Uber planning to buy 2 lakh cabs to cover more ground in India

The US tech giants are leaving no stones unturned to prove their mettle competing against local players in the country. On the one hand, we have e-commerce sector getting heated up with fierce rivalry between Flipkart and Amazon and on the other it’s the taxi hailing segment that’s seeing exciting competition between Ola and American cab aggregator Uber.

After Ola’s deal with M&M to purchase 40,000 vehicles in two years for its driver-partners, Uber has also drawn out a big expansion plan for its business in India. According to a report in Economic Times, the company is planning to buy as many as 200,000 passenger vehicles over the period of next two years. The company will then employ the services of its leasing unit, Xchange Leasing, to lease out the cars to drivers who’re willing to join their platform, says a top-level executive.

Incidentally, it will be Maruti Suzuki and Tata Motors that will gain the most as the company already has driver skilling, vehicle purchase and financing pacts with them.

The vehicle purchase, likely the largest ever by a single buyer in India, will be in addition to Uber’s programme to help driver-partners acquire their own cabs by arranging finance and negotiating deals with automakers, says the report.

Speaking to ET, Raj Beri, head of leasing at Uber India, said, “We aim to empower a million driver-partners by 2018 under our UberSHAAN initiative and expect that potentially one out of five new drivers would be on the platform through our leasing programme.”

Just like Amazon, Uber is also going all guns blazing to take on Indian players. The country has emerged as the second-largest market for the company with local operations here accounting for 12 percent of its global market share. But with Ola as its rival, backed by SoftBank and a host of other foreign investors, the competition is indeed tough for Uber.