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Ola, Uber Saw Sharp Decline in the Growth of Daily Rides

24Sep By Gauri SinghNo Comments

BUSINESS

Ola, Uber Saw Sharp Decline in the Growth of Daily Rides

The two largest ride hailing services in India that are Ola and Uber, are witnessing a sharp slowdown in the growth of rides over the past year. This is the result of their steer toward operational efficiencies, cut customer discounts and driver incentives, and expand into newer verticals such as food delivery. Though the absolute number of daily rides has increased, growth declined to 20% on average in 2018 to 3.5 million across all its segments.“The market has dwindled owing to a higher base effect, as well as a plunge in supply and hike in fares,” said Jaspal Singh, founder of Valoriser Consultants, a transportation consulting firm.In 2017, Uber claimed to achieved 9.4 million trips a week (1.3 million a day), which represented a 67% growth in a span of 11 months. In 2018, CEO Dara Khos...

Zomato scales FY18 revenue by 40%, Losses Fall Almost 73%

22Sep By Gauri SinghNo Comments

BUSINESS

Zomato scales FY18 revenue by 40%, Losses Fall Almost 73%

Online food delivery and restaurant discovery firm Zomato has ended the financial year 2017-18 with a 40% growth in revenues at Rs 466 crore. The firm also reduced its losses by almost 73% to come in at Rs 106 crore in FY18 as compared to Rs 390 crore last year. According to the reports, the firm witnessed its standalone revenues grow almost 25% to Rs 388 crore in FY18 from Rs 309 crore last year. Also, the standalone losses for FY18 fell 86% to Rs 78.5 crore this time. “We demonstrated that our business can generate profits — almost throughout the year, we hit EBITDA breakeven globally, across all our business, and while maintaining good growth levels; and then in the last two months, we decided to double down on growth,” said Zomato Founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal. The firm saw ...

Swiggy Expands its Services to Eight New Cities

21Sep By Gauri SinghNo Comments

BUSINESS

Swiggy Expands its Services to Eight New Cities

The food delivery platform Swiggy which is the rival of Zomato is gearing up for the competition. The company has launched its services in eight new cities as it strengthens presence across the country. The new cities where Swiggy has rolled out its services include Dehradun, Puducherry, Mysore, Vijayawada, Nashik, Guwahati, Kanpur and Ludhiana. It has been stated that the company has partnered with over 1,200 restaurants in these cities. "Expanding to these eight new markets is very important to us,” Swiggy COO Vivek Sunder said. He also stated that over the years, Swiggy has played an important role in making food ordering and delivery more convenient, reliable and accessible for consumers across the country. The company was founded in 2014 and claims to have over 40,000 restaura...

Amazon Plans to Launch 3,000 Amazon Go Cashierless Stores

20Sep By Gauri SinghNo Comments

BUSINESS

Amazon Plans to Launch 3,000 Amazon Go Cashierless Stores

The retail giant Amazon has made aggressive plans of launching as many as 3,000 new Amazon Go cashierless stores in the next few years. The people familiar with the development stated that the company plans to open 10 such stores by the end of this year. These stores will further be expanded to 50 locations across major metro areas by 2019 and as many as 3,000 stores by 2021. At present, Amazon has three Amazon Go stores in Seattle and has announced one in Chicago with further plans to expand its operations in San Francisco and New York. The Amazon Go stores have no cashiers and allow shoppers to buy things with the help of a smartphone app. This makes the shopping experience easy for the customers and also saves their time that was required to stand in the queue. This concept is ...

Flipkart Rolls Out Cardless Credit for Customers Amid Festive Season

19Sep By Gauri SinghNo Comments

BUSINESS

Flipkart Rolls Out Cardless Credit for Customers Amid Festive Season

With the upcoming festive season, the e-commerce platforms are gearing up for various mediums to attract customers through methods like festive season sale and offers. With this, the e-commerce player Flipkart has come up with a fresh feature that is a credit line for customers to complete their shopping on the platform. This credit line is known as ‘Cardless Credit’ which will allow the customers to get an instant credit line of up to Rs 60,000 based on the user’s creditworthiness. The customers who do not have a formal credit access, through this feature, can purchase products and in turn trigger a growth in the gross merchandise value for the e-commerce major Flipkart. “Close to 45 million customers on our platform do not have formal access to credit and a good portion of this is em...

After UK and Australia, Ola is all set to Enter New Zealand

18Sep By Gauri SinghNo Comments

BUSINESS

After UK and Australia, Ola is all set to Enter New Zealand

The homegrown cab aggregator Ola has been on an expansion spree lately and is expanding itself in various international regions including UK and Australia. Soon after this, the company announced its plans to enter the New Zealand market starting with Auckland, Christchurch and Wellington. However, the date of launch has not been mentioned as of now. With this announcement, New Zealand becomes the third international market that Ola will enter into this year after rolling out its services in Australia in February and UK in August. For this purpose, the company has appointed Brian Dewil as Country Manager for New Zealand. “I’m excited to build the local team and business in New Zealand and provide a healthy contribution to the nation’s local mobility infrastructure”, said Brian Dewil, Co...

