Ola Electric sells scooters worth Rs 600 cr in 24 hrs, 4 units 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. The purchase is available exclusively on the Ola app and the process is completely digital.
Ola commenced bookings on July 15 . Given its production plans in the coming months, today will be the last day for consumers to purchase their Ola S1 and S1 Pro scooters, the company said. The “response is beyond its expectations,” it said. Those who have already reserved can purchase until midnight tonight at which point, the purchase window will close. Consumers can continue to reserve their spot in the purchase queue. The purchase can only be made through the Ola app.
The aforesaid value (Rs600 crore) includes buyers who paid the additional Rs20,o00 to get their bookings confirmed after paying Rs500 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-the envelope translates it into bookings of 50,000 units.
With prices starting from Rs 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.
According to Harshvardhan Sharma, auto retail practice head at Nomura, “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.” Being a mass player will give Ola an edge in the market even after the initial euphoria settles in, he added.
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.
The Bengaluru-based company had earlier said lakhs of consumers booked their slot to purchase the Ola S1 and S1 Pro since it started accepting bookings a couple of months ago.
“Yesterday we opened for purchase and consumers responded by booking the Ola scooters in unprecedented numbers. We sold 4 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.”
“India is committing to EVs and rejecting petrol,” he Tweeted aggarwal. According to him, with the right product, India has huge pent up demand and a massive domestic market for two-wheeler EVs. “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,” said Aggarwal.
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First Published: Thu, September 16 2021. 12:30 IST
