India is the 4th largest tyre market in the world after China, Europe and USA. Volumes grew by 49% between 2015 and 2019 to reach 192mn units and the replacement market makes up around 55% of the total value at $5bn in 2020. As the car parc of vehicles increases in India, this market is expected to reach 60% of the tyre market touching $7.4bn by 2025.
Retailing of tyres is highly fragmented and unorganised, with over 40 tyre brands and 100,000+ tyre dealers in India. Major brands have between 2,000-6,000 distribution points (not including sub-dealers) in the country with a mix of exclusive brand outlets and multi brand outlets. In India, exclusive single brand outlets have had limited success, due to the lack of brand affinity and varied requirements of different customer segments. Hence, they still account for only 10% of the tyre retail network in India. With the exception of MRF, the majority of brands focus on multi-brand outlets for distribution of their tyres and these comprise around 90% of all tyre retailers in India.
Multi brand tyre dealers are small family run stores, with the majority still running their business using manual processes and ledgers. The owner cum operator’s bandwidth is taken up by POCs from different brands, searching for ad-hoc supply via offline networks and managing daily logistics. The lack of use of technology makes matters worse, leading to lower revenues, lower margins and lower customer satisfaction.
Further, these stores face very high working capital requirements, as the category has over 15k+ SKUs with high value per unit and dealers get no credit from brands (in fact they have to keep a security deposit with brands to become an authorised dealer). Hence, dealers usually keep limited tyre sizes and brands leading to loss of sales when customers need other brands and/or sizes.
The tyre retailer is also suffering from reduced walk-in customers, as the dealer is not digitally savvy, but consumers are getting more and more influenced by digital channels. As a product category, tyres have seen a 55% increase in monthly tyre related Google keyword searches between Jan’20 and Dec’20. Hence, overall now 12-15% of all tyre purchase decisions are touched by digital channels and there is large headroom for this to increase inline with other categories like auto, where now 90% of purchase decisions are digitally driven.
TyrePlex is building technology solutions to cater to the requirements of the multi brand dealer in India. The company helps dealers in reducing working capital requirements due to inventory optimization, reduced security deposits and ease of sourcing tyres. Additionally, TyrePlex also helps its partners in increasing revenue, margins and customer satisfaction. The TyrePlex dealer management system (DMS), allows the dealer to organise operations and manage their business in an efficient manner.
In the longer term, the Company could also target other auto consumables and the fact that the first tyre replacement usually happens around the same time as the OEM vehicle warranty expires, opens up other exciting possibilities in the future.
Founded by a highly experienced team with over 40 years of experience in auto, e-commerce, retail and consumer tech in India. The two co-founders specifically, Puneet and Rupendra have deep auto tech domain insights, having held key positions at Droom and helped scale their marketplace and certification services verticals.
We are thrilled to partner with TyrePlex and look forward to building something together in the digital auto ecosystem in India!
