After Tesla, Bhavish Aggarwal's Ola May Be Entering Amazon's Territory Next

Popular startup Ola Cabs is reportedly finalizing plans to expand beyond ride-hailing and manufacturing of electric scooters to venture into offering digital services to other two-wheeler makers.

What Happened? Ola executives are contemplating diversifying into software sales and cloud computing, according to a report by Nikkei. This move is aimed at increasing revenues that have been affected by the global economic recession and inflation.

Sources close to the company led by Bhavish Aggarwal told the publication that Ola could be planning to provide its proprietary software to other two-wheeler manufacturers, thus circumventing the need for dealers.

The company is also contemplating creating a cloud computing platform along the lines of Amazon Web Services, although discussions on this are still at a very nascent stage.

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According to one of the two company sources that spoke to Nikkei, Ola needs to establish supplementary sources of income because its present revenue is unlikely to improve over the next year due to market instability. Even if Ola’s revenue were to return to pre-pandemic levels or exceed them, it would still find it challenging to maintain such a high valuation in the public market.

In late 2021, market analysts estimated the worth of ANI Technologies, the ride-hailing division of Ola, to be roughly $7 billion (₹57,515.69 crore), while Ola Electric, the company’s electric vehicle operations, achieved a valuation of about $5 billion (₹41,079.02 crore) in mid-2022.

After scooters, the company is also jumping on the electric-car bandwagon, popularized by Tesla. The company said in February it expects to deliver its first four-wheeler EV in the latter half of 2024.

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