Cars24 Cannot File Its IPO Papers Until April 2027, After The Reverse Flip

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Cars24 expects to complete its reverse flip from Singapore to India by April 2027, after which it can file draft papers for a public listing.

Chief financial officer Shivanshu Makkar told PTI the company has received approval from Singapore to redomicile and is filing the required papers in India, a process he expects to take six to nine months. Once it becomes an Indian entity it can file its draft red herring prospectus, with SEBI approval, pricing and book-building adding a further three to four months.

Cars24 was incorporated in Singapore in 2015. Makkar compared the process to the redomiciling undertaken by Flipkart and Myntra.

The timeline is longer than the one cofounder and chief executive Vikram Chopra offered in January, when he said the company was targeting a listing within six to 12 months.

Makkar said the listing is intended to create capital for expansion rather than to meet an immediate funding need. Cars24 operates retail in 25 cities and wants to reach as many as 200, handling around 50,000 cars, alongside further expansion in the Gulf and Australia. He noted that five in every 100 Indians own a car.

The company also changed how it accounts for its wholesale business in the middle of FY26, moving from an inventory-based model to a commission-based one. It now recognises the commission earned on a transaction rather than the full value of the vehicle sold.

Cars24 last raised in 2022, at a post-money valuation of $3.3 billion.

Spinny confidentially pre-filed for a ₹2,500 crore to ₹3,000 crore issue this month, and CarDekho's parent Girnar Software is converting to a public company ahead of an issue of up to ₹3,500 crore.

The accounting change is the disclosure that will matter most when the prospectus arrives.

Cars24 moved its wholesale business from an inventory-based model to a commission-based one during FY26. Under the old treatment, selling a car for ₹5 lakh put ₹5 lakh through revenue. Under the new one, only the commission earned on that transaction is recognised. Nothing about the underlying business has changed. The revenue line will look dramatically smaller.

That creates an obvious difficulty for anyone comparing the three used-car companies heading to market. Spinny reported ₹4,657 crore of revenue in FY25, a figure that measures the value of vehicles moved rather than the margin earned on them. If Cars24 books only commission on its wholesale volumes, its revenue and Spinny's are no longer describing the same thing, and the smaller number may well belong to the larger business.

Prospectuses handle this by restating prior years, so the comparison will eventually be made properly. Until then, headline revenue figures across the category should be treated with care.

The date itself is the less interesting half. April 2027 for eligibility, plus three to four months of process, puts a listing in late 2027 at the earliest. That is roughly a year later than the six-to-12-month horizon the chief executive described in January, and the delay is procedural rather than commercial.

The city expansion is where the capital requirement becomes clear, and it explains the shape of the listing.

Going from 25 retail cities to 200 is not a software rollout. Each city needs inspection capacity, refurbishment, physical sites, logistics and local demand generation, and every car sitting on a lot is working capital that stays tied up until it sells. Used-car retail is among the most capital-hungry consumer businesses there is, because the inventory is expensive, individually priced and depreciating while it waits.

That is why Makkar's framing of the IPO as a war chest rather than a funding need is worth reading carefully. A company that genuinely does not need capital does not usually list to build a war chest. The more accurate description is that Cars24 does not need money to survive but does need it to grow at the rate the expansion implies.

The competitive timing is unhelpful. Spinny has already pre-filed and is targeting a 2027 listing. CarDekho's parent is converting to a public company now. Both will reach the market before Cars24, which cannot even file until April.

For public investors the sequence matters. Whoever lists first sets the valuation benchmark for the category, and whoever follows is priced against how that first stock has traded. Cars24 was the largest and best funded of the three at its last round. It will arrive last, and the multiple it gets will be shaped by two companies that got there earlier.

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