Markets See Best Weekly Run In Four Years
India's key indices had another solid run on Thursday last week to log their best week in more than four years
On Episode 561 of The Core Report, financial journalist Govindraj Ethiraj talks to Kunal Khattar, Founder at AdvantEdge.
SHOW NOTES
(00:00) The Take
(09:09) Markets see best weekly run in four years
(11:37) Oil markets experience extreme volaitlity
(13:35) Global trade uncertainty is pushing investors towards consumer facing stocks.
(15:30) Maruti Suzuki Chairman says India cannot grow if it hides behind tariff walls
(18:08) What is the future for electric vehicles?
NOTE: This transcript contains the host's monologue and includes interview transcripts by a machine. Human eyes have gone through the script but there might still be errors in some of the text, so please refer to the audio in case you need to clarify any part. If you want to get in touch regarding any feedback, you can drop us a message on [email protected].
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Good morning, it's Monday the 21st of April and this is Govind Raj at Sriraj Headquartered and Broadcasting as well as streaming from Mumbai, India's financial capital. Well, welcome back from a long holiday in case you could take one. If not, it will be a while before we encounter holiday-shortened trading weeks of the kind that we've been seeing in recent weeks.
The Take
Another startup imploded last week. This time it was BlueSmart, a Delhi-based cab company which suspended its operations abruptly, grounded some 8,000-plus cars, and left thousands of its drivers in the lurch and also blocked funds that customers had parked in the company's app.
Allegations of malfeasance and fraud are flying hard and fast targeted at Gensol, a publicly listed company run by the same promoter brothers who allegedly diverted hundreds of crores of rupees from that company, that's Gensol, including into a 43 crore rupee apartment for their mother, investments in other startups, and a fancy golf kit. Now, BlueSmart's fleet, the company in the public eye, applies primarily in Delhi but also in Bangalore and Mumbai, unlike Gensol, which is a more B2B company doing solar engineering and construction contracts. But Gensol bought cars and leased them to BlueSmart so the links were strong.
Now, BlueSmart could perhaps survive this mishap with a new owner if one is found before it's too late. Frozen cash flows, particularly for sustained periods, are tough to recover from for any company. Now, the new owner will have to reckon with a few fundamental questions, whether the cab aggregator business model based on electric vehicles can work, even with subsidies and investors still betting on mobility and electric as a path to sustainability and climate tech, and how much water or ions, for that matter, does this approach hold in an era of drill baby drill, which is, of course, not clear enough. Now, the BlueSmart Gensol promoter shenanigans will be discussed for some time to come, and perhaps more time than necessary will be spent on the objects of their affection, so to speak, because nothing attracts attention and kicks off a dinner party conversation like a 26 lakh rupee golf set, which surely puts wealth and the leisure time potentially devoted to spending that wealth in perspective.
Not to forget that company funds that were inappropriately used to buy all of this. The BlueSmart fiasco erupted in the same week as another story came to light. This one involved some startup companies which got notices from the income tax department in recent months, asking them to explain funds deposited in their account over the last five years.
The investments in this case appeared to have come from Singapore, and the section quoted was section 68 of the Income Tax Act, a fairly blanket rule that allows the income tax department to question unexplained credits in taxpayers' books. The notices currently issued required companies to establish the source identity of the foreign investor, their creditworthiness, and the genuineness of the transaction with documents. The approach and treatment is very similar to angel tax, where the income tax questioned the premium an investor may have paid to acquire shares in a certain company and then proceeded to treat that investment as an income, thus making the company in question liable to pay a 30% tax on that figure.
In this case, the sweep is broader because it's not the value that's being questioned but whether the funds that came in were investments to start with. The income tax department has also sought in some of these cases details of those investors and their financial backgrounds, and quite evidently the details that have been asked for are quite challenging for those companies or individuals to share, particularly cross-border. Now, the income tax notices obviously follow some method, even in all this madness.
