Cabbin Fever

Ola’s cab supply conundrum

Ola spent millions on its cab leasing scheme, which helped the company build massive blocks of supply. However, in the absence of Ola’s once-stellar incentives, this supply is slowly dwindling. Ola has to make its move fast or risk losing what it has built to its rivals

02/08/18

Salman SH

Five years after it started, Ola realised the need to build a larger supply base of cabs to take on Uber

So, it created a leasing arm in mid-2015—Ola Fleet Technologies Pvt. Ltd. It leases cabs to driver-partners

But as incentives plummeted, Ola’s cab leasing model ran into trouble. Drivers left or switched allegiances

Now, despite investing heavily to build supply, Ola is still unable to service 10-15% of the daily demand on its platform

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In 2015, online cab aggregator Ola released a commercial that wasn’t targeted at customers. Instead, the ad, featuring a jovial cabby, sought to entice the lifeblood of Ola itself—drivers. Or driver-partners, as online cab aggregators prefer to call them. The company, hoping to attract a wave of drivers to its platform, ran an ad featuring…

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