Micro alone will surpass Uber’s India business within a month, says Ola

It’s been barely three weeks since taxi-aggregator Ola launched its newest ride-hailing service Ola Micro and the company is already beginning to reap the results of the category.

According to Anand Subramanian, Ola’s Senor Director, Marketing and Communications, what Ola as a platform managed to achieve in a span of three years, Ola Micro accomplished the same results in just three weeks.

“In three weeks, we have put up a category (Ola Micro) which is already 50 per cent of all of Uber's daily bookings in the country. The rate at which Micro is growing, it will be larger than their entire brand within a month," claimed Raghuvesh Sarup, Chief Marketing Officer and Head of Categories at Ola.

At Rs 6 per km and a minimum fare of Rs 50, Ola Micro is the company’s cheapest offering. Available in seven cities as of the moment (Bengaluru, Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Hyderabad and Pune), Ola Micro has been garnering significant traction with the company seeing thousands of bookings every day. On offer are rides in cars like Datsun's GO, Suzuki's WagonR and Hyundai's EON when anyone rides with Ola Micro.

Subramanian added that Ola Micro has been primarily introduced for the ‘short distance commute’ sector- thus giving customers an economical solution. He further said that the Micro will be sort of an ‘onboarding platform’ for new users.

“Our data shows that about two-thirds of the people who tried Ola Micro were new users, so that’s an encouraging development,” claims Subramanian, adding that it will be the first AC cab ride at such a jaw-dropping price for a lot of people.

The launch of Ola Micro was a result of the company learning the Indian market, trying to understand the needs of their users and finally executing the idea.

“We understand that India is a group of micro markets, each of which come with different needs. As a brand, it’s important for us to not only fulfil those needs, but also to ensure that every market is taken care of,” Subramanian further adds.

Citing the example of Ola Prime, the company’s luxury offering with wifi, he says that the Prime was intended to target individuals heading for meetings or official work and he attributed the company’s meticulous understanding of the needs which led to Ola Prime being a runaway hit, so much so that they’ve had to add an extra 20,000 sedans in the last couple of weeks itself to meet soaring demands.

“Our competitions has also tried different permutations and combinations around wifi-enabled cars, but have failed to achieve any success.”

Broaching the topic of competition, when asked to comment on Uber’s claim of being larger than Ola in a month, Subramanian was quick to respond, “Keeping loose claims aside, it’s a known fact that Ola has the majority of the market share- at around 75% as compared to Uber.”

Image credit: Indiatimes