India's second largest travel portal Ease My Trip is in the process of assembling a electric bus prototype, and plans to launch the project by the next financial year.
The company had on September 5 announced plans to foray into bus manufacturing with a 2,000 unit facility, which will gradually be scaled up over next two years to 5,000 buses, Manoj Soni, CEO - EV and Mobility, EaseMyTrip told CNBC-TV18 on September 6.
Arguing that the business is not unrelated, EaseMyTrip said that the company has a portal for online bus ticketing called Yolobus, and the new foray into bus manufacturing is related to this business. The unit will be plying EV buses from FY27, catering to in house as well as outside clients, Manoj Soni added. "We have our tech and R&D teams in place, and we will scale up after an initial investment of Rs 200 crore," Soni said.
The company declined to talk about how much cash it currently has on books, or how it intends to fund the bus manufacturing project, and said the financial details will be shared at a later stage. However, the initial Rs 200 crore for R&D has been arranged via internal accruals, the CEO said. Ease My Trip already has the board approval to raise Rs 1,000 crore, and the company is considering to do a capital raise in the next couple of months' time, it had said in August.
The company sees a potential of growth in the EV bus ecosystem, and finds merit in diversification into bus manufacturing. The CEO confirmed that Ease My Trip (EMT) will be applying for government support through the PLI scheme for electric vehicles.
The bus and train ticketing business currently contributes less than two percent to the revenue, but the non-air travel business has been seeing very strong growth momentum. Trains, buses, and others categories clocked a strong transaction growth of 36.9% YoY in Q1FY25 at 3.1 lakh for EMT.
The company has said in the past that they intend to focus on expanding the non-airline business. During the June quarter, the hotels and holiday packages business clocked a gross booking revenue growth of 116% year on year at Rs 210 crore. Since the time of listing in 2013, when 97% of the business was coming from airlines, this number has come down to about 88%, according to Ease My Trip. Over the next couple of years, the company intends to grow the non-air business to 25%, it has said.
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