OLX claims leadership in online classified space

Quikr counters it, saying its database had 1.25 times more listings than OLX's

OLX, the classified listings firm owned by South African internet entity Naspers, said on Tuesday it had “out executed” Quikr, the Tiger Global-backed local rival in India. However, adding it was still a few years from monetising the business in the country.

“India is a key early market for OLX, in which we had to deploy significant capital in the past years. This investment has been put to very good use by out-executing our main competitor, Quikr,” Martin Scheepbouwer, chief executive of the classifieds business for Naspers told investors in a conference call. “That is illustrated by our relative growth and brand awareness, visits, engagements, and C2C (consumer to consumer) list. Going forward, our focus will be on further maturing the classifieds market, still relatively nascent.”

Naspers  had taken a majority stake in Argentina-based  OLX, considered a competitor to US classifieds listing portal Craigslist. Since then, it has expanded in about 40 countries, including India It had 1.7 billion monthly visits globally in March, generating a total of 35 billion page views.

OLX claimed its daily active users was four and a half times the numbers from Quikr, and 2.3 times more of active app users, citing SimilarWeb data.

Quikr, with $1.5 billion valuation, has raised $364 million so far from investors and acquired four companies, including local real estate firm Commonfloor, to expand its focused listings division.

OLX says it would reduce spending on marketing in India and not make money on listings in the near future.

“The competitive battle against Quikr is over in our view. We’ll choose and spend better to mature the market. That will take some years, during which we can monetise lightly. We can charge for professionals and do some advertising,” said Scheepbouwer.

Nonsense, says Quickr

Quikr countered the claim of Naspers, saying its database had 1.25 times more listings than OLX’s, and was registering revenue, a key indicator for a growing business. It said it had the largest number of users, visitors and listings in the  Indian horizontal classifieds segment, citing data from Comscore and Alexa.

“In a growing market like India where various data sources contradict each other, selectively cherry-picking sources that present a favourable picture of one’s own business can be very misleading,” said Prasun Mandal, head of analytics at Quikr.

"In addition, there is the inconvenient truth that our monetisation is growing strongly and is in tens of millions of dollars, while our competitor is yet to even start generating revenue. We fully agree that the horizontal classifieds battle in India is over. We just disagree on who has won it."