Mjunction, the Steel Authority of India Ltd (SAIL) and Tata Steel joint venture that offers a host of e-commerce services, will now sell cars online.
The website www.autojunction.in that will offer business to customer(B2C) was launched here in the city today.
For starters, the company has tied up with Gujarat based Electrotherm India Ltd (EIL) for selling their battery operated scooters called Yobykes through the portal and is in advanced stages of discussion with Bangalore based electric car manufacturer Reva, that will be soon available on the portal. "Talks are on with leading auto manufacturers in the country and we should be able to start selling Marutis and Hyundais and Tata cars online within may be a year or two.", said V Oberoi, managing director and CEO of Mjunction admitting, however, that e-commerce is yet to pick up in India.
For the time being, Mjunction will be offering information to potential new and used car buyers in terms of comparing the makes of cars, loan and EMI (equal monthly installments) calculators, reviews of new cars, dealer location and test ride services. It aims to earn its revenue from advertising, lead generation for manufacturers, dealers and insurance companies.
"Going forward, we soon plan to come up with services like sales of car accessories by April 2010, and also offer car rental services.", Sumit Chatterjee, head of autojunction (B2C) informed. Autojunction was already present in the business-to-business (B2B) space since 2006 where it was involved in online auction of repossessed vehicles by banks and non-banking financial companies(NBFCs). It has sold around 1.5 lakh such vehicles online and the net transaction value is around Rs 800 crore.
"Mjunction gets around one per cent of the value of each vehicle sold.", Oberoi said adding that for their new B2C venture they do not expect to break even before three years. He, however, is optimistic that India will soon catch on to the worldwide trend like the US where around 12 per cent of all new car sales happens online.
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In India as well, which has 46 million internet users, nearly 40 per cent of all new car buyers and 31 per cent of used car buyers look for information online.
And as Mukesh Bhandari, chairman and chief technology officer of EIL said, "Online information often influences the buying behaviour of the youth." He felt that his company would now be able to reach out to more people at places where EIL did not have dealerships.
"There are many people living outside India who want to gift a consumer product to their relatives, and an online platform is perhaps the only way to reach out to them," said Bhandari who hopes to sell at least 2000 additional Yobykes in a year through autojunction.