Ola Electric Mobility Limited (OLAELEC) Q4 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Hi, everyone. Good day and welcome to Ola Electric, Q4, and FI26 earnings conference call. As a reminder, all participants will be on the listen-only mode, and there will be an opportunity for you to ask questions. After the opening remarks conclude, please note that this conference is being recorded. Before we begin, a few quick announcements for the attendees. Anything said on this call which reflects our outlook for the future, or which could be construed as a forward-looking statement, may involve risks and uncertainties. Such statements or comments are not guarantees of future performance, and actual results may differ from those statements. Now, I would like to request Bhavesha Grawal, Chairman and Managing Director, and Shri Deepak Hastogi, CFO All Electric, to begin the conference. To begin, first, I would request And, uh... Thank you, Deepak, to start with opening remarks.

Before you start, Deepak, I just want to say welcome, everybody. An important quarter for us. I hope everybody has had the chance to read our shareholders' letter. A bunch of nuances which we will cover through the Q&A, and definitely something we want to make sure we highlight some of the important turnarounds that the company has now gone through over the last couple of quarters. So, Deepak, you make your remarks, and then I'll add wherever I want to.

Yeah. Thank you so much, Babish. So, good evening, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Financial year 26 was a year in which volumes were lower than where we wanted to be, but it was also a year in which the fundamentals of Ola Electric became materially stronger. We exited the year with industry-leading gross margins at 38.5%. Thank you. A much lower cost base, sharply improved execution metrics, better product quality, our first operating cash flow positive quarter, and a giga factory which is now entering a scale-up. This progress comes at an important moment for India. The next few years will be defined by two structural shifts happening together, mobility moving from ice to EV and energy moving from imported fuels to locally made batteries. Polar is building across both ships, electric mobility, cell manufacturing, and energy storage on an integrated platform. So let me first start with the margins. In Q4, for 24, 25, 26, consolidated gross margins reached 38.5%, up from 34.3%. In Q3 and 13.7% in Q4, similar, you know, quarter last year. Excluding PLI gross margins was 33.5%. This is now an industry-leading margin profile ahead of most two-wheelers' OEMs, including ICE incumbents. It reflects the structural advantages we have built over last few years. Vertical integration, Gen3 maturity. Pricing architecture, downstream control, and increasing integration of our own cells.

On this point, Deepak, I just pause you. I think gross margins has been definitely one of the things we've been highlighting quarter on quarter for the last many quarters. And this actually shows the success of our vertically integrated approach on both the manufacturing supply chain as well as on the front end. And many people frequently ask us about the sustainability of these gross margins and one of the potential misconceptions is that this is because of incentives. So you can see without PLI also, gross margins are fairly high. So, you know, we believe very strongly that our gross margins will remain a very strong structural advantage for us going into the future as we rebound our volumes. And we are actually now even higher, much higher than ICE industry cross-margin. So if we, you know, for EV competitors to catch up with us, it's going to take a lot of investments into technology and manufacturing, which is actually what has led to this meaningful step. And over the longer term also, we can actually expect gross margins to incrementally keep going up. Obviously, in the short term, there will be commodity pressures as well as some of this gross margin in the last month or two we've invested into aggressive growth. But still, gross margins will remain fairly healthy for us in the short term also. And in the long term, we can actually expect even more incrementally higher gross margins as we go along.

Thank you, Bhavish. So, for financial year 26, consolidated revenue stood at 2,253 crores with 173,794 deliveries and consolidated gross margin improved to 30.6% while values were impacted through the year. The improvement in margin shows the underlying strength of our product economics and operating model. I would now actually, you know, I like the... Cash flows, you know, which, you know, this is the first time we actually have a positive cash flows. So I'll just talk about it. And then I'll ask Dhabhis to obviously add his comments. So Q4 was the first operating cash flow positive quarter. Consolidated CFO was 91 crores, supported by strong gross margins, PLI inflows, lower OPEX, and tighter working capital display. The auto business delivered 213 crores of CFO and 173 crores of free cash flow in Q4. This is an important milestone as Ola moves from a heavy build-out phase to a disciplined scale-up.

