GCash's IPO: why most of the ₱92.3B raise skips the company
Mynt's GCash prices October 1 for a ₱92.3 billion IPO — the Philippines' largest ever — but most of the shares sold are secondary.
What Mynt actually is
Mynt, operating as Globe Fintech Innovations, runs GCash — the Philippines' dominant mobile-money app, used for payments, lending, insurance and investing by tens of millions of registered users. It is jointly owned by telecom operator Globe Telecom, Ant International (the international arm of Alipay's parent Ant Group), Ayala Corporation, and Japan's Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group. After clearing SEC and Philippine Stock Exchange approval, Mynt is now taking the company public in what will be the country's largest IPO on record. It's the kind of deal that's easy to track live in the pipeline view once it lists, alongside every other name working through the IPO process right now.
The offer, in numbers
The mechanics are set. Mynt priced its IPO process on October 1, opened the public offer period October 6–12, and is targeting an October 20 listing on the PSE under ticker GCASH. The company is selling shares at up to ₱10 apiece — covering as many as 8.03 billion common shares in total, plus an overallotment option (a greenshoe) of up to 1.20 billion additional shares if demand runs hot. At the ceiling price, that puts the total raise at up to ₱92.32 billion (roughly $1.5 billion) and implied market capitalization at up to ₱668.9 billion.
That would eclipse Monde Nissin's ₱55.89 billion 2021 offering — the prior record — by about 65%, making Mynt's the biggest share sale in Philippine market history regardless of exactly where it prices inside the range.
Not everyone thinks the ceiling holds. Some analysts have flagged the ₱10 top of the range as rich given comparable fintech multiples, with sentiment clustering closer to the ₱6–7 area as the more realistic clearing price. Bloomberg reported Mynt had already lined up more than 20 cornerstone investors ahead of the public offer — a standard way for a large, closely watched deal to lock in a base of demand before retail and institutional books open — though cornerstone commitments describe interest, not where the deal actually prices.
Primary vs. secondary — where the money actually goes
Here's the detail that gets lost in the headline number: of the up to 8.03 billion shares on offer, only about 1.61 billion are primary — newly issued shares where the proceeds go onto Mynt's own balance sheet. The remaining roughly 6.42 billion are secondary shares, sold by existing shareholders cashing out part of their stakes. The 1.20 billion-share greenshoe option, if exercised, is entirely secondary too.
Run the split and roughly 80% of the base offer — and 100% of any greenshoe exercise — is existing owners selling down, not the company raising fresh capital. That's not unusual for a mature, profitable business going public (it doesn't need the cash the way a pre-revenue startup would), but it does mean the bulk of that ₱92.3 billion headline is a liquidity event for Mynt's backers rather than a war chest for the business. It's a milder version of the mechanic covered in NSE India's all-OFS listing this month, where 100% of the offer was secondary and the company itself raised nothing at all. Mynt at least keeps a primary tranche; NSE didn't.
The overallotment structure is also worth naming precisely: it's the same greenshoe mechanism covered here through Holtec Nuclear's filing — underwriters get the option to sell additional shares, usually borrowed from a selling shareholder, and cover the position later by buying in the open market or exercising the option, which can stabilize the stock in its first days of trading.
Who's actually selling
Ownership going into the IPO breaks down roughly as follows, based on recent stake disclosures:
| Shareholder | Approximate stake |
|---|---|
| Globe Telecom | ~34% |
| Ant International (three Ant Group entities) | ~32% |
| Ayala Corporation (via AM 50 Ventures) | ~13% |
| Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group | ~8% |
Globe remains the single largest holder even after years of Ant and MUFG buying in at rising valuations — Mitsubishi's most recent stake purchase alone was reported near ₱18.4 billion. That ownership table is also the cap table doing the selling: a deal this secondary-heavy means Globe, Ant, Ayala and MUFG are the parties best positioned to realize value from the listing, alongside whatever primary capital the ~1.61 billion new shares deliver to Mynt itself.
What to watch after October 20
Once GCASH lists, the questions that matter aren't just where it prices inside the ₱6–10 range — they're how the stock trades in its first weeks against a market that hasn't absorbed a deal this size before, and how quickly the secondary sellers' lockup terms (if any beyond the greenshoe) let the rest of that 6.42-billion-share secondary block trade freely. New IPOs like this one show up with live pricing history in recent IPO tracking as soon as they debut, which is the cleanest way to see whether a ₱92.3 billion secondary-heavy deal held its price or gave it back once the cornerstone lockups and cheerleading faded.