Ola Progresses with IPO Plans as Electric Scooters Gain Popularity in India – EQ Mag
Driven by the stupendous demand for electric scooters, Ola Electric Mobility Pvt managed to leapfrog its progress and is now in line for an initial public offering sooner than its founder previously imagined.
The Indian startup firm began selling electric scooters in late 2021. On company’s IPO plans CEO of Ola Electrics, Bhavish Aggarwal, said that he was expecting four to six years of revenue for company’s IPO plans.
“Now I can feel that it will be much earlier. Ola Electric has grown and matured faster than I had initially planned because the market response has been very strong,” the thirty-seven-year old CEO told Bloomberg in an interview.
The company is backed by major firms like SoftBank Group Corp and Tiger Global Management. Once a new entrant in the EV segment, Ola Electrics now owns 38% share in the market. It has sold more than 239,000 electric scooters since December 2021, according to data from the Society of Manufacturers of Electric Vehicles.
Throwing light upon the experience of buyers, Ola Electric CEO said that demand is fuelled by first-time scooter buyers. But most of Ola Electric’s customers now are already fully-fledged converts.
When to expect Ola electric motorbike and car ?
Bhavish Aggarwal is planning to expand his company by unveiling a motorbike by the end of 2023 and a battery-powered car in 2024. He also warned that the timeline can be changed. The CEO of the firm is also planning to export scoters to Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Europe.
Ola Cabs got as far as selecting banks for a $1 billion IPO in Mumbai, Bloomberg News reported in August 2021, but that never materialized. The company, which competes against Uber Technologies Inc., is a “profitable business for us now,” Aggarwal said in last week’s interview in Delhi. He didn’t comment on any renewed attempts to list, nor did he mention a date for a possible Ola Electric IPO.
‘Tesla is for the West, Ola is for the rest’
Amid the global popularity of Tesla and its entry in India, Ola electric CEO said, ‘Tesla is for the west, Ola is for the rest’. He is also building a 115-acre battery factory in southern India, pitting him against billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries Ltd. This will help him with manufacturing lithium-ion cells primarily for Ola Electric vehicles.
This will also open venues for the company to sell cars on a bigger scale and increase margins, said Aggarwal. Designing vehicles from scratch will give the company more control of quality and costs in a market where mos EVs are converted from gasoline models, he said.