An official told Business Standard that when information about a taxpayer's foreign accounts or investments received through treaty partners doesn't reconcile with their income tax returns, it triggers automated scrutiny. In particular, that official said transactions are being scrutinised under the principal purpose test and anti-abuse provision included in bilateral tax treaty to assess whether the primary intent of routing funds to Singapore was to unlawfully claim treaty benefits or avoid taxes. Now, going by some past instances or accounts, it's quite likely that some of those investments that came into Indian companies were established or as round-tripping ones or funds that were sent illegally overseas and then coming back, or perhaps the bona fides of the investors were seen as suspect, at least in the eyes of Indian regulators.
I now go back to Trade Minister Piyush Goyal's comments two weeks ago, admonishing Indian startups of pouring their engineering genius into delivering Chinese fried rice in record time, while their Chinese counterparts were setting records with AI breakthroughs like DeepSea. The country's startup ecosystem pounced on Mr. Goyal and pointed out how difficult it was to do business in India. Other leading lights spoke of the various problems faced in running a business in India, whether in the domestic or export markets.
It was also pointed out that delivery boy jobs were also jobs in the country which otherwise struggles to create sufficient employment for its burgeoning youth workforce, and that raising billions of dollars to build an app and the attendant logistics ecosystem that can get a shampoo delivered to you in 10 minutes was as close to genius as the system would allow. An earlier edition of The Take has already dwelt on all of this and argued that this is a flawed construct somewhat, also because no one stops you from delivering a can of soda in 10 minutes and creating wealth for yourself in that process, but one can surely ask, as Mr. Goyal did, if that is the pinnacle of technological achievement for a country with so much talent as India. The Take also pointed out that we tend to overlook India's successes in areas like space, where we launched some of the cheapest satellites in the world at scale, used artificial intelligence to drill oil, and all by engineers who are paid a fraction of what their food delivery coding or programming counterparts earn.
Now, the larger problem lies in the difficulty of accepting that we're condemned to a mating dance of sorts between the regulators and the regulated, and nothing tells me that this is going to change however much we hope to. Prasesh Sa, founder of diversified finance company Edelweiss, told me in an interview just a week before that he would not start a bank even if offered a licence because the sector is just too regulated, apart from the fact that margins and business is not easy anymore. According to him, regulation in the context of banking and finance has only got tighter since 2018, when the ILNFS scam surfaced, which saw the public sector bank-supported institution default on massive loans.
Now, the people who write and enforce regulation, like the section 68 we discussed earlier, are like us, at least up to the point where we diverge into private or government jobs, and now they see a world where the boundaries between honesty and dishonesty become difficult to separate. Everyone, including a salivating media, revered startups to the point that they appear to operate beyond the usual confines of business, in a rarefied atmosphere where there were little rules and no gravity, until BYJU's, the biggest of them all at that time, self-detonated amidst a series of governance scandals, which are case studies in themselves. As much for the brazenness of fund diversions, and thus fraud, as for the staggering blindness of the investors who poured billions of dollars and just sat on the board.
Now, BYJU's and BlueSmart are not the only examples. There have been several other governance failures, small and big. Another big one was Paytm, another much-revered icon where the Reserve Bank of India imposed curbs on an unlisted Paytm payments bank after years-long warnings about data flows between it and Paytm, a separate business entity that trades on the stock exchange's 197 communications.
So, we would all like the income tax department to go easy on companies. We would all like them to make it easy to do business. But easy to do business to do what?
Because if it turns out that a substantial number of companies don't follow the law, even in spirit, leave a loan letter, and perhaps never intended to, then what does a taxman do? Particularly since the most revered corner of the economy, the startups turn out to be often operating with exactly the same moral compass as their predecessors. Now, this is not to say that every company should be sent show-cause notices and make the honest suffer for the misdemeanours of the dishonest few.
