New Delhi: Ola Electric Mobility Ltd missed its full-year revenue guidance for FY26 after sales nearly halved amid operational challenges and mounting competition in India’s electric two-wheeler market, with the company’s annual revenue falling below rival Ather Energy Ltd for the first time.
On Wednesday, the Bengaluru-based company posted a 50% year-on-year (y-o-y) decline in FY26 revenue at ₹2,253 crore, well below its ₹3,000-3,200 crore guidance issued in November. Ola Electric attributed the miss to an operational reset and higher investments in in-house cell manufacturing.
The company’s scooter and bike sales fell 44% to 173,794 y-o-y in the financial year, even as losses narrowed to ₹1,833 crore from ₹2,276 crore in FY25.
The revenue decline also allowed cross-town rival Ather Energy Ltd to overtake Ola Electric in annual revenue for the first time since the two companies began selling scooters together.
Ather’s revenue rose 63% y-o-y to ₹3,671 crore in FY26, driven by a 69% jump in volumes to 263,000 units, while net loss narrowed to ₹517 crore from ₹812 crore in the year-ago period.
Ola Electric’s revenue guidance miss also came on the back of its lowest quarterly revenue since listing in August 2024. In the January to March quarter, its revenue fell 57% y-o-y to ₹265 crore, while its loss narrowed to ₹500 crore from ₹870 crore.
The company released its results after trading hours, during which its share closed with 1.04% gains as against 0.84% gain of Nifty Auto.
Reset and recovery
In its quarterly letter, the company told shareholders that financial year 2026 was a year of reset, which affected its sales.
“We used the year to strengthen the fundamentals of the business—service, product quality, gross margins, operating costs, cash discipline, sales productivity and cell manufacturing. Q4 was a low-volume quarter, but it also showed the reset working,” Ola Electric said in its letter.
Ola Electric said it plans to raise capital for its cell business to expand manufacturing capacity to 20 gigawatt hours (GWh) from the current 6 GWh as it looks to monetize the cell business.
It is betting on plans to improve service, scale up sales, and utilize the 6 GWh cell facility in the current financial year to get revenue back on track.
Bhavish Aggarwal, chairperson and managing director at Ola Electric, noted that the company will migrate all of its products into its own cells by the end of September 2026, which will help in cost savings.
“Our advantage of our own cells has actually improved. Even at this low volume production where we are today, it is cheaper for us to make our own cell versus buy a cell from outside,” Aggarwal told investors and analysts during an earnings call on 20 May.
He added that once the 6 GWh capacity is utilized over the course of this year, “we will get a 10-15% advantage on building our own cell, including the operational overheads of the Gigafactory”.
In the first quarter of financial year 2027, Ola is expecting 40,000-45,000 orders, nearly twice the preceding quarter. That will be lower than the over-68,000 unit sales it registered in Q1 of FY26, indicating that a full recovery in sales may still take time.
