OLX accelerates its leadership in the pre-owned auto segment with the launch of OLX Autos

• Merges online and offline businesses for auto
• The new brand rolls out today across 100+ existing franchise & company-owned stores and across OLX's online presence

INDIA, New Delhi, Dec 2nd, 2020: OLX Group, the leading global marketplace network, today announced the launch of OLX Autos - a car buying/ selling model with a strong online and a strong offline component. OLX Autos brings the company's online operations with industry-leading tech and it's well known offline brand, CashMyCar(which will be rebranded as OLX Autos stores) under its umbrella. OLX's strategy reinforces its commitment to customer-centricity by offering a slew of services, product innovation and an integrated experience across the value chain. The new product innovations include a reliable verified inventory of cars, inspected cars, new automotive allied services & a new interface across OLX's online presence(web+app). The new offerings have begun to roll out across India and will be visible across OLX's 100+ existing franchise & company-owned stores across 20+ leading metro & non-metro cities and OLX's online presence(web+app).


OLX currently commands 80 per cent of the market share in the Indian pre-owned auto marketplace and lists over 20,000 cars online for sale daily. Building on the solid customer-focused operations that it established over the last decade in India, OLX Autos is positioned for strong growth, as buying and selling of pre-owned cars continue unabated in 2020. OLX has seen over 133% increase in demand and a 112% increase in supply for pre-owned cars on its platform since April.

"We aim to set a new industry benchmark for the used car trade-in India, bringing to the consumer a seamless process to buy, sell and finance a car under a trusted, easy and safe environment. Our new customer-centric approach enables us to leverage the strength of the OLX brand and better focus on and serve consumers, and adapt to their changing behaviours and preferences. It better positions us to grow and win across channels and geographies by delivering consistent, seamless and exceptional experiences, wherever and however our consumers shop for pre-owned autos", said Amit Kumar, CEO OLX Autos India."By combining our technology, financing and smart services to digitize more of the transaction, alongside our offline services and inspection centres, we will make buying and selling vehicles easier, faster and more convenient all around our network, while offering peace of mind on every transaction made", he added.

OLX Autos offers newer product innovations for a seamless and enhanced buying and selling experience.

• Inspected cars: Consumers and dealers will be able to access detailed car inspection reports, technical reports on the car performance, ownership details, insurance or accidental history of the car and more. 

• New car selling experience: Car sellers will now have the option to sell it across OLX's online marketplace or via its retail outlets at the tap of a button. OLX will provide dedicated support staff to guide consumers through the process of selling their cars at a retail store. 

• Financing, Insurance & Roadside assistance: Dealers and consumers will be able to avail financing and insurance for their respective needs at attractive rates. Customers will be available these options across OLX's franchisee & company-owned stores only as of now. 

• New in-app & web user experience: Buyers will now be greeted by a new user interface & dedicated section within the mobile app/web with a simplified user feed which will show relevant cars and details. Sellers will be able to list their cars faster and buyers can get a car of their choice faster. 

Commenting on the launch, Sapna Arora, CMO OLX Autos India, said, "At OLX Autos, we constantly listen to our customers - both expressed and unexpressed needs and wants - and funnel these insights into our development process. This enables us to stay close to our customers, bring differentiated and improved products more quickly to market, and deliver a consistently superior experience." She further added, "By integrating the experience across our online and offline channels, we endeavour to make buying and selling vehicles easier, faster and more convenient throughout our network."


With the new launch, dealers & sellers will get access to OLX's over 10 lakh plus interested buyers to sell their cars across OLX Integrated-Omni Channel Store experience. Buyers will have access to over 3 lakh plus cars available for sale on the platform via the new dedicated online presence & OLX Autos stores. Over the next couple of months, OLX Autos will continue to roll out new features & offerings across its retail channels and online presence.

OLX Autos 

OLX Autos is a global car marketplace that's transforming the autos industry. A one-stop solution to buying or selling a car, it's safe, convenient, and offers guaranteed peace of mind for both buyer and seller.

OLX Autos has more than 500 inspection centres across the Americas, Asia and Africa. It operates under its own and other well-known leading brands, such as OLX CashMyCar, 321 SPRZEDANE!, CarFirst, Cars45 and Webuyanycarusa. Every year, OLX Autos inspects 300,000 vehicles and enables 130,000 vehicle transactions globally.

OLX Autos is part of OLX Group, which operates the fastest-growing network of trading platforms globally. It serves more than 300 million people every month in 30+ countries around the world, helping them buy and sell cars, find housing, get jobs, buy and sell household goods, and much more. For more information, visit www.olxgroup.com.