But the law is wired like that in India. The more we change it, the more it remains the same. We may drop some laws in the name of reform, but we quickly reinstate fresh ones, pointing to how some promoter or company pulled a fast one and cheated the exchequer of millions of rupees due.
I've been personally part of several discussions where the taxman has quoted gory examples of loot and pillage to justify a new section or guideline. Now, can all of this change? I would like to say yes, but it's extremely unlikely it will in my lifetime.
The latest attempt to simplify and produce a new income tax bill 2025 has already been dismissed by experts as a renumbering exercise. Work is still on and suggestions are presently being invited by a parliamentary panel that is looking into it. We have to live with more complex regulation than in most places.
It's not that we can't do business or succeed in this fairly difficult environment, it's just that it takes much more effort and determination. And we have to keep fighting for lesser rules and lighter implementation of existing rules. We cannot give up that effort, but we have to accept that the mating dance will continue.
And that brings us to the top stories and themes for the day.
The stock markets see their best weekly run in four years.
The oil markets are seeing extreme volatility.
Global trade uncertainty is pushing investors towards consumer-facing stock.
Maruti Suzuki chairman R.C. Bhargava says India cannot grow if it hides behind tariff walls.
What is the future for electric vehicles?
A Solid Run
India's key indices had another solid run on Thursday last week to block their best week in more than five years. Moreover, all the year-to-date losses that of 2025 now stand erased. Financial stocks, some of which have hit all-time highs, are one reason for this jump.
Importantly, while Indian indices rose 4.5% last week, the major Asian markets continue to underperform as the uncertainty over U.S. tariffs and their impact on economic growth stayed. ICICI and HDFC Bank jumped about 7% and 5.5% each. That's last week to hit lifetime highs ahead of their earnings release over the weekend.
And I'll come to that thanks to deposit cuts, which were seen as contributing to stronger net margins. Now, HDFC Bank reported slightly lower net revenue thanks to the absence of a one-time gain that it had got earlier from HDFC Traderler, a subsidiary, and a 6.7% growth in net profit. Net interest income rose 10.3%. Now, ICICI Bank, however, outperformed on profitability with net profit up 18% year-on-year in Q4. That's what we are talking about for both cases. And 15.5% for the full year. ICICI's growth in net interest income was about 11%.
ICICI also declared a dividend of Rs. 11 per equity share, which is the highest dividend payout in the last 10 years, according to a report in Mint. Elsewhere, India's top-ranked IT services companies TCS Infosys and Wipro disappointed with their March quarter and full year 25 scorecards on multiple counts and collectively signalled heightened caution up ahead, a report in the Business Standards said, adding that concerns were reflected in outlook to hesitation to commit up front on wage hikes.
Meanwhile, we don't know if it will continue or to what extent, but last week we saw some $1 billion or a little over $1 billion of foreign portfolio investments come in between Tuesday and Wednesday. The benchmarks are still down from their lifetime highs, but only about 9% or so or less than 10% as opposed to the 18% bottom that they had hit in March this year. On Thursday, the Sensex closed at 78,553, up 1,509 points, while the Nifty was up 415 points to 23,852.
On Wall Street, the S&P 500 closed marginally higher on Thursday, but this was after much swinging. The Dow Jones, however, was down 527 points or 1.3%, and both the Dow and the Nasdaq have posted three days of losses at the time. Oil is volatile The oil markets are experiencing levels of volatility not seen in a while.
This has been triggered by a multitude of forces ranging from US President Trump's tariffs to the potential increase in oil supply after the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries Plus said it would boost output at a time when expectation was that they would hold or even cut back because of likely slowing growth. The jewel shocks sent US crude futures down almost 7% for the biggest decline since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, while a key gauge of volatility hit a six-month high, according to Bloomberg. Brent crude is currently quoting around $64, and it would be interesting to see what the coming week brings.
