Antfin’s recent sale of its remaining stake in Paytm masks a complex ownership arrangement that persists behind the scenes, even as the company’s business outlook improves and its shares reach new highs.
Ant Financial’s direct exit from Paytm in August 2025 did mark a clean break in the company’s registered shareholding, but it did not tell the whole story. The Economic Times reported that Antfin (Netherlands) Holding BV sold its remaining 5.84% stake in One97 Communications for about ₹3,803 crore, leaving its direct holding at zero. The sale was widely read as another step in Ant Group’s retreat from Indian financial markets.
The more complicated part dates back to August 2023, when Antfin transferred a 10.30% Paytm stake to Resilient Asset Management BV, a Netherlands-based entity wholly owned by Vijay Shekhar Sharma. TechCrunch and Business Standard reported that the deal was structured without cash changing hands and that Resilient received the shares and voting rights, while Optionally Convertible Debentures preserved Antfin’s economic interest in the stake. Medianama also reported that the move left Sharma with a larger overall holding and reduced Antfin’s visible shareholding.
That distinction matters because it means Ant’s direct ownership and its economic exposure were never the same thing. Even after the 2025 sale, the 2023 structure continued to separate legal control of the shares from the financial benefit attached to them. In other words, the headline that Chinese ownership had fallen to zero applied only to the direct stake Antfin sold in 2025, not to the separate arrangement put in place two years earlier.
The issue has resurfaced just as Paytm’s business has improved. The company said it reported its first full-year profit in FY26, after a sharp turnaround in the March quarter, and its shares later climbed to a 52-week high. That stronger operating backdrop makes the stake sale look less like a forced exit and more like a final tidy-up of a long-running ownership unwind. Business Standard’s 2023 reporting also makes clear that the Resilient structure was disclosed at the time, rather than uncovered only now.
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