Oh, I think Deepak, you covered. I think the only point I will accentuate here is that, you know, 2-4 revenues were low because deliveries were low, but our gross margin leadership as well as our OPEX reduction, both have actually now hit a good stride. And on OPEX, you can see there's a chart in the first few pages that from same quarter last year to this quarter, our OPEX is actually half. And that includes all OPEX, including store lease rentals. And we are further saying that in the next couple of quarters, we'll actually get our OPEX down to about 100, 120 crores a month. So further down while business rebounds. And the good thing about our business is that because we are so vertically integrated on both the back end and the front end. Almost 90 plus percent of our OPEX is actually fixed. That means operating leverage is very high. So as we have reduced our operating cost through efficiencies, and as now we are rebounding sales, a lot of it is translating into net margin for us. And this is specifically seen in the auto business. So, you see, segment financials, our auto business, like Deepak said, and, you know, we report different cash flows for both the segments because both segments are in very different stages of evolution. Auto is now very close to free cash flow generation. As soon as we get our volumes a little bit higher in this rebound period, we will generate meaningful, sustained free cash flow. Sell is still an investment phase, but that also through this financial year will get into sustained revenue growth and overtime cash flow generation. If you see annually also compare our auto segment F525 versus F526 on page 15, you can see how our CFO has actually meaningfully improved over this period. And for our auto business, there is no more capex needed as we scale up. So CFO to free cash flow conversion will also be fairly high. I also want to bring in here a little bit of the macro context, while so far we've covered our internal financials. But, you know, what we are also seeing in the market now is demand for EVs has actually gone up meaningfully in the last few weeks. And while other competitors will need to do more capex, as well as new product rollouts, we have our capacity on both automotive and gigafactory covered, because all the capex is now behind us. So we can easily scale up to a million units a year. Thank you. We are focused and somewhere in the in the note you also find that we are actually right now. Not on 31st March, but right now, in the current May period, running at a very low inventory level in our network. Because demand is so big, people are buying whatever they can find in the network from us. Our inventory, free inventory days, is actually down to three, four days. And we have an order backlog now. So the company is highly focused on ramping up the supply chain quickly enough so that we can fulfill these orders, the backlog also. And I actually expect as we improve our delivery timelines, volumes will go up another 10-20% in the near term. So very, very good signals from the demand growth in the market for EVs. And we are well positioned to capture it without any incremental capital required.

Thank you, Bhavesh. So, the third highlight, you know, which Bhavesh also touched upon is on the OPEX cost reset. Consolidated OPEX, including lease expenses, have meaningfully reduced from 844 crores in Q4 2425, which is last year, to 428 crores during this Q4 2526. This reflects network. Rationalization, tighter sales and service costs, lower fixed overheads, and stronger operating governance. We expect OPEX to move towards approximately 350 crores, we actually spoke about in our last shareholder's letter also, over the next couple of quarters as the full benefit of 26 actions flow through.

A couple of points on this also on the rebound I would like to add for everybody. If you see on page 6 and page 7, you can see how as we have improved service, the first chart on page 6, service backlogs as they have gone down, our sales has rebounded almost in a vShare recovery. And the chart below that shows you week on week how our registration numbers are ramping up. And on page 7, you see, the recovery for us has been broad-based. We are very strong in the north and east, which is actually a growing EV market, and we are gaining back our position in the south and west. So, the recovery in market share is fairly broad-based. Yeah, back to you Deepak.

Yeah, so this reset creates a stronger operating leverage. The core auto capex is already in place for up to 1 million. Bavish just spoke about it. For the auto business of annual capacity and giga, factory phase one infrastructure is in place for, you know, six gigawatt scale up, six gigawatt hour scale up. Together, the asset base can support approximately 15 to 20,000 crores of annual revenue scale across auto and sell without needing for meaningful incremental capex. With the reset OPEX base and Current gross margin structure, adjusted operating EBITDA break-even is achievable at around 20,000 to 25,000 units per month, subject to pricing mix and commodity conditions.

I want to just underline this. I know many of people on the street, investors have asked us the question on the break-even. So, you know, if you do the rough math and all the financials here that we talk about right now are consolidated. In the past segment, financials have created some level of confusion. So today we are just giving the communication on a consolidated financials break-even. So if you see our gross margins of around 35 plus percent, 38 percent in this quarter, our average ASP is about 1.4 lakhs or so, thereabouts. So, 50,000 rupees gross profit per vehicle, and OPEX, Consol OPEX cost, including lease rentals, of about 350 crores in the next quarter or so. So, the break-even, adjusted EBITDA break-even Consol comes to about 20,000 to 25,000 units a month. And in our rebound already, we are seeing a scatter. You saw March, April registration numbers, May also, if I'm sure most of you are tracking. Another thing we've added in this sheet for everybody now is we are also going to show deliveries, as well as registrations, as well as orders. Because the auto industry, the street tracks, wholesale and retail, typically, for us, those are very different. We don't have a dealer model, so there's no wholesale retail concept. Registrations is what you guys consider as retail. Deliveries is what we book as revenue. Orders is what we get when the customer comes into the store and pays. And because of our unique D2C business model, these three metrics also we will publish for future clarity. Another point I want to add here is on page 8. You see how while this period had service challenges and we were focused on solving them, brand has actually held well because our brand has a lot of fundamental strength from the quality and the performance of our product and the proposition of price-value equation of our product, which is unparalleled in the EV two-wheeler industry. So you can see here a very reputed third-party survey on brand strength. Our brand recall is industry-leading, and our NPS is also above industry averages. And specifically, NPS, where there are no service delays, is actually very, very healthy. So we remain very confident about the customer thinking and the customer sentiment on our business, and that's why we are seeing volumes ramp up quickly as we have now largely solved service, and as we are now ramping up our manufacturing and backend, the demand is growing along with it. We also have put there on page 9 a chart of Google searches. It's just the Google plant dashboard itself. So you can see Ola is by far the highest searched brand in the EV space in India. And all these are advantages and, you know, our business model does not have any spends on marketing, etc. So that also benefits when we think of operating costs.