Last week, HSBC revised down its Brent crude oil forecast for 2025 and 2026, for roughly the same reasons that we've been discussing. Its 2025 forecast sees Brent at $68.50 a barrel, down from $73 a barrel, which was its previous estimate, and the 2026 prediction is down to $65 a barrel, compared to its earlier estimate of $70 a barrel.
Gold Is High But Steady
Gold prices are holding steady and in India are inching towards the Rs 100,000 mark, with the price of 10 grams of gold now at about Rs 97,500 as of Friday.
Gold prices fell slightly on Thursday after hitting a record high that's globally of $3,357 per ounce, and investors appear to have booked profits ahead of a long weekend, according to Reuters. Meanwhile, Citibank Research has raised its gold price target for the next three months to $3,500 per ounce, from $3,200 thanks to fresh buying from Chinese insurers and safe haven flows amidst the risks that we now see all around us. Citibank said that China's recent move to let 10 insurers allocate up to 1% of their total assets to gold could generate an annual demand of about 255 tonnes, that's equal to a quarter of total global central bank buying.
Consumer Stocks Are Looking Good
The global trade war is providing for consumer stocks in Asia, as investors move funds into companies that focus on domestic economies, new reports from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have said. Fidelity International said it snapped up battered Chinese consumer stocks, betting the companies will benefit from government stimulus, according to a Bloomberg report, which also added that the MSCI Asia-Pacific Consumer Staples Index has risen 5% since April 2, the best performance amongst 11 sectors and beating the broader benchmark's 2.5% drop. The staples focus has benefited, among others, supermarket chains, beverage and dairy makers in China and Japan.
The interesting part is the reversal in fortunes and perceptions. Consumer staples had been ignored as the markets turned their eyes on AI stocks and tech stocks in the last few years. This is of course more in Asia.
The cohort is also getting a boost from signs that Asian governments are ready to roll out fiscal stimulus to support spending. China, of course, is rolling out stimulus packages to boost household spending, and India is also expected to see positive benefits from an above-normal monsoon that's been forecast, which could drive up rural demand and then there is that other tax benefit that should be flowing into taxpayers' pockets. So broadly, Asian consumer stocks have also fared better than peers in US and Europe during the market turmoil, thanks to its policy support comments.
In contrast, what has not done well or has suffered is stocks of discretionary goods companies, which have been hit on expectations that households will cut back on non-essential spending. The MSCI Asia Gauge for Consumer Discretionaries has fallen over 5% since April 2nd, which is the second biggest drop amongst sectors. And the report finally says that a consensus is forming that staples is a safer bet and the sectoral gauge is expected to offer twice the earnings growth that the MSCI Asia-Pacific Index may deliver over the next 12 months.
The India View On The Tariff Wars
Maruti Suzuki Chairman R C Bhargava has made a strong case for reducing tariffs saying India cannot hide behind tariff walls if it has to grow. The Vixit Bharat or Developed India target cannot be met if we have tariff walls, he told the Economic Times, a statement which at best will have mixed reactions from the rest of industry, which has often indicated its desire for higher tariffs. Bhargava, who heads Maruti, which is India's largest carmaker, said while the country opens up, the government and industry should collaborate to make vehicles manufactured here more competitive to benefit from the opportunities emerging on the global stage.
Tariffs restrict competition, he said, speaking with Economic Times, adding that company managements also need to work to make themselves more competitive. Management systems, processes, and attitudes have to change to attain higher competitiveness, he said. India levies an import duty of about 70% on cars valued at more than $40,000, including CIF, that's cost insurance and freight, and a 40% agriculture infrastructure and development cess on top of that.
Bhargava also told the Economic Times he felt the realignment in trade frontiers globally could boost exports, scale up investments, and revitalise the manufacturing landscape in India. In short, he sees all of this as an opportunity. But he also pointed to the ground-level challenges, including of state governments, who would have to work on reducing time required for processing clearances and establishing infrastructure.
