Naspers-backed online classifieds giant OLX India doesn’t have profitability in its immediate focus. Instead, the company is looking to grow the India business by 10X. OLX is currently battling for the top spot with domestic player Quikr in India’s online classifieds market that is expected to be worth $1.2 billion by 2020 as per a Google and KPMG report.
OLX India is also aiming to doubling its monthly active users from current 5 crores to 10 crores, PTI reported.
“At OLX, our focus is not obtaining positive cash flow or profits because that limits our ambition to grow. That has been philosophy at OLX that look at opportunity and accordingly do investment. If we find growth opportunity we will continue to invest,” PTI quoted OLX India country head Sushil Kumar.
The focus of the company’s investors and board is towards growing India business by at least 10 times before looking at monetisation, said Kumar who was elevated as India head from his previous role of chief revenue and strategy officer in the company.
Interestingly, unlike Quikr, OLX has already been profitable from past few years. Its revenue for FY18 reportedly surged to Rs 179 crore from Rs 92 crore in FY17 even as net profit almost doubled from Rs 8 crore in FY17 to Rs 15.6 crore in last fiscal year. On the other hand, Quikr’s revenue increased to Rs 173.49 crore last fiscal year.
Car sales, jobs vertical to drive growth
Kumar said that the focus would be on doubling its car sales business and jobs vertical apart from the monthly active users.
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, Kumar said.
OLX India had acquired recruitment marketplace Aasaanjobs in January this year for an undisclosed sum to boost its jobs vertical.
The company had earlier this month said that it is planning to invest in deep technologies such as AI, machine learning (ML) to enhance customer experience.
“In the coming two years, we plan to invest in leveraging emerging technologies like AI, ML and deep learning to enable a more seamless experience to our customers which is going to be significantly important in the success of our business,” Kumar had said in a statement.
The company claimed to have 50 million users in India.
