The largest ride-hailing service Uber after its exit from China, is now focusing all of its energy and resources towards growth in India and other South-east Asian countries. To further drive growth in the country, the company is betting big on its enterprise offering — which lets big businesses use the cab aggregation services for its employees.
The company’s enterprise service helps businesses enable a transportation network for their employees, and keep tabs on total spendings in check. The businesses are also provided with a dashboard to monitor the trip activity, manage budgets, enforce ride policies and use a central payment account to pay for rides or ask for reimbursement of business-related trips.
The enterprise ‘Uber for Business’ service which was first introduced for America, U.K, France and Canada in 2014, was introduced in India after a three-month trial in Decemeber 2015. So, within nine months of its operation, the service has seen a tremendous 50 per cent month-on-month growth, and is planning to further scale the offering in the near future.
Commenting on the growth and future prospects of the enterprise offering, Arjun Nohwar, APAC Head of Uber for Business says,
Uber for Business as a product has been growing at an incredible pace worldwide and we are delighted to have some of the largest Indian corporates adopt it for their employee travel. We have over 50,000 companies across the world using Uber for Business and it has proved to be a more affordable and efficient transportation option for them.
The ‘Uber for Business’ service is currently operational in all 28 Indian cities where the ride-hailing service operates in. The company also reports that the service is currently being used by companies such as Cognizant Technologies, Bain & Co, Airtel, AT Kearney, Dr. Reddy’s, Godrej Group, NDTV, Reliance ADA Group, Tata Steel, Welspun. Startups such as Quikr, Mindtree, Stayglad and Treebo.
Uber for Business, the company believes can help any big company cut down on business-related travel costs by a good 60 per cent(about Rs. 5,000 per employee per month) as compared to other offerings. Ola, the company’s fiercest cab-hailing rival in the country also runs an enterprise business-oriented service called ‘Ola Corporate’.
In addition to banking upon its enterprise service, Uber is also planning to tackle the tiring daily tussles with the govt. authorities. It has, thus, created a new position called ‘Public Policy Head’ and appointed former NDTV journalist Shweta Rajpal Kohli at that position.
This will help the ride-hailing company tackle the daily nuances of each state government, who is planning to introduce different policies for cab aggregation services. The Karnataka Govt. has already acted and released a set of rules and regulations for licencing while the Delhi Govt. is now working on a strict draft, introducing an upper cap on surge pricing.
