Carsome Completes Its Acquisition of Parent Company Mobil123 and Carmudi Indonesia

Carsome Group has announced that it has completed its acquisition of iCar Asia. They took over 80.1% of the shares of Catcha Group and other shareholders. After this corporate action, Carsome became the sole shareholder in the automotive product listing company.

iCar Asia has previously been listed on the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) since September 2012. When this news was published, the market capitalization of iCar Asia (ASX: ICQ) was in the range of AUD 238.4 million or equivalent to 2.4 trillion Rupiah.

As is known, iCar Asia has a number of automotive listing platforms spread across a number of countries in Southeast Asia. In Indonesia, they also operate the Mobil123 portal for consumers and the SiJari application for car dealers.

September 2019, iCar Asia also announced its acquisition of Carmudi Indonesia for 42 billion Rupiah. Both Carmudi and Mobil123 are currently still operating under their own brands. In addition to the listing portal, iCar Asia also has the OtoSpirit automotive media for the Indonesian market, which was founded in 2016.

In an official release, Carsome Co-founder & Group CEO Eric Cheng said that his party has been working with iCar Asia since July 2021.

“This partnership will enable us to further enhance our offering across search, consideration, purchase and fulfillment processes, spanning the entire automotive ecosystem anchored in the core values ​​of trust, transparency and technology.”

In addition, it is hoped that the inclusion of iCar Asia in strategic synergies will allow Carsome to provide more diverse solutions and experiences throughout the car buying and selling value chain, both for dealers and consumers.

Moreover, it is projected that the turnover of the used car buying and selling business in the Southeast Asia region annually generates a value of more than $55 billion.

Carsome Fast Move

Earlier this year, Carsome just announced the closure of its $290 million series E funding or approximately 4.1 trillion Rupiah; and managed to boost the company’s valuation to around $1.7 billion.

Currently they are running on a C2B2C business model — not only buying from consumers and selling them to a network of dealers, they are now also selling used cars directly to consumers.

Equipped with O2O experience through experience centers spread across various cities. Regarding the M&A strategy, this is not the first time Carsome has done it.

Previously, their unit in Indonesia has also acquired a majority stake in PT Universal Collection, a car and motorcycle auction service company that has branch offices in various regions in Indonesia.

This action is said to support the company’s omnichannel strategy, to offer integrated online-offline services.

Car Marketplace Platform is Experiencing Rapid Growth Momentum

For the car marketplace platform itself, it is currently experiencing rapid growth momentum. Apart from Carsome, a number of other startups also received significant funding.

Including the latest Moladin as a local challenger, in mid-January they announced a series A funding that boosted the company’s valuation to 3.3 trillion Rupiah. In addition, in the regional arena there is also Carro who has also reached the unicorn milestone.

As for the listing platform itself, Mobil123 and Carmudi are among the ones that get the highest attention when it comes to traffic achievement – ​​in the top 10 most visited sites.

In addition, they also have a number of competitors, one of which is Oto.com, OLX Indonesia, GridOto, to CintaMobil (part of the Dai Viet Group, from Vietnam).

Carsome also released “Carsome Insights 2021”.  This annual report describes trends that have been collected throughout 2021 from consumers and Carsome’s used car dealer partners in various countries where the company operates, including Indonesia.

The trends in question include the brand, model, color, and age of the vehicles traded at Carsome. In doing so, Carsome leverages the company’s data processing capabilities to obtain more accurate information that shows trends in the used car industry. Carsome Insights is one manifestation of that.