By Staff Reporter
KARACHI: Norway’s Telenor is working with Citigroup to sell its controlling stake in Pakistani digital lender Easypaisa Bank, Bloomberg reported on Friday, a move that would complete the telecom group’s withdrawal from Pakistan after two decades.
Telenor holds a 55% stake in Easypaisa, with the remainder owned by China’s Ant Group, the fintech affiliate of Alibaba. The bank could be valued at several hundred million dollars, Bloomberg said, citing people familiar with the matter.
The Oslo-listed company plans to invite initial offers from prospective buyers within the coming months, though deliberations are ongoing and no final decisions have been made, according to the report.
The potential sale would be Telenor’s second major divestment in Pakistan in under two years. In 2024, the group completed the sale of its Pakistani mobile telecoms business to PTCL Group — the state-backed Pakistan Telecommunications Company — for roughly 108 billion rupees. Easypaisa was carved out of that transaction and retained separately.
Easypaisa, one of Pakistan’s largest mobile financial services platforms, has shown sharp improvement in profitability. For the quarter ended March 31, 2026, the bank posted profit before tax of 3.66 billion rupees, more than four times the 840 million rupees it earned in the same period a year earlier. Profit after tax came in at 1.49 billion rupees, with earnings per share of 2.47 rupees.
Analysts said a sale would be welcomed by investors watching Telenor streamline its portfolio.
“It would be well received by the financial community to see Telenor simplifying its Asian portfolio,” Christoffer Wang Bjørnsen of DNB Carnegie told Bloomberg.
Telenor has been reducing its exposure to emerging markets in recent years. The company exited Myanmar in 2021 and has faced strategic scrutiny over its remaining Asian assets amid pressure from shareholders to sharpen its focus on core Nordic and European markets.
Representatives for Telenor and Citigroup did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
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