Ola has been aggressively expanding over past 12 to 18 months or so – they now operate in 102 cities in India and have over 35,000 vehicles on their platform. It is estimated that Ola has captured over 75 percent market share in Mobile App based Taxi booking space.
And it’s just not the taxi space – Ola has earlier ventured in app based auto booking and very recently entered Bus Shuttle bookings as well.
However, Ola’s focus till date has been B2C segment, where they were offering services to end-users only. Starting today they have announced a new initiative called Ola Corporate that will cater to transportation needs of Enterprises.
Enterprise Transportation space in India is currently fragmented and localized. Multiple local taxi providers tie up with corporates and take care of employee transportation needs. Ola wants now capture this market through Ola Corporate.
Ola Corporate plans to make available a wide range of mobility use cases at a much lower costs as against the existing scheduled corporate travel options, along with benefits of a centralized, paperless billing system.
Fares for Ola Corporate are the same as standard rate cards for B2C and company claims that businesses will save as much as 60% on their travel costs with on-demand consumption.
How will Ola Corporate Function?
Ola Corporate will work similar to their existing app where enterprise customers will have the flexibility and ease of hailing an Ola cab as and when required for business and pay from their company’s centralized pre-paid account.
With app based bookings and ETAs of less than 5 minutes across all major Indian metros, Ola hopes to significantly cut the time wasted in waiting for scheduled transport. Ola Corporate’s centralized billing will make transport reimbursements redundant for corporate travellers. For Organizations, it will reduce their overheads and bring much needed transparency in corporate travel.
Pranay Jivrajka, COO at Ola said in regards to the initiative, “Ola Corporate marks the next phase of evolution for enterprise transport in India. This is an important step towards our goal of ensuring mobility for a billion Indians, by addressing a major use case with unique and customised solutions. With ‘Ola Corporate’, we are bringing the inherent benefits of Ola’s technology platform to simplify the way executives travel for business, at the click of a button on their Ola app. The corporate dashboard allows for improved efficiency and productivity for businesses, taking away the hassle of scheduling pickups and cumbersome billing and payment processes. With operations in more than 100 Indian cities, Ola offers the most comprehensive mobility network for India Inc.”
Ola Facing Stiff Competition
While Ola rules the Indian market as of now, Uber is slowly increasing their market share in India. Other local competitors are also coming into the fray. Recently, Reliance Industries announced that they will soon be getting into App based cab bookings as well, which is sure to cause worry to incumbents like Ola and Uber.
Ola will also now be facing stiff competition from 35,000+ Kaali-Peeli Taxi cabs in Mumbai (which is one of their biggest markets), as they announced last week launch of their own mobile booking app called 9211.
With launch of Ola Corporate, they will enjoy first movers advantage in this space and help gain market share in the space that is largely untapped by organized players.