His larger point was that there would be opportunities, but countries like Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Thailand would rush in, and thus India will have to move faster, particularly at the state government level, in awarding and moving on local clearances like in land, power, water, and so on. Elsewhere in the tariff universe, a Boeing jet intended for use by a Chinese airline has been sent back to the manufacturer in the United States on Sunday, a victim of the tit-for-tat bilateral tariffs launched by President Trump in his global trade offensive, according to Reuters. The Boeing 737 MAX, which was meant for China's Xiamen Airlines, that's spelled X-I-A-M-E-N Airlines, with its livery, landed at Seattle's Boeing Field on Sunday, according to a Reuters report and witness.
It's highly unlikely China will accept any aircraft at these tariff levels. Reuters says 125% on tariff, with a market value of $55 million, would quite likely lead airline CEOs deferring purchases rather than paying duty. Steep levies on Chinese-made ships arriving at U.S. ports have been proposed, up to as much as $1.5 million, as part of a plan to bring more ship manufacturing back to the U.S., a policy which has bipartisan support, according to a Reuters report.
BluSmart
The recent grounding of the fleet by EV-only ride-hailing company BlueSmart has raised the issue of sustainability of both the ride-hailing model as well as EVs in general and specific. While there are problems exclusive to BlueSmart, including charges of diversion of funds in a listed company run by the same promoters which leased EV cars to BlueSmart, there are other questions that are genetic. Many ride-hailing companies are dropping commission-based models and switching to subscription fees for their drivers, which is seen as friendly.
Elsewhere, there's a fundamental question about EVs. Once you strip away the subsidies and also funding lines that are usually deserved for climate tech and clean tech, what happens then? I reached out to Kunal Khattar, who runs Advantage, which says it's the first and most successful mobility fund in India with investments in both ride-hailing as well as battery startups.
And I began by asking him what ailed the EV industry?
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Kunal Khattar: I think ultimately, if you were to ask me, I think the electrification of shared mobility platforms is inevitable. It's just a question of how you go about doing it. I think from a customer's point of view, at least from what we've gathered, people are not so particular about whether an ICE vehicle is going to pick them up or an EV vehicle.
They are more bothered about other elements of that transaction, which is the estimated time of arrival, whether the vehicle is clean or not, and whether the driver is courteous and professional. I mean, if you're able to deliver on those aspects, I think whether it's a Tata EV or a Maruti Desire petrol or CNG, customers will not bother. I think BlueSmart did a terrific job in delivering on the elements that were important and relevant.
I think Uberola sort of seems to have lost the way of being a pure marketplace model. Their ability to control quality, consistency, deliver, superior service sort of started falling. And the reason for that, I think, is predominantly during COVID, where tens of thousands of these taxi drivers, these ride hailing partners as they like to call them, suffered financial stress and banks were not able to finance them.
So they really were struggling to add supply, which is why cars on these platforms today are now more than five, six years old and still going, because they've not been able to replace them. Fortunately now, as time goes by, credit scores are coming back and we've started seeing more and more vehicles being added onto the platform, but demand is outstripping supply and that is why you're seeing a deterioration of quality. Going back to what BlueSmart did, I think it's important for us to reiterate that a majority of the challenges that BlueSmart has faced today is because of wrongdoings at Gensol.
Nothing to do with BlueSmart itself. I think it was a quality product. I have met so many people who loved BlueSmart, including me.
I was a regular customer, but ultimately what BlueSmart was delivering was a superior product at a highly subsidised price and Gensol was absorbing that subsidy. So I mean, anybody who gets a superior product and you're not paying full price for it, as Indians, we will all love that. So I don't think there is, it's a question of how there were issues with BlueSmart itself.
Yes, there were business model challenges and things like that, but ultimately what brought down, brought about the fall down of BlueSmart was not the business or the use of electric vehicles, it was actually things that were going on in Gensol.
Govindraj Ethiraj: Right. So if we were to replace electric or substitute electric with, let's say, ICE engines in the same company, how would things have been? This is a purely hypothetical question.