Thank you. So execution improvement, which, you know, Bavish just talked about, I'll just add some more flavor to that. So execution improved meaningfully through the year. Product quality is improving with Gen 3 with warranty. Cost is 70% lower than Gen 2. Service metrics have also improved sharply with service stat down 88%, same day closures at approximately 87% and part pendency down 69%. Execution approved, sales started responding, April registrations were up 20% month-on-month, while the broader E2-wheeler industry declined by more than 22%.

On warranty, Deepak, I would like to highlight for the team, for everybody on the call here on page 6 of the shareholder's letter in the second paragraph. You can see how year-on-year our warranty costs have actually come down in a very material way. You know, in FI25, we had a 500 plus crore of warranty cost. In FI26, it's only 60 crores, 59 crores to be accurate. So, you know, what we've been sharing with you guys on our Gen3 platform being by far the industry leader, it is validated by our warranty costs in FI26. And that also kind of tells you that some of the service challenges that we had were largely linked to service network operations, which also in the KPIs, again, you can see in that we have meaningfully improved. So looking ahead, we feel very optimistic about our sales as well as customer sentiment.

Looking ahead to Q1 27, we expect 40 to 45,000 orders and consolidated revenue of 500 to 550 quotes, nearly double of the Q4 level. As volumes recover, we expect the auto business to move towards adjusted operating avatar and cash flow positivity through financial year 27. You know, there are a lot of questions on the bike, Vishen. I wanted to make sure that, you know, we actually address this as part of our narration.

Let me give the headline here, Thicham. So, you know, we launched the bike about a year ago, and we've been very consistent about our communication in the earnings calls that we are scaling it step by step. So now we are very, very happy to say actually that we are seeing good traction both on the EV bike industry. Bike industry itself in the last six months or so has more than tripled of a very small base right now, but the trend is very aggressively growing. You know, think of it as where EV scooters were five years ago before Ola really entered the market in a big way and scaled it up. Bikes are also there, and our market share in bikes is 50 plus percent. And bikes are a little different than scooters in terms of product. The customer expects more range in the bikes. And that's why our bike portfolio has slightly higher range than scooters for the customers. And specifically at the top end, actually, only because of our own Bharat cell, the 4680 cell, we can offer almost a 500 kilometer certified range product. So there's very strong interest in the bike and customers. Again, we are constrained not by demand there, but by supply. We are seeing significant uptick in the Roadster product in the northern belt of India, which is the heartland of the bike market of India. And I actually feel now, especially with the petrol prices in the macro, bike EV movement is here through the next couple of quarters. And we are fully ready to take best advantage of that.

So Roadster is becoming our second auto growth engine. Motorcycles are India's largest two-wheeler category and EV penetration remains very low. Olar now has 50% market share in electric motorcycles and bikes contributed 15% of April gross orders. With products going up to 9.1 kWh battery capacity and 500 plus km certified range, Roadster is built around the core motorcycle customer needs of range, performance and reliability. The giga factory is now entering the scale phase. We currently have 2.5 gigawatt hour operational capacity. Installation up to 6 gigawatt hour is largely complete with commercialization expected to be completed by the end of this quarter.

