Ather Energy will eventually be a publicly listed company, says co-founder & CEO

The eventual goal is for Ather Energy will be a publicly-listed company, Tarun Mehta, Co-Founder & CEO of Ather Energy, told CNBC-TV18.

“It also makes sense given the space we are in, given the opportunity here. Business is maturing really fast. Last fiscal, we grew almost 6x in revenue to Rs 400 crore plus. This fiscal we are expecting at least 3-5x in revenues. So there is enormous growth ahead of us. As a business, we are only about 18-months-old, so we want some more maturity to emerge. So I cannot put a timeline on the IPO yet,” Mehta said.

The company launched the 450X Gen 3-E Scooter in India, with higher range, larger battery and more functional updates over the previous model. The battery is 25 percent larger than the previous generation, which means the certified range is 146km. "The true range that we expect to get in city conditions on an average is 105 kilometre. Higher range was one of the big asks that customers had with us over the last few years," Mehta said.

He said the scooter's price point is more or less unchanged — 450+ is around Rs 2,000 to Rs 2,500 more expensive than the previous generation, whereas 450X is around Rs 5,000 more costly than the previous generation. "However, in some cities such as Delhi and Ahmedabad the difference is almost negligible given the state subsidies,” he said.

The company's CEO said that if the company is incredibly successful by the year-end, it will comprise around 30 to 35 percent of the Indian EV scooter market, but that would be 1 percent of the Indian two-wheeler market. "We are starting our journey and we don't want to get distracted with cars or anything else except scooters this year," he said, adding that a motorbike is on the anvil. " We do like that space but we think we are not ready for it yet,” he said.

While many cases of electric two-wheelers catching fire have been reported across the country, Mehta said no Ather scooter in operation has ever had a fire incident. "The one scooter which caught fire was a vehicle where some of the components were replaced by the user and the scooter had an accident where the battery pack got damaged and then in a complete miss of SOP, our teams threw water on it to clean it submerging the live damaged battery pack with water. So outside of this one scooter we have never had an incident," he said.

Talking about the learnings out of that incident, he said, "The first one was that we need far better awareness for our customers. You don't go around opening up the fuel tanks in normal scooters and similarly that awareness for battery packs will really go a long way. So we think better awareness is needed for the market. We also realise that we need better SOPs for our service stations."

The Ather Energy CEO said that the company runs around 120 to 150 tests on a battery pack and three to four iterations of those tests before it gets launched. "A full vehicle goes through around 800-plus tests. Ather does, by far, the highest amount of testing in the Indian electric two-wheeler industry. We continue with those and we are strengthening them even more," Mehta said, adding that in the 460X Gen 3, the company has focused a lot more on thermal management and there is enormous improvement in that.

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