Founder of Ola Plans to Launch IPO in the Second Half of Next Year

• ByStartupStory     |    December 24, 2022

According to Bhavish Aggarwal, the company’s founder and group CEO, Ola Cabs, the cab aggregator platform sponsored by Ola SoftBank and operated by ANI Technologies Pvt Ltd, will likely launch its initial public offering (IPO) in the second half of the upcoming fiscal year.

The ride-sharing company located in Bengaluru had originally planned to go public earlier this year, but it was delayed due to erratic equity markets and unreliable macroeconomic conditions.

On the occasion of the public release of its third software update, MoveOS 3, which has introduced new functionality to the company’s S1 family of scooters, Aggarwal stated, “We intend to launch the IPO in the second half of next year.” Due to the nationwide rollout, two-wheelers will be able to add 50 kilometers of range with just 15 minutes of quick charging. Along with features like enhanced hill hold, proximity unlocks, party mode, vacation mode, regenerate mode, display mode, and others, the update also adds hypercharging. The business gave updates to more than 10,000 users during the beta rollout.

“We will launch more products in the next year…over the next few months, we will release our financials, and they will show how capital efficient our business is..,” Aggarwal said in a press conference on Thursday.

“Our EV two-wheeler business will turn cash positive and EBIDTA positive by 2023,” he added. By 2024, Ola Electric, the group company’s production arm for electric vehicles (EVs), also intends to commercialize EV motorcycles and EV cars.

Aggarwal mentioned an ambitious deployment that included rental-based subscription arrangements for electric two-wheelers, allowing customers to rent the vehicle rather than buy it.

Ola Electric typically manufactures 1,000 units each day. The company recently reported monthly growth of over 60%, which is double the growth of the two-wheeler EV sector as a whole, which was only up about 30%. Ola Electric did not provide the entire number of vehicles sold during the first two months of FY22-23 when it stated in July that it had exceeded Rs 500 crore in revenue. Ola Electric reported last month that it had sold about 20,000 of its electric scooters and had a “good performance” throughout the holiday season.

The company intends to further introduce its own lithium-ion cell, a crucial part in creating batteries for EVs, by the end of 2023. The lithium-ion battery cells used by India’s EV producers now come from China, Taiwan, Japan, and Korea. Currently, LG Chem in South Korea is where Ola gets its cells.

“We will be India’s first and largest lithium-ion cell manufacturers. We had been building the technology for the last two years… we have already built our own tech without any dependence on other countries or players,” Aggarwal said. The move to produce the cell in India could help reduce the cost of the battery packs by 40-50%.

He continued by saying that a sizable Gigafactory for the lithium-ion cell is being built in Krishnagiri. “We will initially use it for our motorcycles before considering how to generate money off of it and make it available to the public,” he said.

Ola has disclosed an investment of $500 million in battery innovation and homegrown research and development (R&D). Five gigawatts (GW) or so will be the plant’s initial capacity, said Aggarwal.

 

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