At a time when finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman made a slew of announcements last week to turbocharge the fledgling electric vehicles (EV) industry, smart electric scooter start-up Ather Energy is gearing up to expand to about 50 cities across the country in five years.
It also wants to take its scooters to global markets, including Latin America, Southeast Asia and Europe in the same period.
Backed by marquee investors such as Flipkart co-founder Sachin Bansal, Tiger Global and Hero Motocorp, the company is also looking at other business models such as rental and ride-sharing, leveraging the connectivity features in its scooters. The Bengaluru-based company has already introduced a lease programme for its scooters.
“I am extremely happy with the (Budget) announcement. I don’t think I was going to ask for more,” said Tarun Mehta, co-founder and chief executive of Ather, in an interview. “A product like this has to go global. I think, as companies like ours emerge, there is more of an opportunity to go international rapidly,” said Mehta, whose firm has raised around $100 million from the investors so far.
He said now the government needs to stimulate local production and supply chain. This includes incentives that help not just the original equipment manufacturers but also the supplier ecosystem.
“We can’t afford to get a lot of demands and have no local producers of these vehicles,” he said.
Mehta, who cofounded Ather Energy in 2013 with Swapnil Jain, said he commutes daily on an Ather electric scooter to his office located at a tech park which also houses firms such as Accenture, Byju’s and Swiggy in Bengaluru.
In June last year, Ather opened its flagship product Ather 450 for pre-orders in Bengaluru, while deliveries started in September. The company is now entering an aggressive expansion phase starting with Chennai and eventually expanding to 30 cities by the end of FY23. To meet the projected demand in the coming years, Ather is planning a new manufacturing facility, which will be designed to produce one million vehicles a year.
No comments:
Post a Comment