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What is the latest update from micromobility company Beam?
In an email interview with e27, Co-Founder and CEO Alan Jiang revealed the most significant milestones that the company has made recently, starting with its US$93 million Series B funding round in early 2022–which he dubbed as a “significant stride” in Beam’s journey to growth and profitability.
“We’re particularly proud of being able to achieve both of these simultaneously in today’s macro environment,” Jiang explains.
Apart from that, the company has also doubled its footprint in eight countries in different regions, including Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Turkey, South Korea, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand.
“We also doubled our fleet size up to 60,000 vehicles, and most significantly of all, each of the three regions (North Asia, Southeast Asia, and ANZ) are already independently EBITDA profitable by a double-digit margin,” Jiang says.
This year, Beam has been confirmed as one of the companies that will be speaking at the Echelon Asia Summit 2023, June 14-15 at Singapore Expo. Before we get to hear what Jiang will share at the event, let us keep ourselves updated with what Beam has in store.
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The following is an edited excerpt of the interview with Jiang.
In recent years, you have made significant milestones that include a Series B funding round and expansion into new markets. Is there any lesson that you can share with us from that experience?
We have been laser-focused on unit economics since Beam was founded five years ago.
Ensuring that we had great unit economics in place before we scaled up enabled us to achieve both growth and profitability at the same time.
The biggest challenge we see with startups that achieve growth through price discounts or negative unit economics is once those discounts go away, growth also shrinks. For us, as we add profitably deployed vehicles to our fleet, our P&L improves and achieving country-level profitability in each country was just a matter of growing into our fixed cost structure.
How do the back-to-back global crises that we are facing today affect your decision-making process? What major changes have you made?
We are fortunate that we have been focused on unit economics and profitability from Day One, so we are less impacted by the sentiment shift of growth vs profitability that we see in the venture ecosystem today. However, we are also an extremely capital-intensive business as we own and operate all our own assets. We do expect capital to get more expensive in the near term and this impacts where we invest. We are more focused on short-term cash flow today.
What opportunities do you aim to seize this year?
We are always in conversation with governments across APAC to discuss how Beam vehicles can help cities reduce congestion and pollution in cities, and improve first/last mile connectivity. Due to our positive unit economics and healthy balance sheet, we expect to be in a strong position to be able to invest in cities that embrace micromobility.
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What is your major plan this year?
We are focused on continuing our profitable growth trajectory in 2023 by continuing to invest in more vehicle deployments into all eight of our markets in APAC. We see micromobility as just scratching the surface in APAC, and we expect the popularity of EVs – especially shared EVs – to grow significantly in the coming years.
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Image Credit: Beam
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