Ola, backed by SoftBank Group Corp. and Tiger Global Management, has sold more than 239,000 electric scooters since December 2021, according to data from the Society of Manufacturers of Electric Vehicles.
New Delhi: Bhavish Aggarwal, the founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Ola Electric Mobility Pvt., has said that the company is in line for an initial public offering (IPO) sooner than he imagined. The Indian startup began selling electric scooters in late 2021 and has emerged as the leader in India’s electric-scooter market with 38 per cent share.
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“I thought it would take me four to six years of revenue to go public,” Founder and Chief Executive Officer Bhavish Aggarwal said in an interview with the Economic Times. “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.”
Ola, backed by SoftBank Group Corp. and Tiger Global Management, has sold more than 239,000 electric scooters since December 2021, according to data from the Society of Manufacturers of Electric Vehicles.
Aggarwal said that while the demand initially came from first-time scooter buyers, most of Ola Electric’s customers now are already fully-fledged converts.
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Expansion Plans
Ola Electric has big plans to expand. A motorbike by the end of the this year, and a battery-powered car in 2024. Aggarwal also continues to consider exporting scooters to Southeast Asia, Latin America and Europe, a proposition that got interrupted because demand at home was so strong, reported ET quoting Aggarwal.
As per a Bloomberg News report dated August 2021, Ola Cabs got as far as selecting banks for a $1 billion IPO in Mumbai, but that never materialized.
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In the interview with ET, Aggarwal said that Ola Cabs, which competes against Uber Technologies Inc., is a “profitable business for us now”.
Ola Electric is building a 115-acre battery factory in Tamil Nadu’s Krishnagiri with the aim of making lithium-ion cells primarily for Ola Electric vehicles, as well as potentially offering energy storage and home energy solutions.
It is touted to be one of the most advanced and biggest cell manufacturing facilities with a production capacity of 10 gigawatt-hours per annum.
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The in-house manufacturing of EV components will help Ola Electric sell cars on a bigger scale and increase margins, said Aggarwal, who graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai. He added that designing vehicles from scratch will give the company more control of quality and costs in a market where most EVs are converted from gasoline models.
