Ola Electric sells scooters worth ~600 cr in 24 hrs
Softbank-backed firm says it sold four scooters every second
Ola Electric, the mobility giant’s electric vehicle arm, said it sold scooters worth over ~600 crore in just 24 hours, during its sale of Ola S1 and S1 Pro scooters. The Softbank-backed company said it sold four scooters every second.
Ola Electric, which had to defer e-scooter sales due to a website glitch last week, opened the purchase of Ola S1 and S1 Pro on Wednesday.
Ola commenced bookings on July 15. Given its production plans in the coming months, Thursday was the last day for consumers to purchase the Ola S1 and S1 Pro scooters, the company said. The “response is beyond its expectations”, it said. Those who have already reserved can purchase the scooters until midnight. Consumers can continue to reserve their spot in the purchase queue and the scooter can be bought only through the Ola app.
“Yesterday we opened for purchase and consumers responded by booking the Ola scooters in unprecedented numbers. We sold four scooters every second,” said Bhavesh Aggarwal, co-chairman and group chief executive officer, Ola, in a blog post.
“In fact, in just 24 hours, we sold scooters worth over ~600 crore. That’s more, in value terms than what the entire 2W (two-wheeler) industry sells in a day. Make no mistake, the age of EVS is here,” he said.
The ~600 crore includes buyers who paid the additional ~20,000 to get their bookings confirmed after paying ~500 as the token amount. It also includes the new set of buyers who would have booked the model in the last few days. A back-of-theenvelope translates it into bookings of 50,000 units.
With prices starting from ~99,999 (excluding state government incentives, registration fee, and insurance cost), Ola’s e-scooter rivals electric two-wheeler makers, such as Ather Energy, Hero Electric, Bajaj’s Chetak, and TVS Motor Company. “The numbers are indeed impressive and shows there are serious buyers,” said an analyst at a domestic brokerage.
“India is committing to EVS and rejecting petrol,” Aggarwal tweeted. “We must leverage this to drive innovation, a robust local EV ecosystem and make India not only a big EV market, but also a global EV manufacturing hub,” he said.
Harshvardhan Sharma, auto retail practice head at Nomura, said, “Ola Electric has the origins of a start-up. While a cash burn is good, only time will tell how long the company can weather it.”
Also, given the kind of acute shortage of chips facing the automobile industry globally, being able to live up to the promise of delivering the model in a time-bound manner, could be challenging for Ola.