OLX Acquires Aasaanjobs to Strengthen its Online Jobs Vertical

OLX Group has acquired Mumbai-based Aasaanjobs, a recruitment company for entry level jobs in India, for an undisclosed amount.

The acquisition is aimed at strengthening the OLX India’s position in the online job search segment and help OLX address the growing requirement of over 60 million urban workforce in India valued at over $1 billion.

Tim Hilpert, CEO of OLX Markets, said, "This acquisition resonates with OLX’s commitment to grow its verticals strategically and leverage technology for better user experience on the platform. We aim to disrupt the ever growing job market with this portal and further unify our position in the jobs classifieds market in India,” he added.

Founded in 2014 by Dinesh Goel and Gaurav Toshniwal, Aasaanjobs is a recruitment marketplace for blue and grey-collar jobs (drivers, maids, cooks, tutors, back-office staff, etc) in India which aims to create a digital identity for people who play a crucial role in the ever expanding service industry of India.

Dinesh Goel, CEO and co-founder of Aasaanjobs, said the company’s inception was inspired by the large unregulated blue/grey collar jobs segment in India where there is a massive untapped opportunity.

OLX said its jobs category has been growing organically in India over the last couple of years. It cited a recent study to state that in urban centres alone, over 70 million blue/grey collar job opportunities are available each year, while the workforce stands at 60 million workers annually.

This reflects the significant scope for growth opportunity in the sector, OLX added.

Aasaanjobs has raised a total of $6.5 million in funding over only two rounds from investors that includes
Chiratae Ventures (formerly IDG Ventures), Aspada and Inventus Capital Partners. It last raised funding in February 2016.

In June 2017, Aasaanjobs had also acquired mHire, a Noida based recruitment platform focused on skilled & semi-skilled blue & grey collar (ie entry-level) jobs.

Source - Business Line

OLX’s Founder & CEO Amarjit Singh Batra Plans to Move to a Global Role Within Naspers

OLX India announced today that Amarjit Singh Batra, the CEO and founder of the OLX India business, is planning to move within Naspers for his next adventure. Amar joined OLX in 2008, and has been instrumental in building OLX India as the undisputed market leader as well as a household name.

Batra joined OLX at a time when consumer Internet businesses in India were at a nascent stage, and the concept of second-hand buying and selling between individuals was almost unknown. Starting out as the first employee of OLX India, he has built the business from scratch to a 550-strong-team today.

Batra not only pioneered the consumer-to-consumer (C2C) classifieds business in India but also led OLX to become the largest classifieds platform in the country commanding 80% market-share of the C2C classifieds business, and a brand-awareness that has now been consistently seven times or more than that of the closest competitor. Apart from introducing India to selling and buying of pre-owned household items, Batra also led OLX to emerge as the biggest platform for pre-owned cars in the country commanding 72% market-share of the pre-owned car trade. Other key categories that thrived under his leadership were that of pre-owned motorcycles, where OLX has 75% market-share of the online trade, and mobile phones, where OLX commands 50% market share. Real Estate and Jobs are also categories that he built from a horizontal perspective, giving OLX an underlying advantage in the space.

At OLX he is known for his innovative approach, implicit understanding of the consumer needs, and a passion for building business solutions that can solve everyday challenges and make the user experience more friction-free. A visionary, he built OLX with a mobile-first approach at a time when many other businesses were still focused on desktop. This helped in laying strong foundations for business growth at an early stage. He was also the first in his space to take the decision of experimenting with customized colloquial regional-language television advertising - rather than using dubbed Ads for all markets - in order to reach out to a new consumer base. These are just a few examples of how he thought and led.

It was under his leadership that OLX India introduced an improved version of the OLX App last year that made buying and selling more simple, secure, and social. The new App that leveraged artificial intelligence and machine learning has resulted in the strongest year yet for OLX. In the last 10 months, Unique Sellers have grown by more than 70%, Buyers by 200%, and Daily Active Users (DAU) by 100% with a 50% growth in stickiness and engagement.

Under Batra’s leadership, OLX has outdistanced the No. 2 player in the space by a wide margin. OLX now has almost 14 times the DAUs on the App that the No. 2 player does (Source: Similar Web), 7 times the brand awareness they do (Source: Google Trends) and 9 times the Unique Listers they do in the Goods and Cars Categories.

