India-based Ola Electric announced its Q3 FY 26 (Oct-Dec 2025) results yesterday, and the heavy bleeding has continued. The company reported a net decrease in cash position of INR 9,120 million in the quarter and now has INR 19,910 million left on hand. If it burns at the same rate, we are looking at less than seven months of cash left.
Realistically, Ola Electric has been cutting costs aggressively and will likely cut much more in the near future. In end-Jan 2026, Reuters reported that Ola will reduce its workforce by 5%. Then, a few days back, The Economic Times reported that Ola is rationalising its office space to save costs.
We would also like to point out that employee costs were likely higher this quarter as many were given an exit.
Keeping everything in perspective, the burn rate is likely to come down in the next quarter, and the money in the bank may be stretched a bit further.
However, it can go just a bit further. Ola needs to raise, and raise now.
The Numbers
The company reported revenues of INR 4,700 million in the quarter, a 55% decline from Q3 FY 25. However, operating expenses declined by only 33.9% to INR 4,320 million, from INR 6,540 million in Q3 FY25.
As a result, EBITDA (loss) was INR 3,230 million, a 34.6% improvement on a year-on-year basis. There was just a marginal improvement in the net losses at INR 4,870 million, a 13.6% reduction from INR 5,640 million in Q3 FY25.
The positives that the company points out are an improvement in gross margins, which are now 34.3%. They were 18.6% a year back. But Gross Margins is a metric used by the startup ecosystem to make at least one row of numbers look good.
The numbers we would like to watch in the future, if they are ever revealed, are the internal cost of the Ola 4680 cells compared to the 2170 cells Ola buys from outside.
Sales Remain Elusive
It’s the 14th of the month as we write this, and the Indian registration data shows Ola’s to-date monthly sales at 2020 units. That comes to a little more than 150 units/day on average for the first 13 days of the month. If they maintain the run-rate, the month will end at just about 4,000 units, Ola’s lowest volumes since some time in 2022.
It was just in October 2024, less than 18 months back, that Ola’s monthly volumes were 41,843 units. Since then, it has been a steady decline.
In this quarter, vehicle sales were 32,680 units, a 58.7% drop from 84,029 units in Q3 FY 25. Even worse, the sales mix for Premium/Mass was 18.6/81.4, a sheer drop from 34.8/65.2 it was in Q3 FY25.
It’s d/dx–>0
Except that Ola would like us to believe that the decline in numbers is somewhat deliberate. They make fewer losses when they sell less. The market conditions mean that they should sell fewer.
Duh!
Seems the same memo of EV wisdom did not reach Ather Energy, TVS, Bajaj Auto, Hero Vida, River, Revolt, BGauss, Greaves-Ampere, Ultraviolette, and many more, who are all selling more.
Theoretically, you can cut down losses to zero if you sell nothing. But then there is nothing left of the company. It’s d/dx–>0.
That’s all kinds of contradictions coming from Ola Electric’s Q3 Shareholder Newsletter. On one hand, the company touts its massive investment into manufacturing, both cells and vehicles, having created capacity for a million two-wheelers and 6.0 GWh cells. At the other end, they point out that EBITDA breakeven would be at 15,000 units/month and justify the low volumes.
So what is the direction the company wants to take?
Break Even is a Shifting Goalpost
Mathematically, Ola Electric mentions that they now need a steady rate of 15,000 vehicles/month to be EBITDA positive. A few quarters back, this number was 50,000 vehicles/month. We are sure that if there is a further sales decline and more business optimisation, the breakeven number can fall further.
Historically, Ola’s numbers have continued to downshift. The vehicle plant was supposed to be the world’s largest with a ten-million production capacity; only one is installed. Similarly, the cell Gigafactory is supposed to scale to 100 GWh but will stop at 6.0 GWh.
Shakti’s Power is in Being Invisible
Ola Shakti is the name of the home power backup/inverter system that is energised using the Ola 4680 NMC cells. Ola launched the Shakti range in October last year and claimed to have started deliveries a few days back.
However, throughout the shareholder communication and the subsequent analyst call (terribly short – they hardly took any questions), there was not much mention of Shakti and the market response to the same. That is surprising and worrying.
If it’s on the Internet, it must be true…
Then on Page 4 of the investor newsletter, we find this:
However, there are no details given on who the ‘independent third party’ entity was, how big the sample size was, or what the methodology was.
Cutting Down Retail Presence
Ola has cut down the number of retail stores to 700 from the originally announced 4000. That is a scale-down not announced to the exchanges and media earlier. To absorb it with the right perspective, Ola expanded to 4,000 stores, from about 800, in December 2024. Now, within a year of that, they have scaled back to 700.
That’s a mind-boggling number of commercial leases surrendered, and retail employees likely let go which the company has not provided any details.
Dwindling Cash Position
With negative cash flows, Ola Electric’s cash-in-hand situation has been deteriorating steadily. The company states that they have INR 19,910 million cash on hand. Considering that they burned through INR 9,120 million in the quarter reported
The Yield of the Gigafactory
The yield rate of the cell gigafactory is another thing that Ola has decided not to talk about anymore. However, they do tell us how many cells they have manufactured in every quarter. This quarter was the best with 72,418 cells. Last quarter was 38,080, and the quarter before that was 11, 744 cells. That’s a cumulative number of 122,242 cells. That is commendable as Gigafactories scale up slowly.
But here was the Founder-CEO retorting to an Elon Musk tweet just ten days back.
He is technically right. Ola has deployed 1.22 lakh (1 lakh = 100,000; it’s an Indian measure) cells to date. However, the tweet is completely off in spirit. As an illustration, if you told me that you have millions of dollars, I would certainly expect the number to be much more than 1.22 million. When I find out that it’s 1.22, I would reach for the salt shaker the next time you tell me anything.
We estimate the cell Gigafactory is currently running at a low double-digit MWh scale. Scale-up should happen in due course, but you don’t produce cells if there is no vehicle demand.
That’s a chicken-and-egg situation that Ola faces after INR 53,000 million investment (approx USD 600 million) in investments on manufacturing, battery innovation, and battery tech.
