The taxi booking service Uber has said it will invest $1bn (£0.64m) to expand its business in India.
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Uber connects travelers with drivers through its smartphone app and is an alternative to traditional taxi services.
This new influx of funds will be used to further improve its operations in India, launch in new cities and develop new payment solutions and products.
Amit Jain, president of Uber India, is of the opinion that India is a an extremely fertile market for Uber.
Online taxi booking company Uber Technologies Inc is making a big push into India with planned investments of billion (nearly Rs6,400 crore) over the next nine months. Uber wants to clock one million trips daily by 2016 in India, five times its current 200,000, and take on its home-grown rival Ola, which operates four times as many rides daily. India being its largest market outside U.S., it is leaving no stone unturned to tap it to it’s best.
However, the process was suspended after Uber, Chinese search engine Baidu and other investors failed to reach an agreement on Uber China’s value and their respective stakes in the unit, Tencent said. He added that Uber would expand its services beyond the 18 cities in which it operates, the largest number in any country outside the US.
The company said it aims to have 200,000 drivers in India on its app, which connects riders with available cars, by 2016.
“We will be establishing a great support network and public-private partnerships”, Jain, who joined Uber from Rent-.com in the US, told ET.
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The Delhi government banned all mobile app-based cab-hailing services in the National Capital last December after a woman was allegedly raped by a driver contracted to Uber. The company, which plans to invest up to $50 million in the southern state, has set up its customer care facility in Hyderabad.
