The war of words and bitter rivalry between cab app aggregators Uber and Ola has been a hotly discussed topic in the media.
Earlier in March, Uber’s President of business in Asia, Eric Alexander, had claimed that Uber will surpass Ola in India within a month. This statement actually triggered the war of words between these two taxi app behemoths.
A month after Eric’s statement, Ola claimed that their newly launched ‘Micro’ category alone had beaten the entire Uber Fleet.
While we had statements from both these companies, there was no way to authenticate statement from either of them. There was no third party data that could verify the market share of these cab aggregators up until now.
Truecaller, one of the most widely used caller identification app has finally given us authentic third party data that should put this debate to rest!
Ola is More Than Twice as Big as Uber
Homegrown Ola is more than twice as big as Uber – Truecaller’s Trueinsights report analysed around 2.5 billion calls made between consumers and service providers to understand the penetration of cab services in the country. Analysis of data between Jan 01, 2016 and April 17, 2016 revealed that 102 million calls were made between Ola and its users compared to 39 million calls for Uber. The distribution of calls between Ola and Uber stands at 72% and 28% respectively.
While the numbers do not give market share – the number of calls give us a fair idea of how many cab requests were made to Ola vs Uber. Even if we consider that Ola has more cancellations than Uber (which we think would be same for both), still Ola remains far ahead of Uber in terms of market share!
The Cab hailing market in India
Truecaller’s TrueInsights report also gives us peek into burgeoning cab hailing market in India. According to the report, from January 1st to April 17th, Indian smartphone owners made and received 2.49 billion calls to some sort of cab or car service.
This also shows that even though Ola and Uber are talked about in the media quite frequently, other unorganized cab rental providers have a huge market. Out of 2.4 billion calls made to service providers, half of them were for other driving services like private drivers, transportation services and other unorganized taxi providers.
Here is a graph that gives you an idea of share of call volume.
The debate is settled – Homegrown Ola is far bigger than Uber in India and we don’t see this equation changing anytime soon!
Source: TrueInsights