Chinmay Bidkar
1st May 2017, India:
India’s leading ride-hailing startup, Ola has widened its losses in the Financial Year 2016 to Rs. 2313.7 crore as per the report by ET. ANI Technologies, which owns Ola reported thrice the losses compared to Rs. 796 crore in FY15.
However, the revenue has seen a tremendous growth compared to Rs. 104 crore in FY15, a Bengaluru-based company registered Rs. 758 crore in FY16.
“Advertising, initial driver incentives, strikes in major cities and customer discounts are some of the contributory aspects to the losses seen for Ola,” an analyst told ET. “However, there has been a slight decrease in losses seen since driver incentives fell. We can expect to see a 15% cut in losses (in 2017), since the number of trips have also increased.”
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The SoftBank-backed company has also recently formed two new entities — Ola Electric Mobility Pvt Ltd and Ola Skilling Pvt Ltd — for its electric car foray and training its drivers, respectively as per the report by The Businessline.
Ola recently raised Rs. 1,675 crore in fresh funding from its existing investor SoftBank. Post the funding, SoftBank now owns the majority of the shares in Ola. According to estimates made by VCCircle last year, SoftBank held a 22.5% stake in Ola, followed by Tiger Global (20.5%). As per the report by Livemint, In this round, the valuation of Ola, which has so far raised nearly $1.5 billion in cash, will slide to about $3 billion on a pre-money basis, the people said. Pre-money refers to the valuation excluding the current round’s cash infusion. Ola’s post-money valuation will be determined by the exact amount of capital it finally attracts. Compared to Uber which has its presence in just 29 cities, Ola is presently active in 110 cities. Uber too is rapidly working on to expand to more cities. (Image- Livemint)
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