| Friday, 18 October 2024 |
An abridged, narrative version of the latest episode of Two by Two, The Ken’s premium weekly business podcast Subscribe here
Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],
Ola and Uber are in a “late-stage duopoly”. After spending millions and millions of dollars, they’ve finally secured pole positions in ride-sharing in India. Both these companies control ~70% of the market, and have created network effects that make it much harder for new entrants to enter and compete with them.
However, this victory is now under threat. And just like how Ola and Uber conquered city after city using a disruptive model and technology, the same thing is threatening to happen to them. Uber and Ola are facing structural disruptions from not one, but multiple fronts in India.
Single-handedly, none of these disrupting forces are enough to break this duopoly. However, put all of these together, and they can pose a serious, existential challenge to both these players. The threat to Uber and Ola isn’t a single giant killer, but a slow fade into irrelevance from a thousand cuts, each slicing away key, lucrative parts of their businesses from different directions.
In episode 14 of Two by Two, my co-host Rohin Dharmakumar and I have a discussion with three experts, each with strong beliefs about which of these disruptions will prove to be the most impactful for Ola and Uber.
Joining in are Professor Srinivasan R, who teaches Strategy at IIM Bangalore; Pradeep Puranam, Head of Revenue and Operations at Yulu (ex-Udaan, -Uber); and Nilesh Sangoi, CIO of Fincare Small Finance Bank, previously CEO of Meru Cabs.
If you have The Ken’s Premium subscription plan, you can listen to the full episode on our app here.
If you are a free or basic subscriber, you can:
1. Subscribe to The Ken’s Premium subscription tier, then install our iOS, iPad, or Android apps. You have full access to not just all of our podcasts, but also stories, newsletters, and infographics.
2. Subscribe to Two by Two on Apple Podcasts. It’s a monthly subscription, so you can decide after listening to four episodes whether you want to renew and stay a subscriber.
You can also listen to the 30-minute version of this episode here if you want to get a sense of what we discussed:
You build a taxi. You build a taxi. Everybody builds a taxi
If you already own a taxi fleet, it’s not all that hard today to get it online and compete against Uber and Ola in your own backyard. The Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) allows for exactly that. “If you want to build a business on top of ONDC, you can do it for very cheap,” Prof. Srinivasan R had noted in the very first episode of Two by Two. [See: Will Flipkart become Phonepe before Phonepe becomes Flipkart?]
He’d also observed how effective it was to build and run small experiments on top of ONDC and identify interesting business use cases.
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