games, music streaming and messaging applications.