In May this year, Entrackr broke the news that Gurgaon-headquartered hotel brand Oyo has entered China in partnership with China Lodging Group.
Now, within months of launching operations in China, Oyo’s business is fast emerging in the country. It has been able to set up a base of over 50,000 rooms, which is almost half the company’s entire inventory in India.
This month alone, it added over 25,000 rooms to its inventory across 26 cities in China.
The numbers were shared by SoftBank’s Chief Executive Masayoshi Son, who was speaking to investors on Monday. SoftBank is the earliest and the biggest investor; has invested around $350 million in the hotel brand.
Presently, OYO claims to operate 8,500 hotels and over 100,000 rooms in more than 230 cities in India.
Son credited the growth to the advanced use of technology like artificial intelligence by the hotel brand, which it has used to increase occupancy for partner hotels from 30 per cent to 78 per cent in the past one year.
After raising $250 million from SoftBank and Hero Enterprise, Oyo pivoted from aggregation to a pure-play franchise model in December last year. Since then, the platform has also launched back to back operations in various cities outside the country.
Recently, the company began operations in London. Entrackr had exclusively reported Oyo’s operations in UK and Dubai. Previously, it also forayed into Malaysia and Nepal.
Experts say that with the expansion on the line, the hotel brand eyes sizeable opportunity in budget-hotel segment. The budget-hotel segment is still untouched in the International market which gives direct benefit to the likes of OYO.
Besides, the hotel brand is all set to become the next unicorn as Chinese Internet company Tencent is planning to invest between $300 and $500 million at a valuation of over $2 billion.
Oyo is currently engaged with Tencent, along with other investors for a possible financial round.
The development was first reported by Business Standard.
