www.deekpay.com: India's "Alipay" has been a bit of a pain lately.

Recently, Paytm, the payment service that has been dubbed "India's version of Alipay", has been at the centre of public discussion. Unfortunately, not all of this attention has been positive, with rumours that Paytm may be heading for a financial crisis.

Earlier, Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway sold its entire stake in Paytm due to huge losses. International investors, including SoftBank Group and Ant Group, have also reduced their stakes in the company. There is widespread speculation that Paytm's "mobile payment empire" is disintegrating. So far, Paytm is still in consultation with the Indian economic sector, seeking support and trying to attract new investors.

Founded in 2010, Paytm had dominated the Indian e-payment market with its online and offline integrated operating model, making it the largest platform of its kind in the country. Analysts attributed Paytm's success to India's large population and market potential, as well as its adoption of the successful strategies of Chinese payment giants such as Alipay and WeChat Pay.In 2018, Warren Buffett invested $26 million in a 3% stake in Paytm, his first direct investment in India's tech sector.

The founder of Paytm is Vijay Shekhar Sharma.

Born in 1978 in Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh, to a middle-class family, Sharma was a child prodigy, entering college at the age of 15. In 1994, he moved to the Indian capital to study at the Delhi College of Engineering (now Delhi University of Science and Technology). However, Sharma, who was brought up in Hindi, struggled with English and had difficulty adapting to the English teaching environment. This language barrier may have caused him to lose interest in his original engineering specialisation and explore emerging fields such as computer software and the Internet instead.

While in college, Sharma co-founded a company with three friends that used the school's computers to create electronic itineraries for airlines and a website called Travel India. He also developed a content management tool that provided portals and search engines for media organisations, including the Indian Express. It is clear that even in his university days, Sharma was already a rising star in the Internet space, similar to the trajectory of Internet moguls in other countries.

After graduation, Sharma decided to stay in India and start his own business. Around this time, mobile phones started to become popular in India and Sharma quickly identified an entrepreneurial opportunity in the mobile communications space. He founded One97 Communications, a company that partnered with Indian telecom operators to provide news updates and information services to mobile phone users via SMS, with remarkable success.

In 2007, with the release of Apple's first smartphone, Sharma realised that consumers would eventually move to the mobile internet, heralding the end of his current business. This prompted him to turn to mobile payments.

Initially, the company's board was opposed to getting involved in mobile payments, citing low smartphone penetration in India and high initial R&D and operational risks. Despite board opposition, Sharma launched Paytm, a digital wallet for individual consumers, in 2010.

However, Sharma soon realised that the board's concerns were not unfounded. Paytm's initial rollout was challenged by smartphones, internet access and a lack of trust in the new technology. As a result, Paytm adjusted its business strategy to focus on attracting and educating users, building up its user base by offering cash rebates to merchants. As the service expanded, Paytm evolved from a mobile recharge and bill payment platform to a comprehensive ecosystem of payment-related services.

In 2016, India implemented the "abolition of banknotes" to stop the use of large currency notes and promote digital payments, which brought significant opportunities for Paytm. By 2017, Paytm became India's first payment app with more than 100 million downloads. In the same year, Sharma became India's youngest billionaire with a net worth of $1.3 billion. The Times of India has described him as "the small-town boy who sparked a digital payments revolution in a country where cash is king".

However, Paytm's luck didn't last long. Firstly, the Indian government introduced the "Unified Payment Interface", which brought all payment platforms under unified management and announced that no platform would be allowed to charge merchants transaction fees. This move effectively cut off Paytm's most direct and critical source of revenue. Although the Indian government recently said it would consider providing some compensation to Paytm to cover the platform's operating costs, analysts believe that these policies will not be able to cover the costs actually incurred by a company like Paytm in competing for business. Secondly, competitors like PhonePe and Google Pay entered the Indian market. Compared to these companies, Paytm's user acquisition method - relying on merchant promotions and cash rebates to consumers - is costly and slow, with limited competitive advantage. It is foreseeable that as more foreign capital enters the market, it will become increasingly difficult for Paytm to maintain its current position.

In the face of these challenges, Sharma vowed to support his company and said he would not stop buying Paytm shares. In an interview with Bloomberg, Sharma said Paytm is now focusing on the lower end of the market, working to promote mobile payments in a low-cost "Indian way" and "better steer Paytm in a new direction".

Like all startup stories across the globe, Paytm has come to a crucial chapter. Sharma has a huge challenge ahead of him. However, that doesn't seem to have stopped him. Indian media revealed that Sharma wrote in his notebook, "Entrepreneurship works when there is no other option. 'Hope' is a panacea when things don't go my way."