Kunal Khattar: So I think it's important to understand how two-sided marketplaces work. I think the core challenge is there, right? So ultimately in a mobility, shared mobility platform, you've got supply and you've got demand.
Ultimately, for you to operate in a city, you have to have enough liquidity or installed base that a customer across the entire city, if they request for a ride, is able to receive a car, whether it's a two-wheeler or four-wheeler, in about under four to five minutes. I mean, you and I also, when we ask for an Uber, Ola, Rapido or BlueSmart, if the waiting time is 15-20 minutes, the chances of you transacting is low. Now for a five-minute ETA or estimated time of arrival, there's a certain number of volumes that you need.
As per our calculations in NCR, you need about 12,000 cars for a customer anywhere in that geographic area to request for a mobility option, which is picked up within five to six minutes. Now, which means that you can't go from zero to 12,000 cars overnight. You've got to go through that process, which is why initially these mobility platforms burn a lot of money, because you have to generate supply.
So that sits on standby, but there is very little demand. So you have to pay drivers or car owners to be just available on the app, but there's very little revenue coming. So I think BlueSmart was in the process of building those volumes, right?
I think they had 12,000 cars, I believe, or 9,000, but they spread it across three cities. Now, if you were to ask me, as somebody who's built marketplaces, both in the US and India, if they had all 8,500 cars running in Delhi, they would probably have become positive from a unit level, because you would have become on demand. Now, this is the key thing.
For ride-sharing platforms to start getting positive at a unit level, you've got to be an on-demand service. BlueSmart till now was not an on-demand service. You had to pre-schedule your ride, which means the utilisation of their vehicles was not that good.
So whether it's ICE or EV is not as important as the number or the density or the supply liquidity that you have. And Uber, Ola, Rapido today have crossed that threshold. In cities that they operate, they have enough liquidity, enough installed base, enough supply to be able to deliver a customer or reach a customer in under five minutes.
So that, for me, is the most important.
Govindraj Ethiraj: And I'd love to sort of delve into that, but it's a slightly different discussion because I want to stick to electricity. Is there any concern because of this on the viability of EVs in general, particularly in the context of, let's say, cabs or taxis or overall, and then everything that goes into it, including batteries and charging infrastructure and so on?
Kunal Khattar: So if you ask me, I think ultimately what happens is that in every business, every opportunity, there are multiple operators. Not every company is going to survive or thrive. I think with BlueSmart specifically, again, the issues or challenges that brought down BlueSmart had nothing to do with the fact that they were operating an EV.
I'll tell you two elements, I think, that were challenging for BlueSmart. One was, of course, the fact that a majority of the financial misappropriations or whatever it is, the corporate governance was with Gensol, not necessarily BlueSmart. I think BlueSmart was still a pretty clean company because they had independent directors, they had investor directors on the board with people who they had a lot of respect for, whether it was the representative from BP Ventures or Indrapreet Wadhwa.
It was a relatively well-managed company. I think the challenge with BlueSmart, when I mentioned, of course, was that the density was missing. The second was, if you really look at the form factor, a majority of their fleet consisted of Tata vehicles.
They were still trying to go after the value customer. Now, the challenge with the Tata vehicle is that it's been designed for personal mobility, which means that even if you have a 200, 250-kilometre range, now that range is consistent only if you are spending four, five hours to charge the vehicle. Because BlueSmart was running these vehicles on double shifts, which means they didn't have the luxury of charging these twice a day and therefore had eight to nine hours of downtime, they were pushing these cars through rapid charging.
Rapid charging typically, if not done properly, often done repeatedly, results in a significant reduction in range. That reduction in range resulted in even lower utilisation. So, you were stuck with cars that have not been designed for rapid charging, and have not been designed for ride-sharing.
