Oyo grabs $103 Mn cheque from Grab; claims adding 50K rooms every month

Within a week of speculation about Oyo raising $103.4 million (Rs 732.73 crore) strategic round from Grab, the company has raised the sum, reveals RoC filings by the company with MCA. The firm will use proceeds towards ramping up assets and renovation, training and staffing and hiring a management team to operate the properties efficiently.

Although the round doesn’t seem significant for the SoftBank-backed company, alliance with Grab will help Oyo to have strategic ground support in South East Asian countries including Indonesia and Malaysia.

Meanwhile, to achieve its long-term goal to become the world’s largest hotel chain by 2023, Oyo plans to open 50,000 rooms every month. With this pace, the company will have  2.5 million rooms by 2023.

Currently, Marriott manages about 1.4 million rooms and Oyo wants to outnumber American hospitality firm to emerge the world’s largest hotel brand.

As of now, the company has 3.3 lakh rooms across 500 cities in the world. Surprisingly, Oyo’s largest and fastest growing business is in China (1.8 lakh rooms in 265 cities) where it entered almost a year ago.

The transaction numbers for the company have already increased threefold with 90 per cent repeat customers. India’s standalone growth has increased from 1.6X to almost 3X in three years while the occupancy rate also improved to 65 per cent.

The company, now, exists in several international spaces. It started with Dubai, and further forayed into China, England, UAE, Indonesia. Its recent overseas expansion was made in Spain and Portugal.

Recently, the Gurugram-headquartered company had hired Aditya Ghosh as CEO for South Asia and India.