As the fight for market share took nationalist overtones, Indian ride-hailing startup Ola on Thursday hit out at its San Francisco-based rival Uber for fanning the nationalism debate to hide its identity of being a multinational with “serial violations of law”.
“It is a shame that our competition has to fan a debate of nationalism to hide their identity of being a multi- national, with serial violations of law as a business strategy, not just in India, but globally. This debate in our view is not about foreign vs local but who is respectful of the local laws and who is disrespectful,” Ola COO Pranay Jivrajka wrote in a blogpost.
While Ola last week was granted a licence to operate its cab aggregation service in Karnataka, Uber said its application was still languishing and officials had asked it to make a fresh application.
Uber, however, continues to operate.
“Over the past couple of days, there has been an irrelevant debate around organisations operating in the country being national or international. Isn’t a company like Alibaba, run by a local entrepreneur like Jack Ma, ‘Chinese,’ despite having a majority of its shareholding from international investorsIJ Aren’t the cutting edge technology solutions, high value jobs and Internet ecosystem that Alibaba has built, invaluable assets for ChinaIJ,” Jivrajka wrote.
This was apparently in response to a blogpost by Bhavik Rathod, Uber’s general manager of South and West in India.
“What makes Uber ‘foreign’IJ The fact that we are established in San Francisco but have a hyperlocal team solving problems that are locally relevantIJ Or that, just like our competitors, we received most of our funding from ‘foreign’ investorsIJ” Rathod wrote in a blog titled ‘let’s keep Bangalore moving’.
Jivrajka wrote it is the onus of the business that brings in transformative technology, to work with the government and evolve the ecosystem further in a partnership mode.