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A year ago, a founder in the electric vehicle market told me that there were about 500 EV startups in India.
That number shocked me.
The founder, who has traveled extensively across the country, even showed me pictures of small companies in rural areas putting together EV bikes. These were mostly people in garages who use white-label components to assemble their bikes. .
This indicates how intense the competition in India’s two-wheeler EV space is. Even in Southeast Asia, there are several EV scooters already out in the market that I haven’t even heard of.
Competition in the EV market has been heating up in the region, with several new players and gasoline bike manufacturers also entering the space. Honda – which has the largest market share in Indonesia’s motorcycle market – has launched its own e-scooters in the country.
With incumbents coming into the market, it has put pressure on EV startups that might not have deep enough pockets to go toe-to-toe with them.
In addition, automobile giants already have a large network of dealerships and after-sales service centers – the most critical support for customers. In India’s Ola, for example, is beefing up its retail and service netwo4k after losing market share to automobile incumbents like TVS Motor and Bajaj Auto.
With VCs tightening their purse strings, we could see more consolidation in the EV space. Case in point: Earlier this week, we broke the news that Singapore-based Ion Mobility is being acquired by TVS Motor at a discount.
The Indian two-wheeler company has been a strategic investor in Ion Mobility since February 2023, when it injected US$18.7 million. TVS Motor even added capital a year later.
While Ion Mobility has been operating for five years, it has yet to get its EV bikes on the road. It faced delays in delivering its M1-S model to customers who had placed pre-orders and even issued full refunds to them in December 2024.
In my story, we take a look at what led to the delays for Ion Mobility and what TVS Motor’s acquisition means for its plans to break into Southeast Asia’s EV market.
— Collin Furtado, journalist at Tech in Asia
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