Ola CEO compares radio taxi competition with Vietnam War

“Let the Americans come, we are the local guerillas,” says Bhavish Aggarwal

Bhavish Aggarwal, the chief executive of homegrown cab-aggregator Ola on Tuesday compared the competition with its rival Uber to that of Vietnam war, where the worldwide ride-hailing colossus was the U.S military fighting with local guerillas.

“Let the Americans come, let them carpet bomb the country. But we are the local guerillas,” said Mr. Aggarwal during a fireside chat with Mindtree executive chairman Krishnakumar Natarajan at the State government's 'Elevate-100' event, which is a platform for startups. “We have to go into the nooks and corners of the Indian opportunity,” he said.

Uber which has picked Dara Khosrowshahi, the head of Expedia, to be its new chief executive, considers India as a priority market. The San Francisco, California-based firm had said in a recent statement that the firm had completed 500 million rides in India within less than four years of operations in the country.

An alumnus of IIT-Bombay, Mr. Aggarwal who co-founded Ola in 2010 said that Uber is strong in technology and do things well in the Western world. “But as a local entrepreneur our strength is our knowledge of our country,” he said.

Mr.Aggarwal was of the view that Ola has a better ability to understand the Indian consumers and drivers and there are many ways it can build defensibility in its business model. “We can hold off competition from their aggressive tactics and build a winning business,” he said.

Mr.Aggarwal also mentioned that to deal with any competition, as “Indians” one should remember their roots and design the business model focused on it. According to Crunchbase, Ola has raised total funding of $1.75 billion from global investors such SoftBank, Tiger Global and Tekne Capital.

In the past, Mr. Aggarwal and Flipkart co-founder Sachin Bansal, have called for policies that protect domestic companies against their global competitors Uber and Amazon. They alleged that these firms were “dumping capital” to win customers.

However, Apurva Dalal, head of India engineering at Uber, had said in an interview that this argument doesn't hold ground. “I don’t know what is an Indian company, we are as Indian as any other firm. We are solving problems that are important for India,” Mr. Dalal had said.