The world's largest unicorn appeared: 130 billion in Kazakhstan

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The largest company to IPO in the United States this year is actually a Kazakh company.

Its name is Kaspi, it was founded in 2007 and is headquartered in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Recently, Kaspi was listed on the Nasdaq in the United States, with a market capitalization of about $18 billion (about 130 billion yuan) and raised more than $1 billion.

This broke two records.

1. Kaspi is the first Kazakh company to IPO in the United States. 2. Since October 2023, Kaspi is the world's largest IPO.

So here's the problem.

With a population of only 20 million, how can such a small country grow such a valuable company?

It's hard to imagine Kaspi's place in Kazakhstan without experiencing it firsthand. Like WeChat, it is also a super APP, except that its business is more like Alibaba, and its core business includes e-commerce, finance, etc.

Kazakhstan has a total population of about 20 million, and Kaspi has 13.5 million monthly active users. Among them, 65% of users use the app on a daily basis.

Globally, Kaspi is second only to WeChat in terms of this number, according to prospectus data. WeChat has more than 1.3 billion monthly active users, of which about 85.5% use the app daily.

Comparatively speaking, Alipay's performance has been a complete failure: only 40% of monthly active users use Alipay every day.

What do 13.5 million monthly active users do in Kaspi? In contrast, Kaspi provides services such as: e-commerce, delivery, payment, travel, etc.

From the perspective of business development, Kaspi is similar to Alibaba: such as Taobao, Tmall, Alipay, Cainiao Logistics, etc. - but in terms of implementation path, it is quite different from Alibaba.

From the perspective of product form, Kaspi's route is more like WeChat, taking the super app route: users have N needs, and Kaspi integrates them all with one APP.

This decision has made Kaspi worth a lot of money.

At some point, Kaspi almost took the Ali route, for example, A needs to use product A, and B needs to use product B. IT experts told them that it was too complicated to integrate different services such as ABC into one application, and that it was better to develop financial applications, e-commerce applications, and payment applications separately.

Some marketing experts tell them that it is crazy to make a financial and e-commerce business a brand. They say that consumers will never use an app to save, buy kitchenware, etc.

Looking at the business situation in China, the experts' advice is more correct. But entrepreneurship is like this, and it is impossible to correctly judge the future by just summarizing history. Starting a business, there is nothing you dare not think, only what you dare not do.

Apparently, Kaspi stuck to his idea. In the prospectus, it is defined as "the most important and best decision".

Eventually, Kaspi became the founding team's vision: the leader of N fields.

According to a survey conducted by KResearch (2022.10-2023.9), Kaspi ranks first in the following directions.

In terms of income composition, Kaspi is also far from Alibaba.

Alibaba's core revenue comes from e-commerce, such as advertising and commissions. In 2022, Alibaba's advertising revenue will be about 103.96 billion yuan, accounting for about 30% of the total revenue.

Kaspi's core income comes from finance.

Such as payment. In 2022, Kaspi's payments business generated net revenue of approximately $420 million – up 59% year-over-year – and in aggregate, it accounted for more than 20% of total revenue.

In 2022, Kaspi's net income was approximately $1.21 billion.

For example, fintech (loans). Kaspi provides users with buy now, pay later, saving, and loan services. In 2022, finance-related net income exceeded US$500 million, accounting for the largest share of total revenue.

Kaspi is aggressively attacking AI and trying to replace more humans with it. In 2020, the number of full-time employees at Kaspi decreased from approximately 9,310 to 7,802 in 2022. A few years ago, Kaspi developed the virtual assistant "Ruslan", which now covers the workload of about 1,000 employees and saves the company $10 million a year.

In the future blueprint, Kaspi's ambitions do not stop at Kazakhstan, but serve 100 million users (currently 13.5 million). At the right time, it will move quickly and efficiently into new geographic areas.