Insurance Biz Helps CarDekho Group Increase Revenue By 92% In H1 FY20

The Indian auto industry has been facing a major slump over the last few months. Passenger car sales declined by 31% in July 2019 and 29% in August 2019 as compared to last year. This fall is the highest in decades. Further, during the festive season, the domestic passenger vehicle sales rose by 0.28% in October 2019. However, vehicle sales across all segments fell over 12% in the month.

The impact of the falling economy has been massive with the whole economy seen to be in shambles. At such point, Jaipur-based auto-tech company CarDekho, a subsidiary of GirnarSoft, has said that its new auto business segment posted a significant growth of 30% in the first half of the fiscal year 2020.

The company attributed this growth to pre-emptive moves to build relationships with the new car and bike OEMs, as well as, building consumer behavior-based content solutions. CarDekho also said that it recorded the revenue of $28 Mn in H1 2019, a 92% Y-o-Y growth.

Founded in 2007, CarDekho has built a complete auto ecosystem to enable its consumers to have easy and complete access to buying and selling cars, as well as information on cars. The group currently operates in various leading Indian auto sites such as CarDekho.com, Gaadi.com, ZigWheels.com, BikeDekho.com, InsuranceDekho.com, PowerDrift.com and more.

Amit Jain, cofounder and CEO, CarDekho group, said that this unique ecosystem built up helped the company to retain its competitive edge. “The key benefit of this ecosystem has been the ability to scale up and synergize different transactional businesses, which service each other such as used cars business, insurance and warranty business and financial services business,” the company said in a media statement.

Here’s a brief of CarDekho’s H1 FY20 performance:

• Insurance and warranty business grew 523% Y-o-Y and contributed heavily to revenue growth
• CarDekho’s insurance venture sold over 360K policies, 12x Y-o-Y increase
• The used cars business of CarDekho grew by 118% Y-o-Y
• CarDekho launched 28 new Gaadi stores during H1, bring the total number of stores to 56 in 17 cities
• The company transacted used cars worth over $50 Mn in H1 FY20
• The financial services business posted a growth of 135%
• Through CarDekho, used car loans of $56 Mn were disbursed in H1

So far, CarDekho, owned by Girnar Software, has raised $202 Mn, including the latest funding round of $110 Mn. Prior to this round, the company raised $75 Mn from investors such as Hillhouse Capital, Tybourne Capital, Times Internet, and Sequoia Capital, among others.

CarDekho is now looking forward to playing an important role in the Indian electric vehicle (EV) segment, set to boom by 2021-22. CarDekho’s major competitors include Droom, OLX, Cars24 etc.

With no respite in sight for India’s auto slowdown, if CarDekho continues to grow its business remains to be seen for the coming six months.