As the battle between online cab services rages, Indian start-up Ola’s CEO Bhavish Aggrawal is standing firm in the way of world’s most valuable startup, Uber’s CEO Travis Kalanick’s India plans.
Uber is present in over 54 countries, but in India indiginous companies have the advantage.
Uber, is trying hard to penetrate into India and create a base. It just dropped prices as low as 6 rupees per kilometer and is aiming to add more than 20,000 drivers through an alliance with Tata Group and that in turn also gets them Tata cars easily.
Ola in turn recently tied-up with Didi Chuxing which is Uber’s competition in China, and also Grab and Lyft in other parts of the world. Now they are looking to adapting for local markets individually as well..
Didi has introduced a ride-sharing feature for the purpose of dating and is a hit in China. Grab offered the Malaysian fruit called Durian to its customers. It also has rebates for special millitary personnel. This came shortly after Uber started ice-cream deliveries according to a Bloomberg report.
Ola founder Bhavish Aggrawal believes that ‘local is better than global’ and that Ola understands the needs of the Indian customer and changes better and can adapt accordingly.
Uber co-founder and CEO Travis Kalanick last year said that it planned to spend around $1 billion in India to pose a threat to Ola.
Kalanick has been pushing hard in China to attract riders, but Uber has not been able to compete with Didi, which in turn raised $7.3 billion where Apple had a share of $1 billion.
The fight in India, although less capital intensive, but Uber (valuation $ 62.5 billion) can afford to get subsidies for drivers and customers while Ola ( valuation $ 5 billion) would need a lot of additional funding.
