I disagree with iCar Asia management. iCar ain’t clearly the market leader anywhere
And it ain't going to be another carsales.com.au any time soon
That's the negative picture I draw after some research
I read the icar Asia presentations which show they have more listings than their competitors by a big margin and thought, "That's great". Then I did some of my own looking and realised that they define their competitors only as other car classificd websites but there are more significant competitors than these.
Just as carsales.com.au competes against a general classified website (Gumtree) each of iCar's three websites also compete against a general classified website. In Australia, Carsales clearly has more listings than Gumtree. However, in Indonesia and Thailand, iCar's websites have much fewer listings. And in Malaysia even though it has more listings than its competitor, it actually has less used car listings.
This is a game where a dramatic spiral exists. If you are in a positive spiral you have more sellers listing more cars and more people use the website and therefore even more people list their cars and so on until you have a fantastically profitable monopoly. Conversely you can get in a death spiral. You just have less buyers, less sellers and less buyers and you disappear.
If you are in a race to be number one, you want to be leading the competition in terms of listings. The trick is that none of iCars websites are clearly in front (despite what they say). They are either going to become increasingly irrelevant or it is one going to one very long and costly battle to become number one. It certainly ain’t going to be the triumphant march that Carsales enjoyed.
The number of listings of the relevant websites are below*
Malaysia iCar website Carlist.my vs Mudah.my Total cars 123,000 vs 94,000 Used Cars 59,000 vs 66,000
Thailand iCar website One2car.com. vs Kaidee.com Total cars 30,000 vs 74,000
Indonesia Icar website mobil123.com vs olx.com Total cars 202,000 vs 434,000
*the number of listings may be a month or two month old but google the numbers yourself
