Eric Cheng drove Carsome to become Malaysia’s first tech unicorn during the funding boom in 2021. Now, amid higher interest rates and worries about an impending recession, the cofounder and CEO of Carsome is shifting gears to focus on profitability in an effort to adjust to the lower-risk environment after more than eight years of breakneck growth.
Carsome is expected to break even by the end of the year and reach full-year profit in 2024, Cheng said in an interview on the sidelines of the Forbes Global CEO Conference in Singapore. “We are sacrificing the growth pace of two times every other year now to focus on our [profit] margin,” he said. “That includes us being able to improve the take rate from every single transaction that’s happening on our platform through optimizing the pricing and workforce, and being able to also utilize the marketing awareness we’ve built.”
Support authors and subscribe to content
This is premium stuff. Subscribe to read the entire article.