P2P car leasing is becoming an business investment avenue: Zoomcar

The NASDAQ-listed firm sees great potential in India, even as it continues to build out a global portfolio, Zoomcar’s Global President Adarsh Menon told DH’s Anjali Jain in an interview

Bengaluru: Since launching as a car rental platform in 2013, Zoomcar has completely pivoted its business model to become a car sharing marketplace. The NASDAQ-listed firm sees great potential in India, even as it continues to build out a global portfolio, the company’s Global President Adarsh Menon told DH’s Anjali Jain in an interview. Edited excerpts:

Why did Zoomcar pivot to a marketplace model from being a leasing platform?

In India, while car ownership is low, those who own cars also have a very high degree of under utilisation which is a major reason why customers on their own are now putting up cars on the platform. Some are even building up a fleet of 10-15 cars to put up on the platform. They are earning close to Rs 7 lakh per annum on a single car.

For us for the last 2 years, it has been fully peer-to-peer as this is a 100% asset light model. I don't think there is any need for us to have an asset anymore. When you have so many cars out there and so many people who could earn that extra income, it makes complete sense to operate in this manner.

How has the pivot affected revenues?

We set out our guidance a couple of months ago. This year, we are targeting a revenue of anywhere between $17-20 million. In terms of growth, that is anywhere between 70-100% growth over last year. Along with this, we're also targeting an annualised adjusted EBITDA of anywhere between $2-4 million in the last quarter of the year. If you just look at these two numbers, you will see that there is good growth in the top line. And we're also targeting a positive annualised adjusted EBITDA in Q4.

What are your focus areas for the FY25?

One, we want to build out the host ecosystem, and build hosting as a habit in the country. Secondly, go deep into India, and at the same time, keep building on our ambitions to be global. Third is creating the self drive category in India and it is still nascent here. We are currently 95% of the market, so the job of creating the category actually lies solely with us.

Fourthly, we want to focus on building strong partnerships, especially on the host side. We are collaborating with used car platforms to give our hosts access to these platforms as business investments with strong financing options.

What are your main business areas in India?

The metros are leading the split of our breakdown. The majority of our business comes from there, even as there is demand from non-metros. But that's largely because we haven't been able to create supply in the smaller cities as well. We will expand this quarter itself to 10 plus cities in India which will take our India footprint to sort of close to 50 cities. And then through the year, we will keep expanding.

What are your expansion plans outside India?

India is our largest market. We are also present in Egypt and Indonesia. We will expand into more countries this year, specifically to Latin and North America, Middle East, and Southeast Asia. We are looking at Mexico, Turkey, Thailand, and Saudi Arabia. We are also looking at other African countries like Nigeria and Kenya. We should be present in these countries by the end of this calendar year.

We want to be a player who actually has a presence in developing markets with our peer to peer marketplace. In all these countries, including India, the one common thing is that car ownership continues to be very low. Yet people do have a requirement for car usage.

But we foresee that even after we expand our international footprint, India will continue to be our single largest market because of the size of the market here and just the way that it is up as well.