Shriram Automall to open 20 facilities this fiscal year

Shriram Automall India Ltd (SAMIL) will roll out 20 automall facilities across the country this fiscal, said Sameer Malhotra, CEO.

Through an automall facility, the company, a 100 per cent subsidiary of Shriram Transport Finance, provides a platform for buyers and sellers to transact in used vehicles – commercial vehicles, cars, tractors and also two-wheelers.

“We are only a service provider. We provide a platform but we don’t buy or sell the used vehicles. We bring buyers and sellers of used vehicles together,” Malhotra told Business Line here.

SAMIL is a pioneer in this space (automall) and as an organised player accounts for a very small share of the nearly ₹1 lakh crore largely unorganised used vehicles market in India.

In the financial year ended March 2014, SAMIL had facilitated transactions worth ₹1,500 crore, a 50 per cent increase over ₹1,000 crore in the previous fiscal, he said.

This company has now entered the Delhi market with the launch of an automall in Narela.

“We are hoping to help transact at least 100 vehicles every month at Narela.

This automall will be for both used cars and commercial vehicles. We have about 4.5 acres in Narela. We are also going close to our customers,” Malhotra said. Plans are afoot to launch automalls this fiscal in Kanpur, Lucknow, Nagpur, Guwahati, Patna, Ranchi, Karnal, Jodhpur, Shimla, Thrissur and Vijayawada, he added.

SAMIL has no immediate plan to list the company’s equity shares in a stock exchange, he said. “The company has no current requirement for any capital funds.”