Following the launch of Bounce Infinity E1 e-scooters in December last year, the Sequoia-backed mobility start-up is ready to start its deliveries in the first week of April. BusinessLine spoke to Bounce’s co-founder and COO Anil Giri Raju on the company’s journey from a shared mobility player to an EV manufacturing company and future growth plans.
A week back, customer test rides of Bounce Infinity were announced to commence in seven cities. How has progress been and when can we expect scooter deliveries to start?
We started in Bengaluru last week and have done this for seven days there. Each day, we got an amazing response. There was an almost 50–50 split between customers who visited the centres after pre-booking the scooters and ones who just walked in and paid the ₹5,000 booking price. We opened pre-booking up to whoever did the test rides, saying they can now pay ₹5,000 and then will be given deliveries priority-wise.
We are planning to do deliveries between early to mid-April and final payments will also be taken close to that timeline. Our production should start at the end of March and since our plant is in Bhiwadi, we want to account for transit time as well.
Bounce has earlier spoken about the vision to build a dense battery swapping network that can offer a swapping facility within 1 km of all customers. How far have you reached in this journey?
In the case of battery swapping networks, we first want to focus on big cities, cities like Bengaluru, Pune, Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Chennai. Currently, we have a pretty dense network in Bengaluru — we already have 150 locations live and we will be adding another 200 locations this month. You will soon see Bounce battery swapping stations at Bangalore Metro as well.
In terms of reaching customers in smaller cities and other locations, we plan to setup stations in partnership with local kirana stores, residential places etc. This expansion will be backed by the demand that we see from various locations. We have set up 4-5 dealerships in all major cities that I just spoke about and these dealerships will operate in a hub and spoke model to enable deliveries in nearby locations.
How did Bounce deal with the global chip shortage and do you expect it to impact the company’s timelines in any way?
We have ordered components in advance and so we are quite confident of our delivery timelines at an early stage, we know these components are already with us. Capacity wise, we have our plant in Bhiwadi with a capacity of about 2 lakh units a year. Based on the response that we have got, we will soon be adding another 3 lakh units. This will most likely be at another location, maybe somewhere in the south. So overall capacity will be around five lakh units in about a quarter.
Bounce’s operating revenue shrank by 83 per cent to around ₹15 crore in FY21. What would you attribute that to?
It was primarily because of the pandemic. It is not just us. Everybody in the mobility space saw this, right from mobility players like us to Bangalore Metro. Everybody is at 15–20 per cent of whatever their pre-Covid levels were.
Bike rentals were a major (96 per cent) contributor to the company’s operating revenue in FY21. What is the path forward for the shared mobility business now?
After Covid, we have transitioned to EV and all the scooters that we run on shared mobility business right now are electric vehicles. Pre-Covid, we used to have about 25,000–30,000 scooters in Bengaluru. Now that we have withdrawn ICE scooters, we have about 4,000 to 5,000 scooters. In a quarter’s time, that number should be close to 12,000-13,000 scooters. Commuting is still a great opportunity which we will continue to pursue. We will expand this service in multiple cities and EVs make it even more economically viable because the cost of operation is much lower.
Further, all our EVs in the mobility business run on swappable batteries. So our battery swapping infra does not just cater to the Bounce Infinity use case, the same batteries are interoperable for the mobility use case as well. We are also offering our battery swapping network as a service to other OEMs; we have tied up with some of the big OEMs for both two-wheeler and three-wheeler EVs. It’s like a fuel station that we have set up and now we want to give it to others so that the overall solution becomes viable.