‘Kalanick’s departure will not hit budget allocation for India’

BENGALURU: Cab-hailing giant Uber Technologies Inc is arguably facing the most tumultuous period in its eight-year existence—over the past few weeks and months, the world’s most valuable startup has been rocked by the departure of its founder and CEO Travis Kalanick following a series of ethical and corporate lapses. Kalanick’s departure has also raised concerns over the future direction of Uber’s business in India. In an interview, Uber India president Amit Jain dismissed such concerns. Edited excerpts: Will Kalanick’s exit impact budgets and resources towards Uber India? Absolutely not. First, India continues to be a very big market for Uber and the commitment towards India is absolute. We will do whatever it takes to continue to invest and grow the market here. Secondly, for the last four years, we were in a cycle where investment was required because we were growing our business here. Now as we move from a startup to a sustainable business, we’ll get to a point where we’ll need far fewer investments. Are you expecting attrition in Uber India to increase because of the negative publicity and uncertainty about the top leadership? Our attrition in the last four years in India has been minimal. We are close to a 1,000person team in India right now. A year and a half back, we were less than half that number. We continue to grow. I do not expect attrition as a result of this. Any other steps that you plan to take to ensure there’s no attrition because of this? We plan to launch exciting products even faster. We just launched UberEATS in Gurgaon. We’ve got three other exciting products on the road map. UberMoto is a product that we started investing in earlier this year. We plan to expand that to multiple cities. An Uber executive, Eric Alexander, obtained medical records of a rape victim in Delhi. Were any of Uber India’s employees involved in getting the records? I can’t comment on the issue because it’s sub judice. I personally don’t know much more because I wasn’t (at Uber) at that time. What kind of growth has Uber India seen over the past year? On the business side, we’ve grown 2.5x since last June. We’ve much more than doubled. The (2.5x) growth is for both trips and GMV (gross merchandise value). We will soon hit our 500 millionth trip in India in the next couple of days. We’ve had 1 billion interactions between our riders and driver partners in less than four years.