Good Morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],

How does the India head of a global category-creating giant view its future in arguably its most complex market?

It’s a hard question to get a straight answer to. Conversations with senior executives are typically guarded affairs, mediated by PR teams, with pre-approved questions and a long list of no-go zones.

Which is why our latest episode with Prabhjeet Singh, the president of Uber India and South Asia, felt so rare. Prabhjeet, who has been with the company since 2015, joined us for a completely unscripted, unfiltered conversation. As we mentioned at the start of the show, there were no preconditions, no list of questions sent in advance, and no topics declared off-limits.

This allowed us to have a candid, deep, and often surprising discussion about the strategic compulsions, constraints, and ambitions that define Uber in India, one of its most critical markets. 

Prabhjeet is a former strategy consultant (he spent nearly a decade at McKinsey), so, naturally, we opened the episode by asking him to frame Uber India’s strategic landscape on a 2×2 matrix.

He framed it as a battle between ambition and time:

“I would imagine an axis which would, on one side, lay out the quantum of ambition on how big and deep we want to go in the market… The other axis would be the time period in which you want to do this, because I think one thing we have learned is that focus is magic. At the same time, you want to move incredibly fast, just given how dynamic the environment is.”

My co-host, Praveen Gopal Krishnan, saw it through the lens of monetisation and disruption:

“So, one axis for me is making money through commissions to making money through zero commission and a flat subscription, because that’s really what some companies that are trying to challenge Uber are doing on this side. And Uber, of course, as we know, has gotten success completely on the other side… I imagine the second axis for me is something to do with revenue, and yeah, maybe time. I think time is the second important thing, which is how long have you been in the market?”

Two By Two • EPISODE 58

Uber India has run the race and stayed the course. Can it change the game?

Inside Uber’s strategy for its most complex market

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And I viewed it as a tale of two Ubers and a platform play:

“My axis was, on the left is Uber US and on the right is Uber India… Uber US is a cash cow… And on the right side is Uber India, which… I’m certain it’s not a cash cow yet… and axis two for me is platform versus ride-hailing.”

The rest of the episode had us discussing some of Uber India’s most interesting, and lesser-known, strategic moves. Here are three of them:

Praveen brought up the “barbell strategy”, a term first used by global CEO Dara Khosrowshahi in 2019 and reiterated just recently.

When we think of Uber’s core business, we think of moving people. But one of its most explosive growth areas in India right now is moving things. The Courier feature wasn’t a meticulously planned strategic launch. It was, in Prabhjeet’s words, a “hack” born out of necessity during the pandemic lockdowns when ride-hailing was shut down but people desperately needed to send essentials to each other. What started as an ad-hoc solution is now a strategic powerhouse.

This is a good example to understand how strategy and tactics often feed into and off each other. The latent supply of two-wheeler partners, originally onboarded for ride-hailing, gave Uber a low-cost advantage in the hyperlocal delivery space.

Perhaps the most futuristic and counterintuitive insight came from a new product launched just days before our recording. Uber is now allowing its driver-partners to earn extra money during their downtime by training AI models. In a move that shifts Uber from a mover of “atoms” (people and things) to a mover of “bits” (data), drivers can now perform micro-tasks like classifying images or digitising receipts directly from their app. I joked that this was “Uber Mechanical Turk”!

This is an expansion of what the Uber platform can be. It leverages its massive, distributed network of 1.4 million active earners in India not just for mobility, but as a human intelligence taskforce.

Listen to the full podcast for tons of more insight into Uber and how it sees the India market and opportunity.

Correction: In yesterday’s note about this episode in our morning email—The Spotlight—we wrote that Uber is moving to become a full-scale mobility platform in India. We want to acknowledge that this was an error and clarify that the said shift is happening in the US. We deeply regret the error.

We’ll see you again next week! Do write to [email protected] and tell us what you think, or leave a comment on our website. 

Regards,
Rohin Dharmakumar

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