Said Martin Scheepbouwer, Global CEO of OLX Group, “I started working with Amar five years back when I joined Naspers, and he has impressed me with his entrepreneurial drive, passion, focus and his ability to deliver on big challenges. India is a huge and diverse market, and the way OLX India has shaped up to become an undisputable leader in the horizontal classifieds space is a testimony to Amar’s vision, strategy, and execution. What I am most pleased with is the strong leadership team and culture that Amar has built at OLX India, which has laid a solid foundation for taking the company to the next level. I take this opportunity to thank him for the great work and support him on his plans to take up a new challenge. While he will move on, his legacy will live on in the brand, team, and the culture he has built.”

Said Amarjit Singh Batra CEO, OLX India, “The OLX journey has been a very special and fulfilling one. Rarely does one get an opportunity as an entrepreneur and a leader to build a brand like OLX and take it from obscurity to a household name. In the almost nine years that I have spent at OLX, I feel I have done the whole nine yards. In these years OLX has emerged as the number one horizontal marketplace outperforming all direct competitors. On the back of a robust and innovative product, we have delivered our strongest year yet. I started out alone in India for almost 3 years but today I have a team of great leaders who are poised to take the business to even greater heights. I have also spent a lot of time in building a culture that not only keeps the brand mission alive but also makes OLX a great place to work. I feel like I have achieved the mission I took up nine years back, and that the time is opportune to end this leg of the journey and take up a new challenge. Naspers has a wide footprint and several exciting opportunities in emerging markets that I am exploring at the moment.”

“The person who will be coming in place of Amar has some big shoes to fill. We are working on the transition, and will be ready to share the successor’s name soon,” added Scheepbouwer.

OLX Scouts for India’s Top Talent In Machine Learning and AI

OLX, India’s largest online classifieds, has kicked off its "Code and the Curious" Hackathon to recruit India’s best coding talent, skilled in emerging and disruptive technologies across Machine learning, AI, and Data Science. The hackathon has already received 10,000+ registrations so far.

Organized in partnership with leading online technology and programming platform HackerRank, the recruitment drive consists of two parts - an online assessment challenge from July 22nd to July 27th 2017 followed by a live two-day hackathon session in Gurugram and Bengaluru on 5th and 12th August respectively.

Shortlisted candidates from the second round will undergo interviews for full-time roles at OLX across its global technology hubs in Buenos Aires, Berlin, Lisbon, and Gurgaon. The Hackathon is designed for data scientists, engineers, and coders. There is no participation fee for entering the Hackathon.

Said Varun Madan, Head of HR, OLX India, “One of the highlights of working at OLX is the opportunity to work on 40 others markets across the globe. India is known for its immense tech talent, and we thought it would be fitting to leverage this talent for other markets by recruiting specifically for those countries. ‘Be Open’ is one of our key values. We are open to learning from each other, sharing experiences, and even recruiting the best talent from across other OLX countries.”

“Innovation is a big focus for this year in order to provide a more friction-free user-experience. Our product and tech talent will play a central role in achieving this. The Hackathon which is centered around Machine Learning aims to foster innovation, creativity, and original thinking. While the end-goal of the Hackathon is recruitment, we want to make the process fun.” added Madan.

OLX Group is present in more than 40 countries, and is the market leader in most markets including India. Globally OLX has more than 75 million monthly active users on its app . Globally, OLX also records more than 60 million new listings per month.

In India, OLX gets 3.4 billion page-views a month, with 90% of its traffic coming from mobile. It is also the number one buying + selling App in India on Google Play Store. In India it is the number one marketplace for pre-owned cars and motorbikes, mobile phones, household items with a strong presence in jobs and real-estate.

Given the massive volume of data generated every day, OLX relies on cutting edge and state-of-the-art tools in machine learning, data mining, and artificial intelligence to deliver an enriching user experience. In September last year, OLX kick-started a new journey with the launch of its new mobile app. The new app completely transformed the classifieds experience with innovative industry-first features, which offered a seamless mobile experience to users by making the platform safe, secure, and more social. The new mobile App led to 50% reduction in Ad posting time with the help of the industry-first image-recognition feature which detects products on instant click. OLX introduced the chat-first option, with restrictions on calling to build trust as the App does not make anyone’s phone number public. The new App also offers a hyperlocal experience by only showing listings in one’s vicinity. This makes the experience simpler with an enhanced sense of familiarity to make the platform safer.

More than one-third of the OLX workforce in India works in Technology and Product Development, and lead key projects across multiple markets. In the last few years, key members of the team have worked out of Lisbon, Berlin, Buenos Aires to lend their expertise to global operations. Globally, OLX has over 4000 employees working across 25 offices worldwide. The hackathon aims to scout for talent that will join these team across countries to support the product development initiatives of the company.

Participants can apply for the hackathon by registering at: https://www.hackerrank.com/code-and-the-curious ​