I think Deepak, before we go into operational updates, macro commentary is also very important because the way the country's energy security requirements and narrative is shaping up. Ola Electric is the only company which is actually straddling both of the critical domains. One is EVs and one is batteries. Now, it's very clear from both customer sentiment as well as government sentiment that EVCo encouraged Karanaya. All of you have seen how EV policy, today there were some media articles that for buses, etc., there will be incentives, etc. So, EV encouragement is from government as well as consumer side going up. But also, along with EV growth, two other things are happening. One is the clarity in the policy stakeholders is very clear that we will have to very quickly accelerate domestication of the battery supply chain. And your company there is the best position to do that. Then in the power grid itself, it's very clear that our solar rollout has kind of maxed out unless we start deploying batteries along with it. And that's why you can see already some announcement on floating solar along with batteries. So the government sentiment as well as policy sentiment, whatever we read from media, seems like they will be more just like ALMM in solar. They will be ALBM, ALCM. There will be hopefully some extension in the ACC PLI. There will be domestic procurement for DSS deployments mandates coming soon. And our battery business is actually right in the center of that potential for growth. Now, in our battery business, we have built our own domestic IP, and that's actually the reason why we have been able to create and productionize and scale up the Giga factory and get commercially viable yields and prices. And, you know, we have six gigawattas already installed. Six gigawattas. Two and a half was already done. The remaining three and a half is getting done this quarter. It was supposed to be done a month back, but due to the Iran war, some containers got delayed. But it's getting done in June. And we are actually going to be expanding that 6 to 20 gigawatt hour by next year, but only by raising capital separately at the cell entity, which also we have a lot of inbound interest from private equity players given the leadership of this asset that we have created. So I just want to underline this important point on the macro side that our company is very well in position to really leverage the tide and really come, you know, create this energy security stack for our country in a meaningful way and monetize it. There is some commentary here on our technology, you know, we will probably skip that in our commentary, but another point I want to make in our Gigafactory business is that we have actually, people gave you quick operating metrics. You can find that in page 12 and 13 also. But now we are focused on ramping up production to get revenue in the Gigafactory. And there are three engines of revenue built in this. If you go to page 13, you will see the chart there. We have our cells. The Potisic series is already out there. We are also working on a prismatic cell, which will be out soon. We haven't yet released details of that. But there are three revenue engines now. First is mobility, which is EVs. Obviously, our captive demand will eat up about one and a half to two gigawatt hour by the end of this financial year. But we are also now in conversations with external companies, Indian and global, who want to buy our own sales, given that they are world-class and industry-leading specs. The second demand engine which is already built is Shakti. Shakti we had launched last quarter and we have already delivered some to customers. We are constrained by supply of our sales because we are prioritizing our own auto business moving to our sales in general over Shakti production. But as Gigafactory ramps up through the next few months, Shakti will also meaningfully ramp up. And there we have very strong demand from both retail as well as B2B customers, telecom towers, petrol stations, dark stores, other organized retail chains. Everybody today has diesel generators and lead-acid batteries, and all of them want to replace that with lithium. The third big pillar which we are now creating is the grid storage. So this product is called Mahashakti, which is bigger Shakti, more energy, so Mahashakti. It will be built on our prismatic LFP platform. We are right now in product development. We have had conversations with many platforms there. We have shared specs. People are excited about our product there. And more details will follow through the next couple of quarters.

Okay, so I just wanted to, you know, emphasize that, you know, around 15% of the orders are already on our product using barred sales. And we plan to transition the full vehicle portfolio to our own sales by September 26th.

I think I would underline that, Deepak. This is a meaningful transition. Already 15% on our own 4680 cells in the market. Very good feedback from customers. And by end of next quarter, we plan to transition everything. So it's a meaningful ramp-up of our gigafactory happening as we speak.

So, to summarize, Ola is positioned across the two important pillars of India's energy future, electric mobility and batteries, vehicles create captive demand for the giga factory, cells improve our vehicles through range, cost, and supply chain control, and the same platform opens up energy storage through Shakti and Marhek. Our financial year 2627 priorities are clear, recover volumes, hold marginal leadership, reduce OPEX. Thank you so much. Now, I will open the floor for question and answers to the participants.

Thank you, Bhavish and Deepak. Now, we begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may use the raise hand option. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you will press the raise hand option once again. Participants are requested to unmute themselves before asking the questions. Before asking the question, we request you to introduce yourself with your full name and your organization. Now, we'll wait for a moment while the question queue assembles, and then we'll begin with the Q&A. Thank you, everyone. We'll take the first question from Mr. Amit Doshi from White Oak Capital. Please unmute yourself and ask a question.

Hello. Hello, Tim. Am I audible?

Yes, you are.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to ask the question, and first of all, many congratulations to have a good number in terms of marketing. So just I want to know that are we planning? In last quarter, you told that in quarter four, we are going to have a good revenue, but still it is not reflecting. Also, your team has given the data at the end of March, and you have a very good number of sales. That's why it is not reflecting in terms of the number. That is my question.