If you ask me, that was one of the biggest challenges that they have. Today in India, I don't think we have any vehicle that's been designed for ride-sharing. Most of the OEMs are designing, manufacturing and selling cars meant for personal mobility.
The needs of an individual are very different to that of a ride-sharing platform.
Govindraj Ethiraj: Takes us to a fundamental question. Why did the company then opt or what was the allure of a full EV fleet company to start with?
Kunal Khattar: I think the proposition was very clear. If you look at it, go back to when BlueSmart started. They also started off as a supplier to an Uber platform.
Now, Uber has already solved the equation on the demand side. There was enough liquidity, enough customers who were demanding vehicles. Initially, when BlueSmart started, just like Everest, they were basically integrating and becoming a supplier on Uber's platform.
Now, Uber again created a separate category called Uber Grip. I'm on the board of Rapido and regularly discuss this with the founders at Rapido. What we've realised is, back to my point, customers are expecting timely delivery, etc.
I think that from Rapido's perspective, they're actually also electrifying their fleet, but they're just adding their electric vehicles to their existing sedan category, not really creating a separate because we just don't have the volumes and the density to think that we can have a separate vertical right now till we don't have that. So, I don't think, again, back to your question, I think it's a question of why they chose it. Actually, at that point, there was a lot of capital available for companies that were building pure electric or climate-orientated business models, and that's why they were able to raise capital for that.
Govindraj Ethiraj: Right, and which also, I guess, leads me to the technology question. So, you said that, I mean, some of the shortcomings that you've talked about are linked to technology, the ability to charge batteries fast, and if you try that, well, then the batteries lose their efficacy and so on. So, where are we on that journey?
And for those who are thinking, I mean, I'm not saying I want to become an electric cab operator, but in general thinking about electricity.
Kunal Khattar: So, I think there are two ways to go. If I look at other form factors, right, commercial three-wheelers, whether it's cargo or passenger, or two-wheelers being used for food delivery, quick commerce, we've seen companies that have built specific variants or models for ride-hailing or for B2B use cases, right. We've got companies like Ulu and Baaz that have got vehicles for food deliveries, and we've got companies like Altegrin and Euler that are building EVs for that.
Now, smaller form factors, you could do battery swapping. That removes the need to rapidly charge a vehicle every time you want to do it, because for commercial purposes, uptime is critical. Every hour that you are down, you are losing potential revenue.
So, you've solved for it in two-wheelers and three-wheelers. You've solved it in a commercial. Exponents today have technology that can charge a bus in 15 minutes.
So, there are two ways. One is that sooner or later, people are going to come out with four-wheelers specifically for ride-sharing. I don't know if battery swap is viable in large form factors, but there will be somebody, I'm sure you've read about BYD is now able to charge a car in five minutes.
So, that would be an incredible product for ride-sharing with zero downtime. It removes the need for real estate, removes the need for charging infrastructure and things like that. So, that's going to happen.
The other way you could do it was, you could have gone a super premium route, right? Not worry about the value-seeking customer, but say, look, okay, BlueSmart is going to be, or any company is going to be a premium product. You buy a company or a product, which may be slightly more expensive.
The MS, the MG ZS is a product, even BYD has products that have a four, 500 kilometre range, which is more than sufficient to do an entire day of travelling with no need to do a top-up charge or that. And then do slow charging during the night where there is very little demand. There is a company based out of Bangalore called Shofo, which has chosen that route.
When I met with Vikas, I talked to him about it and I told him, I said, focus on the premium customer. Again, premium customers have different needs, right? So there, that was the other way that they could have gone and started with premium products that are there.
So to your point, I'm sure there will be products available or technology that will help you achieve the need for high uptime. But ultimately, I'm pretty convinced that we're going to see a hundred percent electrification of all mobility platforms in the next three to five years.
Govindraj Ethiraj: Saying that you answered my last question, which was going to be exactly that. Kunal, thank you so much for joining me.
Kunal Khattar: Okay. My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.
