Ola — one of India's 'unicorn' startups estimated to be worth about Rs 15,700 crore, or $2.5 billion — expects to launch the bus service in the next two months with the Ola Bus feature integrated into the company's app, allowing riders to choose between cabs, autos and buses.
"Much like how disruption happened in the taxi space, Ola will not own any buses but use available tourist and chartered buses to aggregate supply," said a senior company executive. "Passengers will be able to make bookings by entering the desired destination and time preference; the app will then indicate the closest bus with available seating."
The Bengaluru company has tasked Sundeep Sahni, a vice-president for new initiatives who joined just this month, with leading the rollout. Sahni earlier co-founded e-commerce company Lazada.
"Ola is focussed on building mobility for a billion people," said Bhavish Aggarwal, the co-founder & CEO of Ola, in a statement. He declined to discuss specifics of the new initiative. Ola, which has so far raised about $700 million in funding from marquee investors including Japan's SoftBank and Russian billionaire Yuri Milner's DST Global, competes with Uber, the world's most valuable startup.
Experts are of the view that Ola's entry into the bus transport category is aimed at expanding its user base and boosting revenue, as it looks to attract more investors to fund aggressive growth.
The five-year-old company — founded by IIT-Bombay graduates Aggarwal and Ankit Bhati — is estimated to clock a revenue run rate of around $450-500 million, and is aiming for gross revenue of $1 billion by the end of 2015.
"They started with taxis and moved to autos. The company wants to establish itself as a transport technology platform rather than be dependent on one mode," said Jaspal Singh, co-founder of Valoriser Consultants, a market research firm for transport companies.
Prime mode of travel
Buses are a prime mode of travel in India, with about 1.5 lakh buses transporting some 70 million people every day, according to industry estimates. In comparison, 23 million people travel by train.
Ola's move into this business is expected to deliver on multiple fronts — increase the user base and boost its database of passengers to expand intercity services or shared taxi services.
Last week, Chinese cab company Didi Kuaidi, which is backed by Alibaba, announced the launch of Didi Bus, an on-demand bus service utilising unused capacity of licensed operators.
Starting with Beijing and Shenzhen, Didi Bus will initially be operated via messaging app WeChat. Additional sources of revenue are expected to include advertisements and value-added services.
In a bid to diversify its business, Ola has ventured into several new categories including food and grocery delivery. The company is currently working on several new initiatives, including carpooling, ecommerce on-demand deliveries and logistics. Ola's spurt in revenues has been aided by its acquisition of rival TaxiForSure in March. "The final details are still in the works and may change closer to launch," said a company executive.
0 comments:
Post a Comment