Whoosh

Whoosh built something none of its Western peers managed at comparable scale — a vertically integrated scooter-sharing operator that grew to a 214,000-vehicle fleet and 149.7 million annual trips (2024) while actually earning money for most of its life — and its 2026 story is a deliberate pivot from growth to harvest plus a high-margin second act. Management guides to roughly ₽14B of revenue and ₽4.5B of EBITDA at ~30% profitability in 2026, explicitly maximizing returns on the existing fleet rather than buying new vehicles — a capital-discipline move available only to an operator that owns its hardware stack and repair infrastructure. The genuinely interesting asset is Latin America: revenue there grew 2.7x year over year in H1 2025 to ₽928M on 5.7M rides, with revenue per ride 90% higher than in Russia and the CIS; Brazil and Chile already host 14,000 scooters, users in the region hit 3.4 million (up 116%) in the first nine months of 2025, Colombia launched in December 2025, Mexico followed, and the company plans four LatAm countries in 2026. Year-round riding seasons and thin competition (Lime exited most of the region years ago) make LatAm structurally better scooter geography than Moscow. As one of the only publicly traded micromobility pure-plays anywhere (MOEX: WUSH since December 2022), Whoosh offers direct exposure to that expansion, and its engineering cost base — Russian-salaried developers, in-house IoT — undercuts Western operators' opex per vehicle. If the LatAm unit compounds at current rates while the home market stabilizes under new regulation that favors large compliant operators over gray-market rivals, today's distressed multiple looks like the bottom of a cycle, not a terminal state.

Whoosh's 2025 results ended the profitable-pure-play narrative: revenue fell roughly 13% to ₽12.5B and the company swung to a ₽2.93B IFRS loss from a ₽1.99B profit the year before — a collapse driven by its home market, where regulatory tightening is structural, not cyclical. Russia is moving toward mandatory registration of e-scooters and potentially driver's licenses for riders, major cities keep ratcheting speed zones and parking bans, and each restriction directly suppresses the short impulse rides that constitute the business. The macro squeeze is just as harsh: Russian interest rates near multi-decade highs punish a fleet-financing business model, and the 2026 plan to skip fleet renewal — spun as discipline — means an aging fleet with rising maintenance costs and degrading ride quality precisely when competitors MTS Urent and Yandex, both attached to giant ecosystems with cheaper capital, contest every market. The Latin American growth story is real but small (under ₽1B of H1 2025 revenue against a ₽12.5B business) and expensive to scale: Brazil's cities have already cycled through failed scooter operators, currency risk cuts both ways, and a Russian-headquartered company expanding abroad carries sanctions-adjacent friction in banking, hardware procurement, and municipal contracting that Western rivals never face. For investors, the wrapper may be the biggest problem: MOEX-listed equity is effectively uninvestable for most foreign capital, dividends and guidance live at the mercy of the ruble, and no strategic acquirer from outside Russia can plausibly buy the company. A shrinking, newly loss-making home market, a subscale foreign bet, high-rate financing, an aging fleet, and a captive-market listing — the 2026 EBITDA guidance has to be taken on faith from a management team that just missed the prior year badly.