Uber said on Tuesday that it has won a bid to work with subway system in India’s capital in one of its rare announcements in India, a key overseas market where it is facing an upheaval battle with local giant Ola.
The ride-hailing giant said it has partnered with Delhi Metro Rail Corporation to deploy parking spots and introduce new products at 210 subway stations in Delhi, Gurgaon, and Noida. Neither of the parties offered a clarification on how many years it would take for these deployments to materialize. The company has also started to roll out a software update to its app to include real-time public transportation options from within the Uber app. It’s the same feature — which is limited to offering details such as navigation data — that Uber introduced in several markets in recent months as it attempts to make Uber app “an operating system” for a user’s every transportation need. But the company, which has retreated some of its businesses in India, had nothing more concrete to say. CEO Dara Khusrowshahi said onstage that Uber was “here to stay in India” — a familiar promise that he made in Southeast Asia early last year before selling the local business to Grab a month later — but avoided a question about future of UberEats, the ride-hailing firm’s food delivery option. In recent months, many restaurants have ceased their tie-up with UberEats, and the company has lowered the discounts it was bandying out to compete with local rivals Swiggy and Zomato . UberEats has lost more than a third of its business in India in recent months, industry sources told TechCrunch. Last year, Uber held talks with both Swiggy and Zomato to sell its UberEats business in the country but failed to attract any meaningful offer, people familiar with the talks said. Bhavik Rathod, UberEats’ India and Southeast Asia head, Deepak Reddy, head of central operations for UberEats in India, and several more executives have resigned in recent weeks, people familiar with the matter said. Uber’s spokespeople have not returned TechCrunch’s emails since last month. At the event today, Uber executives miserably escaped questions surrounding UberEats’ future in India. Uber’s local rival Ola, which leads the market, is increasingly expanding its footprint in the nation. In an interview in 2017, Khusrowshahi said India was one of the key regions where the company planned to invest heavily.