Aggregators and Market Shift in Car Service and Repair in India

mericar

In India, 60% Car Owners look for Multi brands car workshops and nearby garages. There is over 10 Lac garages, small repair centers in India, including two wheelers and passenger cars amongst the most. There are 28 crore registered vehicles and the automotive aftermarket is growing fast.

The Automotive Aftermarket
According recent article (TOI) published – “With a turnover of INR 1.96 lakh crore (USD 26.6 billion) from April 2021 to September 2021, the first half of last fiscal was quite impressive for the automotive component sector of India. The sector recorded staggering 65 per cent growth in these six months. The sector has also performed well on export fronts and registered 76 per cent growth. Owing to improved performance of the auto component sector, the aftermarket witnessed 25 per cent growth in the first two quarters of 2021-22.” 

Digitization in Automotive Aftermarket
Where lockdown slowed down the world, India took advantage of digitization of every unorganized sector, including automotive aftermarket. Apart from garages owners who understood the importance of being digital, there are over 100 aggregators and startups which are helping them to use mobile apps.

Market Shift
On an estimate, all startup aggregators and automotive software providers have made garages using digital solutions which counts not more than 5000. The automotive players like Bosch Car Service, MyTVS, AutoRox, RAMP and many other popular startup aggregators like GoMechanic, Pitstop are also trying managing their branded garages using software. “Digital garage” means garages are having all digital products from making their own job card of every customer to manage their entire operations and spare parts inventory management.

“There is a need of companies which have domain specific knowledge to help every garage to be digital garage. While every mechanic knows how to use mobile app and running Facebook Ad is just kids-play, then why they will be depended upon leads from aggregators and pay commission on every leads. Garages are preferring having own branded mobile app and website” – says Rakesh Sidana, Founder, CEO, MeriGarage.com, a B2B solution company which supports multi brand small repair centers with Software As A Service.

Aggregators and Lead Provider
Classified and lead provider startup aggregators and brand builders have played a greater role making this automotive aftermarket to adopt digitization at some level. Every year, aggregators have shut down without making any noise. The reason for shutting down is unstable business model and leakage in the business as “who own the customer” is still not clear as customer prefer going direct to mechanic if deal is proven in the first visit. Lead Generation is a great business in other sectors but this automotive aftermarket has given more challenges to all startups who tried building business over pay-commission-per-lead.

“MeriCAR.com was still had better scaling model because of “entrepreneurs networking” to bring 5000 garages” claimed the founder.

Automotive Component
According to IBEF, The size of India’s auto component industry is US$ 57 billion with exports of US$ 15 billion. India has become the fastest-growing economy in the world in recent years. This fast growth, coupled with rising incomes, boost in infrastructure spending and increased manufacturing incentives, has accelerated the automobile industry. The two-wheeler segment dominated the automobile industry because of the Indian middle class, with automobile sales standing at 17.51 million units in FY22.

Conclusion :
India economy is fastest growing economy. Unorganized sectors like Automotive Aftermarket are being organized using technology. There is a market shift from aggregators (FOCO Models) to organized players (COCO Models) and there are companies with SAAS (software as a service) business model companies to support these mechanics, repair outlets.