‘In 5 years, everything that moves on road should be enabled through us’
India’s largest ride-hailing service Ola has come under attack from global rival Uber, but it is fighting back by introducing newer categories and fulfilling more use cases as it looks to replace customers it loses to Uber with new ones. Ola’s chief operating officer PRANAY JIVRAJKA, in an interview with Alnoor Peermohamed, says that the taxi-hailing business is already sustainable in India, but a cannibalisation spree between the two companies is keeping the tap for subsidies wide open. Edited excerpts:
Ola is rolling out a lot of new categories and offerings such as rentals, outstation and cabs for corporates. Are these experiments driven by slowing growth in the point-to-point cab market? We’re experimenting a lot but not with the intent of “how to grow” or “how to take things forward” but more with the intent of how do we create more use cases for the customer and improve the customer experience. Rentals as an example has one of the best use cases for someone travelling to a new city for a bunch of meetings in a single day and you can’t rely on pointto-point. This is a very specific use case, and we’d started it with a different intention, but very soon realised it was solving for use cases that was not possible to solve with point-to-point.
About eight-10 months back we started Ola corporate and that’s where we got to learn and understand the massive demand that this particular segment has. A lot of people in corporates, especially at a senior level or mid-senior level, have back-to-back meetings. Similarly for outstation, we rolled it back around three years ago, but there was a clear need and a very big market in itself so we brought it back. Ola shut Ola Cafe and Ola Store, two other so-called experiments from the company. Is it the same with these new categories? These things are here to stay. So everything starts as an experiment, but with Ola Store and Cafe we wanted to see if we could use the same stack to address business-to-business types of solutions. We thought it was something we could use, but maybe this is not the right time for us to focus on that. It’s not that it might never happen again, you might see us coming up with something similar in a few quarters. You’ve rolled out multiple models, some that go against the idea of point-to-point mobility that you introduced first. Is India a country where several models are needed? India is very heterogeneous and it’s historical with the number of languages, religions, etc. and our transportation needs also change as we move from city to city. I’d say they change every 100 km. You can see this at various price points that we offer within our app today. We think you have to cover the entire pyramid and across several use cases for users who might be similar. As we grow, over the next five years, everything that moves on the road should be enabled through us.