India fastest growing country for Uber Eats with 12,000 restaurants

Calling India a huge market for Uber Eats, Raj Beri, who heads this business in APAC, said its important to understand that this vertical just two-and-a-half years old, but is already in over 190 cities and the biggest food delivery business outside China.

“We have been able to leverage the technology platform from the rides side,” Beri said, underlining that Asia is the fastest growing region with six times growth in the last year.

“India is the fastest growing country though we have been there only for 15 months. We have recorded over 50 per cent MoM growth and now cover 28 cities and 12,000 restaurants,” added Beri. Uber Eats launched with Mumbai last May.

Beri said that while India already has a few strong players in the food delivery business, these are still very early days. “In the long run our advantage will be our technology. We did grow a rides business from nothing to the great position it is in now,” he added.

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Beri said that while the app will soon be able to suggest food based on the customers behaviour, the restaurants will also get to know more about those behaviours and expand accordingly.

Entering Tier II and III markets like Indore, Vijayawada and Mysore has also helped. “The appreciation for a service like this is much more in those markets,” he said, adding that this is a global strategy for Uber Eats.

Also, Uber Eats is very keen on using drones for delivering food in the near future. “We have just announced pilots for drone delivery. It will be a magical experience to push a button a get your food delivered in 7-8 minutes, and warmed to quality.” But the new drone policy in India is not open to use of the technology for delivery of food or merchandise.

Beri said it was still early, and conversations with regulators will need to take place over time. “But just the promise that we are investing on something like this is important.”

“We are creating good economic opportunities for restaurants. We work with a lot of small and medium sized restaurants that would not have had access to the kind of demand and marketing insights that we can generate for them,” he said about how Uber Eats is helping restaurants expand. Uber’s Q2 2018 net revenue was $2.7 billion, up 51 percent from the same quarter last year, and gross bookings were $12 billion, up 41 percent year-over-year.

The author attended the Uber Elevate Summit in Tokyo on the invite of Uber India.