Bhavish Aggarwal, the chief executive officer of Ola, said on Thursday that the company plans to go public in the first half of 2022 despite recent volatility and lacklustre listings of some startups in India. Through its IPO, Ola Corporation, which controls most of India’s ride-hailing market, will raise up to $1 billion.
Through its mobile app, Ola connects its drivers and passengers. Ola Cabs is an Indian multinational ride-sharing company that provides vehicle rental and food delivery from Bengaluru, Karnataka. Serving 250+ cities across India, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK, we are the largest mobility platform in India and one of the world’s largest ride-hailing companies.
Bhavish Aggarwal and Ankit Bhati founded Ola in Dec 2010 with the mission to build mobility for a billion people. With Ola, customers are connected to drivers and a wide range of vehicles, including bikes, auto-rickshaws, metered taxis, and cabs, enabling convenience and transparency for hundreds of millions of consumers and over 1.5 million driver-partners.
OLa, backed by the Japan-based SoftBank Group, is working on a “super app” that will expand its services beyond mobility into areas like personal finance and micro insurance, Aggarwal said at the Reuters Next conference.
“We are a company that does not take a short-term view on anything. We might face market volatility in the short term, but that has never influenced our decisions,” said Aggarwal, who founded the company in 2010.
According to accountancy firm EY, Indian companies raised an astounding $9.7 billion through initial public offerings (IPOs) in the first nine months of 2021. However, the dismal stock market debut of Indian digital payments firm Paytm last month has caused concern among some bankers.
Ola has plans to raise up to $1 billion through an IPO, where it competes with Uber Technologies for a majority share of India’s ride-sharing market. After being devastated by the Covid-19 pandemic, Ola’s finances have recovered in recent months. However, Aggarwal said the company is working to improve them further.
Ola aspires to be a large, broad-based mobility platform,” Aggarwal said, adding that the Ola app already lets 150 million users buy and sell new and used cars, as well as get vehicle financing and insurance. To move towards a super app, he said he wanted to expand the offering and utilize the customer base to offer micro-insurance and personal finance services.
In 2023, it plans to launch an electric car and establish a local battery cell manufacturing facility. Additionally, Aggarwal plans on listing Ola’s electric vehicle business in the future; the company has received 1 million reservations for its electric scooters, he said.
“Our ambition in electrification is to make India the global electric vehicle hub,” he said. According to Aggarwal, India can lead in the field of small cars, scooters, and motorbikes, which are in higher demand worldwide. While companies like Tesla are leading in building vehicles for Western markets, India can lead in small cars, scooters, and motorbikes.