Okay, Meeta, I don't know what exactly you're referring to, but our registrations are public data, right? So, in March, it was 10,000, in April, it was 12,000, and May is tending towards 14,000 to 15,000. So, we are growing volumes, registrations. Our orders are growing ahead of registrations, but like I said, we have a production backlog now. So, some of that will come through in this quarter in terms of registrations. In terms of revenue, Q4 was a lower revenue because Q4 was also, like we said, a quarter where we focused a lot on our operations to fix the operations and then scale again, both on cost as well as customer experience. And we started scaling volumes again in the middle of March onwards. And the good thing about our business is volumes to our daily and weekly and monthly publicly in terms of registrations. The cost and the cost margin improvement is what is once a quarter you guys are able to track. Over a period of time. So what I can say now is our volume forecast for Q1 we have given in this is 40 to 45,000. These are orders. Registrations might be a little up or down. Hopefully it will be in the same range. But orders we are facing good healthy pull-in in terms of demand.

Thank you, Bhavistar. And with the regards of follow-up question, just I want to know that are we still focusing on electric two-wheeler and like how you are thinking to main focus, like for the new products of Shakti and that kind of UPS systems or two-wheeler will be still remain in the focus for the business?

Our company has two segments, two business segments, right? So, two-wheeler is the core business because that generates 100% revenue today. But our Giga factory was also always built with the vision of building cells and ESS batteries. So, the Shakti product is already built. It has actually a lot of carryover and platform from the popular platform. So, in that sense, very low cost of CapEx and RMD to build the Shakti product. We will be wrapping that up over the next couple of quarters. But like I said, our priority is to make our own sales go into our automotive business first. And then as the Gigafactory ramp becomes beyond our automotive requirement, then we start scaling up Shakti next. But demand for Shakti also is very high, given that battery storage is a very, very fast-growing thing.

Thank you, sir. And last time you told me that you have become more than your business, so we also become more than your business. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Umeet, brother. We've got a show on Share the Letter. Some people have read it from you. It means that we don't have our own actions and our own future.

All the best, all the best therapy. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Mr. Doshi. We take the next question from Mr. Arvind Sharma of Citi. Please unmute yourself and ask a question.

Hi, sir. Good evening. I hope you can hear me. Thank you for taking my question. On the demand front, since you set a break in around 20 or 1000 a month, what is a bridge from the current levels to that? Is it driven by motorcycles or driven more by service? What would be the key drivers for the volumes? That would be the first question.

So, Arvind, firstly, we are still in our rebound phase in terms of volumes, because what volumes in Q4 were not our steady state volumes, right? It was impacted by our internal operations. But you have seen the recovery since that now, it's the third month of recovery. And we are actually not just recovering, we are growing month on month on top of that rebound, right? So, I believe another couple of months, most likely June, July also, we will see a continuing rebound of our volumes. The rebound itself should get us to about 17,000-18,000 units a month. Now, that will be a mix of both scooter and bike. Bike is about 15% of our volumes now. Beyond that, like I said, now we're running a production backlog. As we are ramping up our supply chain, the factory anyway has capacity, so we don't need to do capex. But as we are ramping up our suppliers, as our suppliers are getting production scaling up again for us, demand is also ramping up. So I do expect just better stability on service and improved inventory availability will lead us to closer to the 20,000, 22,000 number over the course of next quarter.

Got it. Thank you. And if you may just give us some more granularity in terms of your own sales versus what your import, what is, if you can share even directionally, what is the cost advantage that you are getting right now? And would it increase further when you move to 6 gigawatt hours?

Good question, Erwin. So, actually, all of you know that lithium has entered an upcycle in the industry. So, our advantage of our own cells has actually improved. So, even at this low volume production where we are today, it is cheaper for us to make our own cell versus buy a cell from outside, as far as bomb cost is concerned. Obviously, the overheads on the Gigafactory right now with more scale will get factored in, but on just pure bond cost alone, it is cheaper for us to build versus import. And that's at these low volumes. I do expect as we scale up on Gigafactory towards the six gigawatt hour over the course of this year, we will get a 10 to 15% advantage on building our own cell, including the operational overheads of the Gigafactory. The advantages of making in India are actually coming out to be very true already in our business model.

Got it. Thank you so much for answering the question. That's all from my side. Thanks so much.

Thank you. We'll take the next question from Mr. Venkatesh of Motila Loswal. You may unmute yourself and ask a question.

Okay, you know, it's a situation for, you know, you will be scaling up to six gigas a car, wherein, you see, there is a man talk about this.

Benkatesh, we didn't hear you clearly, it got garbled up. Can you please repeat your question? Or if you're not here, you can even type it in the chat box. Oh, there's no chat box. So you can please repeat your question.

Could you please repeat your question?

