Last year, Daybat evaluated the performance of different real estate players in several countries including Idealista vs Fotocasa in Spain and Immoscout24 in Germany. We never anticipated that we would move quickly into a different category, but the circumstances -Wallapop unbeatable leadership vs Vibbo (Schibsted)- and its focus in cars, lead us to start evaluating cars in Spain and what we found was truly engaging and even fascinating.
Our analysis:
We have evaluated the four leading car players in Spain:
Wallapop, the leading c2c native mobile e-commerce app.
Coches.net, the traditional solidly established car category leader, owned by Schibsted.
Milanuncios, the strong horizontal freemium model, also owned by Schibsted.
Autoscout24.es, the number two car vertical player in Spain owned by Scout24, the publicly traded strong German classified leader.
We took data from a recent week (not disclosed which) for all players in the Spanish market and performed our traditional analysis in the following table.
(1) Over the last months, it seems that Wallapop has been using two car publishing systems which were not easy to track. For some variables, we had to make estimates. We normalize the data and provide it marked in red and yellow.
In absolute number of ads, Milanuncios is by far the strongest with 353,591 cars vs 211,315 for Wallapop while coches.net has 160,575 and 124.778 for autoscout24.es. So no question there. We also calculated the average value of the cars in each portal (for this we exclude outliers - cars with no price or above €100.000) and the data appears to be incredibly consistent. Wallapop has the lowest price per car, €6.525, as they also sell the oldest cars. Then Milanuncios with €9.068, as it probably has a similar % of dealer cars to Wallapop. Then Coches.net with €13.111, as it charges dealers a higher price per car ad (losing low price cars) and as it has a bigger weight towards dealers. Last autoscout24.es as when charging dealers it probably captures a higher proportion of more difficult to sell higher-priced cars.
We focus our analysis on comparing Wallapop to Coches.net as that is where the most intense rivalry is happening.
In terms of private vs professional-dealer cars, Wallapop does not differentiate sellers. But we estimate that around 120,000 cars in Wallapop are private, and 90,000 are dealer cars. That almost matches Coches.net 96.635 dealer cars. Well done Wallapop for just a few months working with dealers and a clearly suboptimal app for B2C use. And then Wallapop doubles the private cars available, 120.000 vs 63.624 for Coches.net. This is very relevant as neither of these players charges private sellers. So Wallapop has a stronger position in the base of the car sellers’ pyramid: in cheaper, older cars, sold by younger less affluent sellers. That is the more fragmented, more difficult to capture sellers’ population. And with that positioning in cheaper more affordable cars, it appears that Wallapop is attracting buyers at a very significant volume. And with more buyers in Wallapop’s marketplace, dealers will follow.
Top four portal-apps seller´s structure
A proper diagnosis of the four contenders requires a more granular analysis. We want to know who is ahead of the game in the Spanish market in terms of sellers´ size. We have based our findings in the data from the table below:
Private cars and Dealer cars Top Sellers
In terms of private cars, Milanuncios is the strong leader with 188.339 private cars which appears to be between 30% and 50% more private cars than Wallapop. However, Wallapop has the biggest number of mono-car sellers: 122.992, stronger than Milanuncios with 121.498 sellers. Another signal that Wallapop is very strongly established in the most fragmented consumer segment, the one car seller's market.
It is in the multi-car sellers segment where Milanuncios wins big with 230.000 cars being sold by multi-car sellers. This amount is huge as it represents more than the total of Wallapop cars. Nevertheless, if Wallapop continues to grow its sales force it looks like it will have the muscle to catch up in volume with Milanuncios. We anticipate a very intense fight ahead in this front. Finally, we can conclude that Autoscout24.es does not appear to have focused relevantly in private cars, at least not as much as they appear to do in Germany.
In parallel, Wallapop also appears to have started successfully attacking the summit of the pyramid against Coches.net. The top 20 sellers in both players appear to be of similar size and we have learned from our interviews that Wallapop is trying hard to capture the most relevant dealers. We might elaborate more in future reports but for the time being, we consider that Wallapop is indeed successfully capturing big dealers. Well done by Bernardo Reiner, Wallapop cars commercial director, and his team. Time will tell if Wallapop can also retain those dealers.
Regarding autoscout24.es, they are the most concentrated out of the four players (Wallapop is the less) with their top 1000 sellers representing 57% of their offering. Once again this reflects Autoscout24.es strong position at the top of the market as well as a lower consumer penetration in the mass market.
Want to learn more?
This is only an extract taken from the full report: THE BATTLE BETWEEN SCHIBSTED AND WALLAPOP. Key insights in the car market. Please send us your corporate email in the following link: http://bit.ly/DaybatFullReport and we will send you the full report which includes detailed answers to the following questions:
-How are Wallapop and Coches.net positioned regarding top range premium cars?
-Given that province is the key competitive arena for a car purchase decision, how are both players positioned in some key provinces-areas?
-Is Wallapop in Barcelona (it is a more mature local market) stronger than Coches.net?
-Are there some segments where Wallapop beats Coches.net?
This article was originally published in Linkedin