Thoughts on Strategic Direction for Carousell

(Wrote an entry on Carousell before.)

Friend sent me an article on BT about Carousell. It resonates with how I have been feeling but I have been refraining from commenting partly because I want to see how they executed last 2-3 years and partly because we do have a small indirect stake via a VC that’s now actually significant. 

Note : Latest OLX deal is 22.12m cash, the rest by injecting OLX Philippines outfit at a 30+m valuation if I recall right. So they bought another 8-9mth burn time. And OLX is of course potential buyer. 

Can Carousell become mobile Craigslist of ASEAN? 

Not many people are aware that Craigslist is very profitable on close to 1B of revenue annually. Thats what Carousell is selling to investors. That it can dominate ASEAN as a classifieds player which is a very large 0.5-1B (my estimate) revenue market. However, the dynamics that allowed Craigslist to charge for jobs, property, cars and personals back in early days no longer apply in ASEAN.

It will be tough for caurosell to become a profitable mobile classifieds following the trajectory of Craigslist. Reason is it is not a true first mover in the various classified verticals and each vertical is crowded. The property, jobs, cars, dating classifieds space all have very deep custom built web/mobile platforms and strong brands with significant resources that already are taking up the available online advertising revenue. 

So it would be a hard slog to win against the likes of propertyguru, jobstreet or even sgcarmart. Can slowly make headway like in cars (weakest group) but quickly will be very tough.  Ask yourself where you go to look for jobs, cars, dates or property? 

Can Carousell become a MarketPlace?

Back in 2015, I thought the logical strategy would be to be a mobile marketplace ala Lazada on web and that the whole classifieds was a deliberate strategy to get started with some mindshare and users. Unfortunately, they did not try to primarily earn off GMV and transactional revenues and build out a comprehensive marketplace platform. Now I would argue they have missed the boat and Lazada and shoppee are the regional leaders. There could be a niche as a c2c marketplace but that’s probably much smaller.

Growing into 500m valuation?

Based on 2017 1.7m usd in revenue (Expenses are an estimated 30m in 2017), my guess is if via ASEAN mobile classifieds as a business, they will be lucky to be doing 10m ish usd advertising/fee type revenues (not some funky gmv type topline) this year.

That’s not enough to justify the  500m valuation now. 500m requires to hit at least 50m revenues. And those revenues better be high gross margin type (>75%) type and growing rapidly year on year. Product wise, they need to have users preferring to use them to search and get property or jobs or cars across asean. I don’t think they are anywhere near that now. 

The other possibility is to that it’s not too late to switch into marketplace. I don’t know enough on the competitive dynamics of this space. But a good mark of success here will be an improved platform that somehow offers sufficient value for carousell to earn a cut off the transaction value and which a significant percentage of users are willing to pay for. 

So what’s next? 

Even if Carousell fails to deliver on revenues, it is still valuable to a buyer. Great brand and traffic means it can end up being like Redmart. Founders get decent package but early investors will probably lose most money with latest investors losing less. Redmart gets to continue and consumers and staff benefit. 

Ecosystem wise, that may not be a bad thing. Poster boy does not and cannot mean sure win for everyone. Anyway, we have other poster boys like Garena/Shopee, Patsnap, Ninjavan, Razer, Justco etc and I would argue they have much firmer revenue positions.

Of course, am happy to be wrong and if Carousell manages to crack how to beat the various classifieds players and/or become a dominant marketplace, then it will become a sizable, sustainable unicorn for sure and our small indirect stake will be worth many times more!