It was a polished courtship of the people being asked to hand over billions of pesos for a piece of GCash. Mynt’s top executives and a troop of underwriters took turns selling investors on the company’s growth story, while food and drinks flowed around the room.

Mynt president and CEO Martha Sazon took the stage, speaking before a packed room of investors, brokers, and bankers in Makati on Tuesday, October 6, just hours after the public offer for GCash’s parent company formally opened.

“We see a lot of buzz and a lot of activities,” Sazon said. “I heard some platforms went down because of the traffic. That’s a good problem for all of us, right?” 

And amid all the hype and marketing, there is some truth to the matter too. A screenshot seen by Rappler showed a user attempting to enter GStocks PH through the GCash app before being redirected toward InvestaTrade, the online trading platform offered by AB Capital Securities. 

The screen displayed an error saying there was a “problem communicating with GCash API at the moment.”

Sources close to the incident told Rappler that the disruption was brief and that the platform was back up again shortly afterward.

But if anything, all this goes to show that demand for the homegrown champion is, apparently, red-hot.

An analyst at a prominent local brokerage told Rappler Tuesday that its allocation was already oversubscribed, meaning client orders had exceeded the shares available through the brokerage. In such cases, investors may receive fewer shares than they requested, depending on the final allocation.

Even before the retail offer began, institutional investors had already piled in. Mynt said on October 2 that its institutional bookbuilding was multiple times oversubscribed, with demand going beyond commitments from more than 20 cornerstone investors.

At P6.60 per share, Mynt is selling around 8.03 billion shares worth approximately P53 billion. That remains below Monde Nissin’s more than P55-billion IPO in 2021, but Mynt also has an overallotment option covering another 1.20 billion secondary shares. 

If fully exercised, the deal could raise as much as P60.9 billion and become the largest initial public offering (IPO) in Philippine history.

About that P10 price

The audience, meanwhile, had plenty of questions for GCash. Among them was whether the current price was even the right price at all.

When the PSE approved Mynt’s listing application in September, the company initially proposed to sell shares at up to P10 each. The exchange made clear at the time that this was a maximum price and that the final offer price would only be determined after bookbuilding.

“It was an administrative ‘up to’ offer price that is required as part of the Philippines listing application, which is different from listing application processes in other countries,” Mynt chief financial officer Evelyn Ng

The eventual P6.60 price was 34% below that ceiling.

Ng pushed back against the idea that the company had started out expecting investors to pay P10.

“P10 was never the price that we expected to list Mynt,” Ng told the room. 

“It was an administrative ‘up to’ offer price that is required as part of the Philippines listing application, which is different from listing application processes in other countries,” she added.

Mynt then went through investor meetings and bookbuilding, with input from the company, selling shareholders, prospective investors, and its banking advisers before arriving at P6.60.

That said, is P6.60 the right price? The offer is easier to justify than the original P10 ceiling. 

At P10, Mynt would have been valued at roughly P669 billion, or nearly 39 times its 2025 earnings. At P6.60, that falls to about P442 billion and around 25.6 times 2025 earnings, which is still a hefty premium for the local market. 

Investors also have to consider what they are buying into. GCash is already the dominant e-wallet, so any future gains will likely have to come from lending, investments, insurance, merchants, and overseas expansion rather than simply adding more wallet users. 

Around 80% of the base offer is also made up of secondary shares being sold by existing shareholders, rather than fresh capital going to Mynt. – Rappler.com