Competition among Southeast Asia's online used-car platforms is expected to heat up as a challenger from outside the region seeks to tap the massive market of 650 million people.
CARS24, India's used-car marketplace, launched in Thailand in November and plans to expand into Indonesia in 2022, setting up a three-way battle with Singapore's Carro and Malaysia's Carsome.
CARS24, a unicorn backed by Softbank and Tencent, has set aside more than $100 million for international expansion.
It announced in June that it had begun operations in Australia and the United Arab Emirates.
According to Abhijeet Dabas, chief executive of CARS24 in Southeast Asia, the company will make its debut in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in two of the bloc's largest markets, Thailand and Indonesia, before deciding its path into the rest of the region
"In terms of market size, Southeast Asia is comparable to India – both are roughly $50 billion to $60 billion markets at this point," he said.
"Southeast Asia is a conglomeration of very diverse countries." Every country has its own dynamics, but growth rates are high in all of them. There are clear advantages to purchasing a used car.
Carro and Carsome, both billion-dollar unicorns in their own right, have capitalised on Asean's used-vehicle market and, like CARS24, have aggressively raised funds for further expansion.
Carro announced in June that Japan's SoftBank Group had led its US$360 million Series C funding round, which also included Indonesia-based fund EV Growth and other investors.
Three months later, Carsome announced the completion of its US$170 million Series D2 round of funding, raising the company's valuation to US$1.3 billion and prompting the start-up to claim the title of Malaysia's largest technology unicorn.
CARS24, which bills itself as India's largest online portal for used vehicles with a stable of over 10,000 vehicles, also announced the completion of a US$450 million Series F equity round in September, with investors including SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Chinese tech behemoth Tencent.
The flurry of interest from investors and start-ups looking to establish themselves in the used-vehicle segment coincides with a global chip shortage that has crimped automakers' output and made meeting consumer demand for new cars difficult.
This, in turn, has resulted in an increase in