With little competition countering Zoomcar’s expansion in the cycle-sharing segment, the company is hoping to touch 1.5 million rides a day by the year-end
Self-drive car rentals major Zoomcar is striding ahead with aggressive expansion of its cycle-sharing service PEDL, even as its competitors – China’s Ofo Bikes and Ola’s Pedal – are still in pilot stages.
Zoomcar PEDL, which was launched officially in November last year, has already completed 1.4 million rides across a network of 10 cities, in a matter of 5 months.
“The response has been more than we expected. We focused on accessibility, and that has paid off. We will add more supply in the coming quarters to expand that number,” Greg Moran, co-founder and CEO of Zoomcar, told Moneycontrol.
With little competition countering Zoomcar’s expansion in the cycle-sharing segment, the company is hoping to touch 1.5 million rides a day by the year-end.
Currently, Zoomcar has a network of close to 3,000 cycles. It is targeting to take that figure to 5 lakh by the end of this year. The ambitious target sits atop its plan to leverage its 30-city-wide network for its car-rental platform.
“We have a large and well-established network of cities for our cars. We will launch Pedl in all these cities as a parallel service by the next quarter,” Moran said.
Cab-hailing company Ola had launched its Pedal service in November too, with a pilot project at the IIT-Kanpur campus and is looking to expand to other campuses. China-based cycle-sharing startup Ofo Bikes, launched in India in January, had signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC), to create city-wide bicycle networks. Ofo has launched its service in seven Indian cities on a pilot basis, which included Indore, Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Delhi, Pune, Coimbatore and Chennai.
Zoomcar is currently present in 10 cities, including Hyderabad, Agra, Pune, Bangalore, and Jaipur, apart from the four major metros – Kolkata, Chennai, Mumbai, and Delhi. The company is launching its services in two new cities – Varanasi and Lucknow – in the next couple of weeks, adding about 100 bicycles.
Ofo’s entry into India, however, may pose some counter competition for Zoomcar. The first foreign player in the segment to enter India market brings with itself experience of handling over 32 million cycle rides in 250 cities across 21 countries.
The company, which is taking a wait-and-watch approach for expansion in India, was also recently funded by Chinese conglomerate Alibaba Group with USD 866 million, a significant part of which is expected to be deployed in India. In July last year, the Alibaba Group, along with cab aggregator Didi Chuxing and DST Global, had pumped in USD 700 million into Ofo, which triggered its global expansion, even as it faced stiff competition in its home market. Incidentally, Didi Chuxing, DST Global, and SoftBank, are also investors in Ola.
Zoomcar also raised funding from automotive major Mahindra & Mahindra, albeit, with much lower corpus of USD 40 million. Zoomcar is tackling competition by differentiating its service through better accessibility, sophisticated tracking system, and most importantly, by moving ahead of its competitors.
But, with strong investors backing Ofo, its entry is sure to intensify competition in this nascent segment. Ofo is also adopting a different approach in India than Zoomcar. It has opted for a station-free bike-sharing concept. The company has placed a field staff at several hotspots, who keep an eye for the bicycles being dropped, which are taken back to a repair centre. The strategy is a result of its learning in its home market, where it suffered several vandalism cases where its cycles were damaged or stolen.
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