25% of Ola Cab's business comes via mobile app: Bhavish Aggarwal, founder Ola Cabs

After ecommerce online cab market has become darling for venture capitalists in India. Investors have been betting on unorganised $6 billion cab market, growing at 25-30% year on year. Currently over 10 cab aggregators are operating across cities like Bangalore, Delhi (NCR), Mumbai, Ahmadabad, Pune and others. One such player is Mumbai based Ola Cabs, which has more than 5000 cabs on its platform and with 1500 operators spanning across 4 cities Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Bangalore and Pune.

To understand how Ola Cabs’s operation has been faring up, Yourstory spoke to Bhavish Aggarwal, founder, Ola Cabs. During interaction Aggarwal spoke on various aspects of business. Earlier this month there was report in media about Ola Cabs raised series B investment from existing investors, however Aggarwal decline to comment anything on it. Edited excerpt of the interaction:

Talk about Ola Cab's so far growth in terms of booking per day, number of cars/cabs and average ticketsize of per ride.

Today we have operations across 4 major cities– Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Bangalore and Pune. We have more than 5000 cabs on our platform and around 1500 operators have tied up with us across these cities. We are witnessing a 40% month on month growth when it comes to bookings and attend to over 10,000 customer calls per day.

We have also witnessed a 100% increase QoQ on our booking through the mobile app since August 2012. While the app saw upward of 2 million visits across Android and iOS, the web-booking platform had over 5 million visitors in the last year. Today close to 25% of our bookings happen through the app. The average ticket size for our city taxi is around INR 400.

Which cities contribute most business for Ola Cabs?

Bangalore and Mumbai are the cities where maximum transactions take place for us. Delhi NCR is catching up and is now the fastest growing market for us. We recently ramped up supply by almost 2x in Delhi NCR.

Currently there are more than 6-7 companies are operating in this space - don’t you think similar to ecommerce online cab booking space has become overcrowded?

We do not think so. Car rentals is a $6 billion opportunity in India with 90% of the market currently being unorganized, also growing by 20% annually. We feel there is enough room for multiple players to organize the market.

Having said that, I would like to add that use of technology and end user travel experience will be a big differentiator in this market. As a company, our focus has always been on getting this right. Be it the intense analytics and seamless technology integration across the entire experience at every level like the app, e-invoices, or our obsession with quality of cars and drivers ensuring that the overall trip experience is world class; we stand out from the crowd.

Take us through the future and expansion plans to other cities.

We intend to go deeper in each city where we are currently present. We also plan to offer our service in more cities this year. Some of these would even be tier 2 cities. Pune in this context has been a new experience for us.

We have also launched compact as a separate category for city taxies in Bangalore. This is keeping in mind the choice of a lower price point for customers.