Yeah. Sir, what I said is when you are a battery segment, yeah, when you...

Okay, I think we'll move on to the next question, which is from Mr. Amod Khanowkar of Kresil. Please unmute yourself and ask a question.

Yeah, hi. Congratulations on the margin expansion, Bhavish. My question is twofold. One, is the battery capacity currently that you have and currently that is operational, is it now 100% being consumed in the scooter segment itself and you do not have anything for Shakti? That was my first question. Second is about marketing and advertising. Any specific reason as to you do not advertise big time in a print media? Thanks. These are the two questions.

Thank you. Okay, I'll answer the second one first. See, as a philosophy, we believe that our product speaks for itself. And all along in our journey, we have been able to succeed with that philosophy, and as a result, our costs are also controlled, so it's not like we have anything against print media. We don't even do TV, actually. You will not see a sponsor, any IPL team or any coding or anything. Because our product is so far ahead of competitor products, it delivers great word of mouth. Now, that doesn't mean we will not do advertising, you know, we might do some advertising in the coming month as we see opportunity for educating a larger mass of customers on the benefits of EV, as well as about how our brand has turned around from some service challenges in the past. So we might do something. As of now, we don't see the need to do anything immediately. On your first question, see the six gigawatt hour out of this, roughly rule of thumb, you can assume three is already commissioned. Three is getting commissioned by end of next month. Now, the three that is commissioned already is in a ramp-up phase. So, the way Gigafactory and Gigafactories are very complex, you have to commission. First, you have to install the equipment, then you commission the equipment, and then you ramp up with improving yields. So, the three that we have already commissioned is in a ramp-up phase with good yields. So, as we are ramping up, and we also have to ramp up supply chains, you know, people who send us the cathode powder, anode powder, electrolyte in India, all of that. So as our whole supply chain is ramping up, we are increasing our productivity and our output of the gigafactory. So, by end of next quarter, which is September, we expect a gigafactory to be producing about 2 plus gigawatt hours already. And for the whole year, the allocation of capacity is 2 gigawatt hours to our in-house business, maybe 1 plus gigawatt hours to external auto sales, and the remaining is focused on Shakti and MaShakti.

Yeah, thanks for that. And one last quick question. In terms of monetizing, if you want to call it that way, the sale business, I mean, there were media articles in between that about 2000 crore monetization and money should flow into the company and so on. I understand you cannot speak much about it unless you make a public disclosure on that. But are things moving on that direction?

I can't share too much, but, you know, we have a lot of interest from people on that front. And like I said, our ambition in our cell business is to be the largest in the country. Today, we are the first and the largest. But that space is going to expand fast. And we will be absolutely focused on leading that space being the largest in capacity and revenue. And for that, we will have to expand beyond six gigawatt hour. But we will do that when we raise capital in the subsidiary. And that will be in due course, you know, we will let you know.

Great, Bhavish. Thanks a lot. Congrats on the increasing delivery numbers. Best luck.

Thank you. Thank you. We'll take the next question from Apuva Desai of Kotak. Please unmute yourself and ask the question.

So, hi, Bhavish. So, two quick questions from me, okay? So, the first question is in regards to the ASP calculation that you have given, okay? So, what you've mentioned is that there's a one-time change in the revenue recognition policy. So, could you maybe elaborate on that?

Yeah. So, Apoorva, what we did was we sell some, let's call it care packages or extended warranty packages, which is a three-year product, five-year product. But we were recognizing the revenue up front. So, this time with our auditors, we decided that we will not recognize it up front. So, that's about a 20-30 crore hit in this quarter. Is that correct, Apoorva? Yes, I'm not the financial expert, but this is what it is. So, hence you see the ASP has come down, but actually that revenue will come every quarter, right, because we have already done the same.

Okay, so this was more of a one-time thing. Is that correct?

It'll be a one-time correction. So every quarter now, you will see this revised approach.

Okay, so would that be the case for the earlier quarters as well? Would the numbers be revised or would that not be the case?

No, maybe Deepak you can answer.

No, so you know, whatever was the impact, you know, we have already taken, baked in already in these numbers. And hence, you know, there is no one-time effect which you would see it. It will be already baked in the numbers, so whatever numbers you publish will continue with the same numbers.

Okay. Uh, okay. So coming to my second question. Okay. So it's regarding the Giga factory. So from what your shareholders report told, uh, so I understand that you want to ramp it up to 20 gigawatt hours. So I want to understand two things. Okay. So first is the, I want to understand the rationale behind, you know, going for a ramp up pretty quickly. And the second question is maybe if you could maybe shed. More light on the order pipeline or something, I think, you know, that is all from my end.

