Uber is going all out in India; to make massive vehicle purchase

Uber India is going to shake up its rivals in the cab-hailing app area as it is planning to make a huge purchase in India.

Uber India is planning to buy at least 200,000 passenger vehicles and lease them out to the drivers.

The cab-hailing app wants to buy vehicles over the next two years and also help driver-partners to acquire their own cabs by arranging finance and negotiating deals with automakers. Presently, Uber India has 4,00,000 drivers on its platform.

Uber India’s purchase will be made under Uber's leasing unit, Xchange Leasing and it is expected that Maruti Suzuki and Tata would make gains from this.

Raj Beri, head of leasing at Uber India, told ET, “We aim to empower a million driver-partners by 2018 under our UberSHAAN initiative and expect that potentially one out of five new drivers would be on the platform through our leasing programme.”

India is the next battlefield for Uber as India has emerged as the second-largest market for the company with local operations here accounting for 12% of its global market share.

However, Uber faces a tough competition from Ola.

Ola has also signed a Rs 2,600 crore deal with M&M to purchase 40,000 vehicles in two years for its driver-partners.

With the fleet market posting annual growth in excess of 15-20% over the past few years, compared with low single-digit growth seen in the auto industry, manufacturers from Toyota to Tata, Mahindra and Nissan have been forming alliances with Ola and Uber.