It seems that Rocket Internet is establishing its commercial investments in areas outside of the usual fashion ecommerce startups more and more. The incubator has launched its newest venture Carmundi — an online marketplace for vehicles in emerging markets.
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Initially, the service will offer an estimated 700-million users based in Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar the opportunity find, buy and sell cars, motorcycles and commercial vehicles online. Before today the service was publicly known as Carmido in Africa, Ubiauto in Latin America and Motors in Asia.
A few weeks ago Rocket Internet announced another “mudi” and the collaboration of its real estate-backed startups to become collectively known as Lamudi.
With similar characteristics as Lamudi, vehicle dealers and agents are said to get a trusted online presence through a personalized webpage on Carmudi which goes along with high security standards to avoid fraud.
Fraud, and the fear thereof, is considered being one of the greatest obstacles ecommerce sites face in emerging markets. Carmudi’s platform is said to be operating under a high level of transparency through professional photos, updated listings, detailed descriptions, reports and rankings for 100% of its vehicles in each market.
After this mass roll-out, Carmudi is set to become the world’s leading car classifieds platform for emerging markets. It’s noted that there is an existing demand for vehicle classifieds in the aforementioned markets.
Koen Thijssen, MD Asia Classifieds from Rocket Internet says “So far, across all markets we have already signed a large number of vehicle dealers and agents, registered extremely fast growing traffic on our websites and received great feedback from our users.”
Rocket Internet is said to expand this initiative with further country launches scheduled for the “upcoming months”. Thijssen says “We will grow Carmudi very fast and establish the company as the new number one vehicle platform in emerging markets.”
