A journey that counts

• Eric Cheng has learnt a lot in the last 8 years. In its meteoric rise to a company valued at US$1.7 billion, the CEO of 500-backed used car company Carsome has made mistakes, and shares what he learnt from them.
• “The biggest mistake was in the first year, when we were trying out everything for the business, at one point we were also in places like Australia and we found ourselves being stretched too thin. Australia is a very different place compared to Southeast Asia. Even Singapore is a different car market compared to Malaysia. We took that as a lesson and learned how to navigate and build a business in the right market. Thankfully, we made those mistakes early, and the rest of the journey has been pretty successful.”
• In 2022, Carsome hit US$1.5 billion revenue with 153,000 cars sold across Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and most recently, the Philippines. 
• Carsome sees an average of 15 million monthly visitors across all platforms, and Eric reiterated plans to breakeven this year – by building on the momentum that they had from last year, focusing on creating more margin opportunities, and also being very cost disciplined in the way they manage the business.
• According to Eric, the main driver towards profitability is gaining more margin uplift not just from car sales, but from ancillary services covering end-to-end touchpoints for financing, maintenance, and insurance.
• Acquiring iCar Asia, WapCar and Car Times also allows them to have a holistic view of how users interact with them. When these users become customers, they’ll have their experience customized for them 
• When asked about the economic downturn, Eric was bullish. “If you look at the region, ⅔ of Malaysians are between the upper and lower middle class, so there’s a vast population vying for car ownership.”
• Watch the full interview here.