Online pre-owned good seller Olx, which is backed by over USD 20-billion Naspers group, will start focusing on monetising its India business after clocking a 10-fold growth, a top company official stated.
Also, the online classifieds platform aims to double its monthly active users to 10 crore from the current 5 crore.
The company reached break-even in the financial year 2018 with profit after tax of around Rs 15 crore. Olx is still in the investment mode and not focusing on profits said Kumar, as reported by PTI.
He said that at Olx, their focus is not to obtain positive cash flow or profits because that limits their ambition to grow. The philosophy at Olx has been to look at opportunity and accordingly do investment. If we find growth opportunity we will continue to invest.
Kumar said the focus of the company for the next year is to double car sales business, see a tow-fold rise in monthly active users from 5 crore to 10 crore and grow jobs segment.
Kumar said that Olx already has traffic. Aasaanjobs has experience to find jobs for them (blue collar workers). This is a very vertical which is being heavily promoted today. There is definitely a play in this vertical. Honestly, how we are going to play in this vertical and capture it, we don’t know today.
Olx acquired Aasaanjobs early this year for an disclosed amount. Kumar said that Olx will first start to build around its strength to cater to job segment and might look at upskilling the aspirants in blue collar jobs category.
He added that the platform will continue to focus on sale of pre-owned goods and focus on doubling business in category where it starts getting traction.
Kumar said that Olx is number one in used car sales with 80 per cent market share. They can leverage it further. Our strength is used goods, they will continue to focus on that. Roughly, 7 per cent Indians own car and around 30 per cent people own bikes. Size of bike vertical on Olx is similar to car vertical. So, they see huge opportunity in these segments which they want to explore.
There is a huge ecosystem of mobile phones also developing with penetration of smartphones, the Olx country head said.
Kumar said that the smartphone penetration is increasing. The average phone life has reduced from 12 month earlier to six months which means more and more smartphones are coming in to market. They don’t remember the number correctly but they are selling around 2 crore (yearly listing on Olx) used phones annually, while in market 8 crore used phones are sold annually. There is definitely an opportunity for four times growth for them.
On any plans to enter the refurbished segment, Kumar said the company does not see good margin in sale of those devices.
