GCash IPO Listing Day: GCASH Closes at ₱6.60, Exactly Where It Started, After a Record ₱60.9 Billion Debut

The country’s biggest stock offering touched ₱6.76 on its first morning of trading and gave all of it back by the closing bell.

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. rang the opening bell at the Philippine Stock Exchange (PSE) in Taguig on Tuesday morning, and Mynt Inc., the company behind the GCash e-wallet, began trading under the ticker GCASH. During the morning the stock climbed as high as ₱6.76. When the market closed that afternoon, it was back at ₱6.60. Every investor paid that same price in the initial public offering (IPO), the sale that first puts a company’s shares on the market.

The offering itself set a record. The banks managing the sale exercised the overallotment option, an extra block of shares they can sell when demand outruns supply. That brought the IPO to ₱60.9 billion, the largest in Philippine history, passing the record the food maker Monde Nissin had held since 2021. The PSE put Mynt’s market capitalization, the value of all its shares at market price, at ₱441.5 billion, about $7 billion. That makes Mynt the seventh-largest domestic company on the exchange.

For the 140,725 people who bought shares through the GCash app, day one ended where it began.

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. joins Mynt and GCash executives at the Philippine Stock Exchange listing ceremony on October 20, 2026. — President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. joins Mynt and GCash executives at the PSE listing ceremony on October 20. Photo from PSE

Up by Mid-Morning, Back to ₱6.60 by the Bell

Reports put the first trade at ₱6.60 or a few centavos above, and the stock spent the morning above its offer price. An hour after the bell it was trading around ₱6.73. Its high for the day was ₱6.76, about 2.4 percent above the IPO price. By early afternoon it had slipped to around ₱6.62, and it finished the session unchanged. Market data showed more than 650 million shares changing hands, worth about ₱4.3 billion.

The rest of the market gave the debut little push in either direction. The PSE index (PSEi), the benchmark that tracks 30 of the exchange’s largest companies, rose 0.14 percent to 5,806.17. Elsewhere in Asia, investors were selling technology shares tied to the artificial intelligence boom, and a South Korean AI company fell sharply in its own market debut the same day.

Most of the Money Didn’t Go to GCash

The record figure combines two different sales. About 1.61 billion of the shares were newly issued, and the roughly ₱10.6 billion they raised goes to Mynt. The other shares were sold by existing shareholders cutting part of their stakes. Those sales brought in around ₱50.3 billion, and that money goes to the sellers, not the company. Globe Telecom remains Mynt’s largest shareholder at 33.8 percent. Its other backers include Ant Group, the Chinese financial technology company behind Alipay, and the Ayala conglomerate’s holding company, Ayala Corporation.

Mynt’s prospectus, the formal disclosure document filed for the offering, says 60 percent of the net proceeds from the new shares will fund its CreditTech business, the lending products inside the app.

Large institutions took most of the deal. More than 20 cornerstone investors, funds that commit to buy before the public offer opens, signed on early. Local brokers placed orders for 2.65 billion shares against the 1.6 billion set aside for them, about 1.7 times their allocation. The big local buyers included the Government Service Insurance System (GSIS) and the Social Security System (SSS), the state pension funds for government and private-sector workers.

₱1.1 Billion From 140,725 Phones

GCash users subscribed through GStocks PH, the stock-trading feature inside the app, and together they put in about ₱1.1 billion. That works out to roughly ₱7,800 each on average, or about 1,180 shares at the offer price. Retail orders ran ahead of the shares reserved for them, so many subscribers received fewer shares than they asked for. Under the offer’s rules, GStocks PH orders placed on October 6 and 7 got their first 100 shares allocated in real time, and later orders were filled as shares allowed.

At the day’s high, someone holding 1,000 shares was ₱160 ahead on paper. That is before broker fees and the 0.1 percent stock transaction tax charged on any sale. At the close the paper gain was zero, and anyone who sold at ₱6.60 got back slightly less than they paid once fees came out.

Mynt president and CEO Martha Sazon has said nearly 90 percent of GCash’s customers come from low- to middle-income households. Coverage of the listing described many of the app buyers as first-time investors, so for a good number of them GCASH is the first stock they have ever owned.

PSE president Ramon Monzon described the listing as bigger than one company. “It is a record, and more importantly, it is a statement of confidence in Mynt, in the Philippine economy, and in the strength of our capital market,” he said at the listing ceremony.

Is One Record Enough to Bring Investors Back?

Mynt is the first company to complete an IPO on the PSE this year. The next is Aznar Shipping Corp., whose ₱737-million offering is set for December, a little over one percent of the size of Mynt’s deal. Before the listing, Mynt chief financial officer Evelyn Ng said the company hoped the deal would bring more investors back to the Philippine market, and that some of the investors Mynt met had shown interest in other Philippine companies.

The second session gave a first hint of how that might go. On Wednesday, GCASH closed at ₱6.59, one centavo below the IPO price. It was the stock’s first close below what every one of those 140,725 app buyers paid.

Part of the answer depends on what GCASH does after listing week. Monday’s What If column walked through what changes for subscribers once the price is no longer fixed, and from Tuesday on, the market sets it every trading day.

What Tuesday did show is how many Filipinos will buy a stock when the purchase happens inside an app they already use to pay bills and send money: more than 140,000 of them over a seven-day offer period.