Zoomcar to turn profitable for the full year in 2024: CEO Greg Moran

Car sharing platform gets 90% of its business in India, went public last week

Car sharing platform Zoomcar is on track to turn profitable for the full year in 2024, said the company’s co-founder and chief executive officer following its public listing last week.

“We were able to bring about a dramatic transformation in operating efficiency and profitability at a booking level over a span of two or three quarters, while simultaneously growing our scale by a factor of over 20 per cent,” Greg Moran told Business Standard in a video call. The Indian market comprises around 90 per cent of Zoomcar’s business.

Moran said the Bengaluru-based company, which has more than 20,000 active supply listings, managed a turnaround in 2023. “In the first quarter of calendar year 2023, we were bringing in a loss of up to Rs 500 per booking. By the third quarter (ended September), we were able to invert that to becoming up to Rs 700 positive,” he said.

He denied recent reports that the Delhi government’s transport department has cancelled Zoomcar’s operating licence.

“Through the Zoomcar model, we essentially act as an aggregator for leasing. The business doesn’t operate under the purview of any operating licence tied to a self-drive or motor vehicles act. It has no bearing on our platform or the overall business. Delhi remains one of our top three markets across the country and we anticipate the market to grow very well,” Moran said.

The company, which was founded in 2013 and is focused on emerging markets, connects hosts with customers who can choose from a selection of cars to rent.

The company went public on the NASDAQ on December 29 after merging with blank-check company Innovative International Acquisition Corp. (IOAC) via a Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC) deal.

“For a global platform like us which operates in multiple jurisdictions like India, other countries in Southeast Asia, and soon markets like Latin America and beyond in the coming year, getting listed on a more global exchange in the US potentially had a lot more relevance to global consumer tech,” Moran said.

The SPAC deal offered more “alignment of interest” with IOAC, an existing investor in Zoomcar, in the medium to long term.

“We are very confident in our fundamentals in terms of the growth and profitability of our platform…We are confident we will unlock significant value from the exchange over the course of the next five or six quarters,” Moran said.

The company has witnessed an uptick in demand over the past few years, especially following Covid-19. This demand is expected to fuel the firm’s growth over the next couple of years.

“There has been a major boom over the last 18 months…We are on a trajectory to grow our supply listings by as much as 5X within the next one or two years. We see tremendous headroom to grow our listings, and revenue typically tends to move closely with that,” said Moran.

The company also operates in select markets like Indonesia and Egypt.

Going into the New Year, the company plans to double down on expansion in these geographies, while looking to foray into others like that of Latin America.

“A foray into the US or European market is unlikely as our business model is focused on emerging markets,” Moran said.