Amarjit Singh Batra, who is the chief executive officer and founder of OLX India, has reportedly quit the company and is now moving to a new role within Naspers.
Naspers, which is a South Africa-based media conglomerate, had invested in Buenos Aires-based OLX in 2010 and has been a strong competitor to Quikr.
Amarjit has been instrumental in building OLX India as the market leader. He joined OLX at a time when consumer Internet business in India was at a nascent stage, and the concept of second-hand buying and selling between individuals was almost unknown.
In a statement, the company said that starting out as the first employee of OLX India, he has built the business from scratch to a 550-strong-team today.
Commenting on this development, Amarjit Singh Batra CEO, OLX India, said,
“The OLX journey has been a very special and fulfilling one. Rarely does one get an opportunity as an entrepreneur and a leader to build a brand like OLX and take it from obscurity to a household name. In the almost nine years that I have spent at OLX, I feel I have done the whole nine yards. In these years OLX has emerged as the number one horizontal marketplace outperforming all direct competitors. On the back of a robust and innovative product, we have delivered our strongest year yet. I started out alone in India for almost 3 years but today I have a team of great leaders who are poised to take the business to even greater heights. I have also spent a lot of time in building a culture that not only keeps the brand mission alive but also makes OLX a great place to work. I feel like I have achieved the mission I took up nine years back, and that the time is opportune to end this leg of the journey and take up a new challenge. Naspers has a wide footprint and several exciting opportunities in emerging markets that I am exploring at the moment.”
Amarjit Batra has been credited to have led OLX to become the largest classifieds platform in the country commanding 80 percent market-share of the C2C classifieds business. He also led OLX to emerge as the biggest platform for pre-owned cars in the country commanding 72 percent market-share of the pre-owned car trade.
Other key categories that thrived under his leadership were that of pre-owned motorcycles, where OLX has a 75 percent market-share of the online trade, and mobile phones, where OLX commands 50 percent market share.