UberEats Partners With General Insurance Provider Tata AIG

17Sep By Gauri SinghNo Comments

BUSINESS

UberEats Partners With General Insurance Provider Tata AIG

Food delivery platform UberEats has tied up with general insurance provider Tata AIG for the purpose of offering comprehensive insurance covers for its delivery executives in India. The particular programme will provide insurance to the executives for up to Rs 5 lakh against accidental death and permanent disability, applicable when they are on the road delivering orders for UberEats. Along with this, the policy also offers a cover of Rs 2 lakh against hospitalization expenses and an outpatient cover of Rs 50,000 per delivery agent. “While the programme currently offers accidental insurance, we are thinking of extending it to areas relating to life and medical insurance... We are also running small pilots to negotiate term policies for agents in their individual capacity, at attractive...

Uber to Invest $154 million to Boost Canadian Operations

15Sep By Gauri SinghNo Comments

BUSINESS

Uber to Invest $154 million to Boost Canadian Operations

Global cab aggregator Uber has announced that it would invest up to $154 million (Can$200 million) over five years for the purpose of expanding its Toronto lab which is concerned with developing artificial intelligence for self-driving cars. Along with this, the company is planning to open a new engineering office in Canada's largest metropolis in early 2019. Uber's new engineering hub will join the company's efforts to launch the new features for its app. Also, they would expand into other modes of transportation such as electric bikes and scooters, as well as partnerships with public transit. In the 15 months since the Uber lab led by University of Toronto professor and machine learning expert Raquel Urtasun opened, it has delivered "significant technical breakthroughs towards m...

Tech Giant Cisco Plans to Step Up Investment in India

15Sep By Gauri SinghNo Comments

BUSINESS

Tech Giant Cisco Plans to Step Up Investment in India

One of the biggest technology companies Cisco has announced that it is stepping up investments in the Indian market. This is being done as part of the second phase of its 'Country Digital Acceleration' (CDA) programme. With this, the company will focus on accelerating innovation and entrepreneurship, 5G use cases for citizen services as well as transportation modernization. Cisco claims that India is among its few markets where the company has made the second round of investment as part of its CDA programme. "India is an important market for us. While we are not disclosing the amount we would be investing, it is clear that we are betting on India as a key market. We are adding four more states to our existing initiatives towards areas like innovation, smart cities. We have also signed ...

This English Premier League Team Earn Record $652 Million Revenue in FY17/18

14Sep By AdityaNo Comments

BUSINESS

This English Premier League Team Earn Record $652 Million Revenue in FY17/18

English champions Manchester City posted record revenues of 500.5 million ($652 million) in a record-breaking 2017/18 campaign on the pitch as Pep Guardiola's men romped to the Premier League title amassing 100 points. City reported profits of 10.4million, a fourth consecutive year of profitability, with wages to revenue ratio falling to 52 percent. "Our journey is not complete and we have more targets to fulfil," said chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak, who recently celebrated a decade since an Abu Dhabi-backed takeover of the club transformed City's fortunes. "There should be no doubt that we are looking forward to the challenges of the new season and those beyond it with equal commitment and determination to the 10 seasons that came before." Before Sheikh Mansour's takeover, City's reve...

14Sep By Gauri SinghNo Comments

BUSINESS

Video Streaming Platform HOOQ to Double India Investments

Video-on-demand streaming service HOOQ based in Singapore is doubling its India investments and has changed strategy to focus on Hollywood and English premium video content. This is basically being done to take on Netflix and Amazon prime, and drive growth in India’s highly competitive over-the-top (OTT) video market. “We are doubling up on our investments for India. We are investing in content, manpower as well as technology,” Zulfiqar Khan, managing director at HOOQ India stated. On the new strategy, Hooq will narrow its focus on Hollywood and English premium content, and it has started phasing out regional and Hindi content. India is expected to be among the top 10 OTT video markets in the world in four years. HOOQ will continue its Rs 89 monthly plan. Khan said Hooq’s content p...

Google Neighbourly Rolls Out in Five More Indian Cities

13Sep By Gauri SinghNo Comments

BUSINESS

Google Neighbourly Rolls Out in Five More Indian Cities

The local information app Neighbourly which was launched by Google recently has reportedly expanded to five more Indian cities including Ahmedabad, Coimbatore, Mysore, Vizag and Kota. The app, which helps users with local information like nearby shopping arcades, parks, fitness, food and tuition centres, was launched by Google in beta in May and is now available in seven cities. "With 'Neighbourly', we are able to address the local information needs of India's fast-growing internet users in their neighbourhood," said Josh Woodward, Group Product Manager, Next Billion Users team, Google. The improved version of the app has higher quality voice input, thus, enabling people to ask and respond to questions in their own languages and quicker replies. Also, it has "similar answers" feature ...