Australia: Ola to compete with Uber now in Australia

Ola, Uber’s biggest rival in India, has followed it into another country now. Seven years after its founding, India’s largest domestic ride-hailing company announced plans to enter Australia on January 30. The Bengaluru-based company has started on-boarding private hire vehicles and driver-partners in three major cities—Sydney, Melbourne, and Perth.

“We are very excited about launching Ola in Australia and see immense potential for the ride-sharing ecosystem which embraces new technology and innovation,” co-founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal said in the company’s press release.

The secret weapon that could give Ola an edge Down Under is the outsized foreign-driver population there. “Most (taxi-) drivers in Australia are Indian, which is good for Ola from a cultural point of view,” Jaspal Singh, co-founder of research and advisory firm Valoriser Consultants, told Quartz. As early as 2014, the number of Indian-origin taxi drivers overtook Australian-born cabbies. Just this month, Singh met authorities in Sydney and Brisbane who shared the feedback that migrants are capitalizing on the shortage of drivers there.

“Ola is hopeful that they can capture the market by using the Indian diaspora,” Singh added.

The news comes on the heels of Japanese investing giant Softbank asking San Francisco-based Uber to return its focus to its core markets, one of which is Australia. Softbank is a major stakeholder in both Ola and Uber, fueling suspicions of a soft merger of sorts between the two in India.

Full Content: Ola

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