The Bengaluru-based scooter sharing apps claim they are doing a little more than 100,000 rides a day combined, even as their presence is limited outside the city. This is as per a report in the Economic Times.
While Bounce claims it has achieved 60,000 trips a day, its rival Vogo said it was doing around 50,000 trips. They also claim to have done 5 million rides each in total so far.
To be sure, both companies have grown extremely quickly, fueled by investments in growing their fleets.
Bounce is still largely present in Bengaluru, with 7,000 scooters on the city’s roads. However, after recently raising $72 million in funding led by B Capital, the company says it will expand into several new cities in the next few months.
Vogo, on the other hand, operates in Bengaluru, Mysuru and Hyderabad, with around 11,000 scooters already on the roads.
The rise of scooter sharing comes at a time when India’s ride hailing industry is witnessing sluggish growth.
It was reported earlier that the on-demand cab industry did 3.65 million rides daily on average in the six months to June, rising 4% over the 3.5 million rides a day in 2018.
This is, however, a drastic decline in growth.
Rides registered 90% growth in 2016, 57% in 2017 and 20% in 2018, according to estimates by multiple analysts.
Experts have pegged the slowdown to an increase in cost of trips for customers and a decrease in incentives paid to drivers.
While it is still early days for the scooter rental businesses and they have to overcome hurdles such as low utilisation, vandalism and regulatory hurdles, both Bounce and Vogo seem to have solved some teething problems, the biggest of which was in persuading investors to debt finance the vehicles on their platforms.
Vogo has clinched a $100 million equity and debt deal from ride hailing giant Ola to fund as many as 100,000 scooters for its platform, while Bounce has found partners such as Flipkart co-founder Sachin Bansal, banks and automakers such as TVS to loan vehicles for its platform.
Source: inc42