Sure, Apoorva. So, like we said in the report, in the letter also, we will not be ramping up beyond six right now from a capital allocation perspective, right? We will first consume the, grow into the six gigawatt hour capacity. But the industry demand in India is growing faster. So just to be able to lead the industry, we will expand capacity, especially around the prismatic cell capacity. Today, our capacity is the cylindrical cell. We will expand the capacities into the prismatic cell capacity, but only when we raise capital at a subsidiary level. And that is in our plans for this financial year.

We will take the next question from Mr. Vipul Agrawal of HSBC. Please unmute yourself and ask the question.

Hi, Vipul. Good to see you. Hi, Bhavish. Thank you. Thank you for taking my question. Three questions. Firstly, you talked about lower capex. How should we see the total capex for next two to three years perspective? We see that you already have one million capacity in vehicle, and I guess you will be having just a couple of quarters remaining for the capex in battery plant. Yes. So how should we see your capex in the next two to three years?

First question. Vipul, in auto, we, you know, on an annual basis, you should expect very incremental capex, you know, 50 odd crores, that's about it. Just maintenance capex. Because we have very large capacity already built out. So that means the conversion of, you know, EBITDA to free cash flow will be fairly high. On cell business also, like I said, we have done all the capex for 6 gigawatt hour. Payouts are happening in this current Q1 and a little bit in Q2. Beyond that, you will not see any more capex till we get some capital into the cell company separately. So from that sense, actually, the business's capex cycle is behind it and now focuses on scaling up utilization and monetization.

So if you can quantify, if it is possible to quantify, like what kind of outflow we are looking at by 27 and what kind of maintenance capex we are looking at by 28, if possible, if you can quantify.

We will, again, tell the rule of thumb, maintenance capex will be sub 50 crores annually. I'll just add one more nuance. We do have some R&D which we capitalise, about 20-30% of our overall R&D expenses. That will keep coming in. But in terms of PTE capex, that will be below 50 crores a year.

So, okay. Yeah, my coming next question is on R&D only. So, how should we, like, you are largely done with your product development as well, and your Gen 3 is also doing pretty well. So, how should we see the R&D expense as well in coming years?

We are a technology company and we've always maintained that our competitive advantage comes from both our manufacturing depth of vertical integration as well as our technology depth of owning all key technologies in-house. And you can see how that has played out in terms of gross margin, product proposition, all of that stuff. So, we will continue to invest in R&D across both auto as well as cell business. It will be, you know, right now, obviously, as a percentage of revenue, it is high because revenue was subdued in 3-4, but generally, it should be in the mid-single digits of revenue going ahead as revenue ramps up.

That makes sense. Thank you. My second question is on the cash position right now, basically like since you talked about like lower capex right now and your prices are pretty low. So are we looking at any major cash burn in my 27 or we will should be likely maybe like at par? How should we look at that part of the business?

Yeah, see, we have a, on 31st March, we had about 1,550, 1,600 crores of gross cash and about 2,500 crores of debt. So we had a net debt of about 950 crores. We don't expect any, there will be about 3 to 500 crores of operating cash flow burn over the course of this year as the volumes go up. It could be lower if volumes rise faster. But generally, operating cash burn, like I said, after paying 25,000 orders a month will be positive, we'll be making the operating cash loss. And on free cash flow, just capex is minimal going forward. We do have some debt servicing and debt repayments coming up. Through this year, we'll have about 400 plus crores of debt repayments. And we might also choose to accelerate some because right now our cost of debt is slightly higher.

Thank you. That was a pretty detailed answer. Just last one on our qualitative aspect of the business. So like what we have seen in last three years when you started your new stores, the store experience was pretty, very good and eventually deteriorated. But what we are seeing right now, it has improved, but again, not to the extent what we have seen two years back. So maybe if you can talk a bit on your store strategies, like do you plan to get new dealers or maybe you would, it will be like company-owned company driven. How do you plan to improve the whole experience for the customers?

So, Vikul, our experience has improved from, let's say, two quarters or one quarter ago, and we expect in the next one or two quarters, it will be ahead of industry standards and all key metrics that matter, be it the service turnaround time, be it the quality of the people we have there, the sales process, etc. We are focused on improving experience. We've spent a lot of time building the right back-end processes to make front-end experience better. We don't plan to have any dealerships in our auto business. We believe our strategy is correct. We had some execution slip-ups through last year, but now the company has meaningfully overcome them. That said, there is still some work to be done, like you correctly pointed out, and the good thing is our volumes are ramping up in parallel. So as we work through all the improvements in the front end of the business over the next quarter or two, further you will see customer sentiment and sales ramp up. Thank you for that answer. That's all from my side.

