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Responding to allegations of gaining market share through dumping of foreign capital by its Indian competitor, taxi-aggregator Uber’s chief executive officer Travis Kalanick on Thursday said that both the companies, by the virtue of the huge investments raised, were “foreign owned”.
“Our competitor in India has raised an enormous amount of capital. We have raised capital for our global operations. At the end of the day, both companies have taken so much investments that a vast majority of my company and vast majority of Ola is foreign owned,” Kalanick said at an event organised by US-India Business Council.
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“If it’s about whether I am personally an Indian, I will apply to be a citizen of India, if this is what gets us over the hump. I think at the end of the day it’s about the innovations we have brought to the table, how we are serving riders… so though I don’t agree with all the comments, at the end of the day, we respect competing with Ola,” he added.
In a recent interview with The Indian Express, Ola’s chief operating officer Pranay Jivrajka had said that its competition today, to be in the game, was using capital dumping as a tool. “We can become profitable tomorrow if we stop reacting to competition and stop incentives in key markets, because rest everything is profitable for us,” Jivrajka had said.
However, Kalanick said that operationally, his company has adapted to local ways to compete with the domestic players here. “India and China are both very big markets, which means these markets can on their own support local competitors that are focused on that market. What this means is the only way you can compete is if you become local yourself,” he said, adding that being local for India and China meant taking it to the “next level”.
On the one hand, Uber merged into its Chinese competitor after losing money there — nearly $200 million a month — on the other hand in India, Kalanick said he believed the company was on its way to profitability.
“Merger was a great strategy (in China). We invested about $2 billion in our China business. Post merger, that investment was $7 billion and we did that in about two years. That’s the failure in China. We are losing in India as well, but we see a path towards profitability. The bigger thing about competition for us in India is car ownership,” he said.
India is the largest market outside the US for Uber and accounts for 12 per cent of all its Uber trips globally.
