Hyderabad: Cab aggregators OLA and UBER were, as part of becoming behemoths, redesigning their strategy to aggressively venture into all the possible spaces in a very short period.
Ola acquired food delivery company Food Panda and Uber followed suit recently launching its UberEats segment of food delivery. As per the latest report, Uber recently unveiled its platform 'Movement' where it is going to use anonymised data from millions of trips to help civic and transport administration.
‘Movement’ aims at providing traffic-based data to improve travel experiences for riders and help civic authorities improve roads and manage transit lines, and peak hour rush better.
While fierce competition could be one reason, the other was for establishing monopoly considering the market size. Both the companies had essentially unconstrained cash reserves and could afford to bleed funds by practically venturing into any space.
“You need to have a secret salt which gives you competitive advantage because there is huge availability of capital for disruption. Capital is the key. Without the capital which they can afford to lose, they cannot be venturing into multiple domains. They are all mobility companies and are trying to see where else their mobile solution could work. By touching upon multiple areas, they are trying to get more and more work from the same set of people,” said tech investor T.V. Mohandas Pai Meru was the major organised player till a few years ago. However, Uber and Ola, despite sharing investor relationship with Japan-based Softbank, were currently seen as competitors. Apart from killing all rival cab aggregators, there were speculations of and Ola-Uber merger.
“Behind both these people is Softbank which is betting big on this industry. It invested in every single ride-sharing company in the world. Everything is about data and customer behaviour, most optimised routes and sharing of behaviour. This data can be monetised in multiple ways,”, said T-Hub COO Srini Kollipara.
