Uber gets off to a flying start

Global ride hailing company Uber sees a promising market in Bangladesh, with two lakh people in Dhaka taking 15 lakh rides in November alone, a top official said yesterday.

On November 22 last year, Uber started its operations in Bangladesh and now it has 9,500 registered drivers for cars, said Pradeep Parameswaran, head of central operation at Uber India and South Asia.

“We are now adding more than 100 drivers to our network every day,” Parameswaran said at a programme to celebrate Uber's first anniversary of operations in the country, at Sonargaon Hotel in Dhaka.

“Dhaka is a very important city for us and we will soon add new features to Uber's services here.”

Dhaka is the most densely populated among the 600 cities across the world where Uber has operations, he said.

The company is working to establish a well-planned network to attract more customers, Parameswaran said.

“Dhaka presented us with a challenge of transforming the transportation landscape and creating alternatives to a city burdened with a growing population of cars on its roads.”

Cars are very expensive in Dhaka compared to many countries of the world and that is why Uber's service is expensive here, he told The Daily Star.

“The cost of the service is primarily determined by the cost of the car.”

However, Parameswaran is very hopeful about the growing middle class of Bangladesh. “The size of the middle class is very big and that segment of people wants to use our service as an alternative,” he said.

“The economy has been growing roughly at 7 percent for the last few years and only a few countries can maintain that growth; this will also help us to grow here.”

But Parameswaran declined to disclose their profit or investment in Bangladesh and how they repatriate revenues.

The world's largest ride hailing company started operations in 2009, he said. There were many cities in the world where Uber became profitable after running operations for over seven years, he said. “There is a track record and we cannot be profitable from day one in Dhaka.” Uber is investing to enrich Bangladesh's market, said Parameswaran.

The company plans to launch its services in Chittagong and Sylhet soon, he said. “But the time has not yet been finalised.”

Local entrepreneurs have started entering the market and some of them even launched their services outside Dhaka, he said. “Uber welcomes the competition.”

If there is a real competition, everything will move faster collectively, said Parameswaran. It is a privilege to have more people in the space, he said. New investments depict that the market is attractive, he also added. Uber is waiting for the ride sharing policy, which would help the industry flourish, he said. About the data leakage from Uber last year, Parameswaran said the company is now taking a lot of measures to ensure safety of customers' data.