Thank you.

We'll take the next question from Mr. Tribhavan Singh of Sanalika Family Office. Please unmute yourself and ask the question.

Hi, guys. Thank you for taking my question and very congratulations on the solid results you guys have. I just want to understand the research and development part of OLA's battery business. Like I read somewhere that you guys are focusing on solid state batteries and sodium ion batteries. So how are we progressing on these long term initiatives, I would say.

Yes, very, very good question. I've never thought I'll be able to ask a technical question in an investor's meeting. But actually, you read it in our letter itself. On page 12, the cell technology roadmap shows you that our roadmap ladders into, on the performance side, solid state, and on the cost side, sodium. So we have these technologies already at a lab scale, already working. We are not focused on spending a lot of capital on getting them manufacturing ready right now. Our focus is to ramp up our 46 series NMC. We have, though, brought in our LFP cell also. Through the next quarter, it will start ramping up in our factory. But we are ready as the industry matures for solid-state and sodium. We will be bringing those products to market also.

Sorry, is there a follow-up question or does that answer your question? All right, we'll move to the next question from Mr. Janil Javeri of J&G Holdings. Please unmute yourself and ask your question.

Yeah, hi, Bhavish. Thank you for taking my question. I had a couple of questions. One was relating to the service issues of many videos that I've watched online. The service issue seems to be with part unavailability. So I just wanted to understand that why is that happening? Like, even if it is a gen 1 or gen 2 scooter, how is it that parts are unavailable?

So, you caught it well, Janil. See, firstly, some of the videos on social obviously are old videos, so they keep recirculating online due to competitive pressures. But you are right, one of the challenges we did face was parts supply chain. See, as we had ramped up our network, because in a dealer model, the dealer buys the parts and the OEM distributes it through traditional distributor chains. Now, we don't do that. We send our parts directly to our service sender. So earlier, we were not stopping any parts in our service center, and that led to even for a brake pad replacement, the guy had to wait 10 days. And our parts procurement from our suppliers was also after a part requirement came, so actually it led to 20-30 day fulfillment time-wise. So now we've streamlined a lot of that. So now parts are stocked in the service center, as well as the part procurement is done, basis forecasts. So all of this is just execution fixes that we have done. And now parts have improved. There's still some work to be done. Some parts we still have to, because, like I said, we are still ramping up our supply chain. Some parts are common between our production and service. So we are prioritizing production, but we are ramping up the supply chain so that we can fulfill part requirements better in service also.

Okay, thanks. And one question regarding BESS, why have we selected NMC to go into BESS when we have LFP? And also, like, mostly around the world, it has only been LFP. So, anyone getting LFP cells from China and putting into a BESS product in India would start off much cheaper than our Shakti products. So, why would we…

We had started with NMC for our auto business, and that's why, you know, even now we have decided to ramp up Shakti slower because we are focusing our NMC 46 series into our auto business. Through next quarter, but we wanted to be in the market with Shakti, so many customers actually are okay with paying the price of Shakti with the NMC product today, so we are starting to take that business. But by next quarter, Shakti will have LFT, so that we can ramp it up faster.

Okay. And my last question, I've noticed that there's been a slip-up in terms of some products moving into future quarters or maybe even future years, like the gig product and so…

See what we did, Janil, yeah, I understood your question. See, we decided, and I think we made a public statement of this also, if you missed that, that we have a product roadmap. In our shareholder's letter also, you can see it somewhere in the slide in the pages. But we decided we will not launch new products till our volumes get back up because we wanted to be more disciplined on new capital allocation for new products. Now, as we have stabilized our front-end operations, as volumes are ramping up again, we will actually go back to some new product launches over the course of this year.

Okay. And just one last comment. I mean, I think we will in the interest of time, we will. It's a positive comment. Just wanted to say that there was a video from some of some Garib scientists or some Twitter handle in terms of the technology that goes into your batteries. And I was very pleasantly surprised at the amount of work that you have done. But just would like to say that I think I need to even show the investors maybe, you know, In terms of maybe some kind of analyst meet over there and stuff like that, because it seems like you're doing the hard work, but in terms of the market, it's not coming even through analyst notes.

Yes, very fair point, Janil. We are planning an analyst and investor day in our Giga factory sometime, maybe in a month or so. That's on our agenda. So, thank you so much for seeing that technical video and appreciating it. Thank you.

Thank you.

All right. I think with this, we come to the conclusion of the session here. We appreciate your time and all of your questions during the call today. Thank you so much for joining us, and we look forward to meeting you all during our next earnings conference. Thank you for joining us. You may now log out from the conference call. Good evening.