Zoomcar, the largest car sharing marketplace covering emerging markets, is set to launch its operations in the Philippines.
The start-up, which dominates the self-drive car rental market in India, expanded to Southeast Asia and appointed Gene Angelo Ferrer as country head in the Philippines to help scale their business.
As vice president and country head, Gene will lead Zoomcar’s operations in the Philippines. Prior to joining Zoomcar, Gene led Dostavista’s, a Russian-based crowdsourced delivery platform’s entry into the Philippines in 2018. Locally known as MrSpeedy/Borzo Delivery, the company under Ferre’s leadership grew exponentially with record setting year-on-year growth rates both on daily revenue and total deliveries per day.
Ferrer comes with over a decade’s experience and expertise in start-up management will prove vital in establishing Zoomcar as the first-to-market car-sharing platform in the Philippines.
Commenting on Zoomcar’s international expansion and appointment of new country head, Greg Moran, co-founder and chief executive of Zoomcar said: “We have always been focused on personal mobility and this is the perfect time for us to expand internationally. Against the backdrop of COVID, there are a lot of inherent tailwinds, which is really helping us capture more of the consumer mindset and gain market share.”
“People want to get out and travel and they want to be social again. The Philippines has low levels of vehicle ownership but large, upwardly mobile populations and it’s the perfect opportunity for us to leverage because there’s simply no vehicle accessibility and affordability is a huge constraint,” said Moran.
“We are thrilled to welcome Gene as our new country head in Philippines and look forward to benefiting from his experience of scaling up aggressively and building synergistic partnerships contributing to our growth. Philippines will be a benchmark for us to expand into other countries in Southeast Asia,” he said.
Ferrer said that in recent years, the Philippines has been economically classified as an emerging market and was referred to as Asia’s rising tiger. “Zoomcar entering the Philippines market is yet another step forward to advance another local industry to become world-class. Excitement is an understatement to describe how I feel about joining Zoomcar at this important stage of its growth. I welcome the challenge to redefine the Filipino definition of mobility; self-drive has been widely popular in North America and Europe and I don’t see why it cannot be as popular in Southeast Asia”.
“What I am most looking forward to is to see how Zoomcar can uplift the Filipino people through our proposition of establishing a secondary income stream without sacrificing their existing day jobs. I look forward to learning from Greg and the Global Zoomcar team to further enhance the brand’s market trajectory but now adding some Filipino flavor. Great things have to be built, and today we take the first step to making Zoomcar Philippines the Filipino mobility app of choice,” said Ferrer.