Chief Executive Officer of Ola Cabs, Bhavish Aggarwal, on Friday, took to Twitter to clarify reports regarding a merger between Uber and Ola Cabs.
Ola, which was founded by Mr Aggarwal in 2010 and Uber, based in the United States are both in the business of ride-sharing and rental travelling has been cutting down their operations in various businesses in India.
Bhavish Aggarwal tweeted, “Absolute rubbish. We’re very profitable and growing well. If some other companies want to exit their business from India, they are welcome to! We will never merge”.
Absolute rubbish. We’re very profitable and growing well. If some other companies want to exit their business from India they are welcome to! We will never merge. https://t.co/X3wC9HDrnr
— Bhavish Aggarwal (@bhash) July 29, 2022
Bhavish was responding to a tweet by ET tech on reports of him meeting Uber officials in San Francisco for a possible merger.
Bhavish said that his company was running very profitably and is also growing well.
The initial reports of a possible merger were first released by Reuters. Even NDTV quoted the Reuters report, publishing a story regarding the merger.
Uber Technologies Ltd, based in San Francisco, released a statement regarding the reports of a merger with Indian company Ola Cabs. Uber in the statement denied happening of any kind of merger talks and said that the report is inaccurate.
Ola, which recently entered into electric mobility market, is planning to increase its focus on research and development in that sector. A few weeks ago, Ola decided to halt operations of its grocery delivery business, and fired its employees as part of restricting the business entity to focus more on the electric mobility business.
Nearly a month ago, Ola reportedly laid off 500+ employees from various departments of the business entity and also stopped performance appraisals. The company recently said in a statement that it has decided to shut down Ola Dash. Ola Dash is a quick commerce business launched by the company a few months ago.
In a similar move, Ola also decided to restructure user cars business entity Ola Cars to enable it to strengthen go to market strategy for Ola Electric.
Various reports also suggest that the company is planning to lay off nearly 1000 employees in the coming weeks. This is higher than the earlier reported figure of 500-600 lay-offs.
Uber India, which is facing tough competition from other ride-sharing companies in the Indian market, decide to sell its food delivery business Uber Eats to Zomato in 2020. The move by American multinational ride-sharing company was part of its overall plan to focus on ride hailing business.
The emergence of localised players and high consumer preferences and expectations are making it difficult for any single ride-sharing company to dominate the Indian market.
