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Uber Makes India A Global Priority, To Plow In $1 Billion In Next 9 Months

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Taxi summoning service Uber will invest an additional $1 billion in India in the next nine months as the San Francisco-based app startup says the India market is growing exponentially and is a global priority. Uber is to have 200,000 driver partners in India by next year.

“We are extremely bullish on the Indian market and see tremendous potential here,” said Amit Jain, president of Uber India. Uber is committing an additional $1 billion to improve operations, expand into newer cities, develop new products as well as payment solutions and establish a support network, Jain said in a statement released on Friday morning.

Uber continues to see rocketing growth and, according to the firm, the service is growing at 40% month-on-month rates. “With more investments in product, hiring and payment solutions, we expect to grow at an even faster rate,” Jain said. With the investment and growth, it expects to hit one million trips per day in the next six to nine months.

The taxi aggregator startup is taking on homegrown cab-summoning app Ola which is said to be closing yet another funding round from its investors including Japan’s SoftBank and New York-based Tiger Global. That is to nearly double Ola's valuation from $2.5 billion to $4.5 billion.

Even as they deal with regulatory and licensing hurdles, Uber and Ola are trying to outdo each other in offering newer services and charting newer geographies. Currently, Ola has the upper hand on both counts as Uber’s growth came to a stuttering stop after its troubles following an Uber driver being charged with raping a passenger in New Delhi in December last year.

Uber has been getting its act together in the past couple of months, hiring Jain to head its Indian operations and then expanding to 7 more cities at the beginning of this month. In May, Uber committed $50 million to open its offices in the southern city of Hyderabad, its biggest office outside the United States. Earlier this month, a New Delhi court lifted a government ban on Uber, paving the way for expansion.

India is its largest geography outside the United States and the country’s top five cities account for 80% of Uber trips in India. Yet, it has only 18 cities compared with Ola’s 100+ cities.

Uber said its bullishness on India runs parallel to its aggressive focus on the China market and its uberPOOL ride-sharing service. Uber operates in 58 countries (and 300 cities) and faces regulatory and legal challenges in several of these.

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