Ola! Did You Book An Uber?

Pranjal Malu
“Hey dude, we’re getting late. Book a cab fast”, says one friend to another friend at the
eleventh hour, when they are extremely late for an important client meeting. And within the
first five minutes of the twelfth hour, they have already left for their destination in the cab.
“Book a Cab” this phrase has become the epitome of convenience for all kinds of people.
Men or women, young or old, students or the working class, almost everyone has travelled in
a cab. The fast availability, ease in booking and the affordability of these cabs makes them a
super hit show amongst today’s generation. Given all these advantages, the USP of the cabs
market certainly is the twenty-four by seven availability that they offer. Whether it is two in
the morning or four in the afternoon, all you need to do is pick up that smartphone of yours
and click on a few buttons and Voila!, your cab is waiting right outside. Currently, as we all
can see very evidently, the two main big players in the cabs market are, our very own Indian
origin, Ola and the American multinational Uber. With heavy competition between the two
booming day after day, the question to be answered here is, which one amongst the two of
them steals the show?

With Ola being an Indian origin company, we do feel a desi domestic connection with it, in
comparison to Uber. But there’s more to why Ola stands out and has an edge over Uber in the
taxi service market. Ola came into India first, in December 2010 and Uber came along three
years later in October 2013. Currently, both, Ola and Uber have almost the same amount of
funding in India. Where Ola has raised roughly around $1.3 billion of funding in the past few
years, Uber is also trying to catch up with around $1 billion. Also, Ola has captured nearly
about 102 cities whereas Uber is not seen in more than 26 cities of India. Furthermore, Ola
has a driver base of almost 3.5 lakhs in comparison to Uber’s 2.5 lakhs. This difference is due
to the early entry of Ola in the Indian market and also due to the cordial relations it maintains
with its employees. Additionally, the fabulous perks and incentives it provides its employees
with is one of the sole reason for its large driver base. An example of such incentives is the
‘Ola Premier League’, a five-week long contest based on the number of trips accomplished
by a driver and ‘Ola Stars’. Incentives such as a 2BHK flat, foreign trips, cars, medical
insurance and scholarships for their children are given away. It isn’t very surprising to see
Ola capturing almost 60% of the market share in India and Uber with merely 4% of the share.
Competitors like Meru Cabs and TaxiForSure account for 16% and 14% respectively
according to Softbank data reports.

Adding on, the number of daily rides operating in India by Ola are a massive 750000 in
contrast to Uber’s 200000 daily rides only. This difference is majorly justified by the kind of
vast services Ola offers. Ola micro, Ola mini, Ola auto and Ola prime, all of these serve a
wide range of purposes. An added service is also the Ola share option that makes it more
convenient for passengers travelling to the same place to pool in and travel to their
destinations. Ola also offers car rental schemes that can be easily opted for in almost all cities
that it operates in. Whereas analysing Uber services, there are hardly a handful of them.
Namely uberGo, uberX and uberSUV. The war of the taxi aggregators- Ola and Uber, in
India, is in high gear; every move one makes is met by an even bigger move by the other. The
scuffle persists on several facades as they both strive for the leading position. The battle is no
longer about who is getting more number of customers, but also about who is getting more
consumers on their mobile applications. Ola launched its iOS and Android apps in 2012,
TaxiForSure in 2013 and Uber launched its app in 2014. App install data by WhichApp
shows that Ola has an edge over in India. The Ola app has been downloaded more than twice
as much as Uber based on data of approximately around 90000 Android users in India. Ola
also points out that as of October 2015, it has over 25 million customers in India. Adding to
this information, Truecaller, which operates a large directory of phone numbers, also pointed
out that in the period of January and March this year, almost 4.1 percentage of all taxi
booking calls that it identified were made to Ola or Ola drivers. In contrast, Uber’s stake was
only a mere 1.6 percent. These figures give out some interesting proof of which out of the
two taxi services are more widely used. In addition to the above numbers, data from
7ParkData- a mobile app intelligence company shows some attention-grabbing figures
regarding the same. It has published a chart that compares the weekly active users (WAU) of
Ola and Uber, as a percentage of mobile device users in India during 2014-15. As of October
2015, Ola emerged at the leading position with a booming 8.93% WAU, whereas, Uber stood
at 5.75%.

While Ola is fast moving and touching more and more cities each day, Uber is taking its time
and penetrating deep in quality and service. The game plan that it boasts of about is simple –
lower the costs, raise the demand, flood the market and eventually kill competition. Uber
wants to focus and grow deep in the markets they are in currently. It has surfaced itself in this
competitive industry and poses a major threat to our in-house Ola. Although Uber is global,
slick and hip, our desi Ola still takes the lead on home turf.
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