Even as Ola Electric is facing headwinds in the electric two-wheeler market, its parent company isn’t faring much better.
US-based Asset Management Company (AMC) Vanguard has cut the fair value of ANI Technologies, the parent company of ride-hailing platform Ola, to $1.9 billion. This is 74 percent lower than Ola’s peak valuation of $7.3 billion in December 2021. Vanguard has slashed Ola’s valuation for the third consecutive time.
Vanguard has now cut Ola’s valuation three times in a row. In May last year, Vanguard said the company was valued at $4.8 billion and then again lowered Ola’s valuation to $3.5 billion in August 2023. In 2024, Vanguard had valued Ola at $1.88 billion. Previously, the company had lowered Ola’s valuation in 2020 and 2021 too. Vanguard holds 166,185 shares of ANI Technologies, which accounts for an 0.7 percent stake in the company.
The trimming of Ola’s valuation comes at an inopportune time for the group. Ola Electric had debuted on the stock markets last year, and had doubled over its IPO price in quick time. But as reports of issues with Ola’s scooters began emerging, Ola saw its market share erode and its stock began plummeting. Ola Electric’s stock has fallen 75 percent from its peak, and currently trades over 40 percent over its IPO price. It has also lost the top spot in the electric 2W space to incumbents like Bajaj and TVS. Meanwhile, Bhavish Aggarwal’s other big bet, Krutrim, hasn’t yet made a splash in the AI space, with Aggarwal himself admitting that the company was nowhere close to global competitors. And with the original ride-hailing seeing its valuation fall by 80% over the last three years, Ola CEO Bhavish Aggarwal will need to carefully steer his tech empire in what are clearly testing times for the group.