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Food delivery space to get hotter with UberEATS set to enter India
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San Francisco-based cab aggregator Uber is set to launch UberEATS in India in the second quarter of the year. The platform, which is different from the cab-hailing app, has started on-boarding restaurant partners to create a network.

 

This comes at a time when the major on-demand food aggregators ad delivery companies such as Swiggy and Zomato are looking to strengthen their businesses with additional capital and Google has launched its hyperlocal services and food delivery app Areo which passes on leads to partners such as Faasos, Freshmenu, UrbanClap and others in Bengaluru and Mumbai.

 

The management of UberEATS team will be different from the ridesharing app at national and city levels and UberEATS has been hiring city general managers, city-level restaurant operations managers as well as branding and sales heads across six cities, namely Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, Mumbai, Chennai and Gurugram.

 

The India launch is being headed by Manan Javeri, former McKinsey executive who joined Uber in 2015.He will report directly to Uber's Asia Pacific head Allen Penn.

 

He added that the service will launch in one city by the second quarter of the calendar year, following which the service will be scaled to six cities by end of the year.

 

UberEATS had started discussions with third party hyperlocal delivery players earlier this year apart from using the service as an additional source of income to utilize the network of driver partners on the platform better.They have also started on-boarding restaurant partners and will charge between 25 to 30% commission on each delivery, said one of the restaurant partners in discussion with the the company.

 

This is higher than what competitor Swigggy charges its restaurant partner at 15-20% of the order value, apart from the delivery charges billed to the customer.

 

Uber currently does not have a fleet of two-wheelers on its platform in India which is used to deliver food in larger markets like London, and others. UberEATS started as a pilot in Los Angeles in 2014 and is currently live across 62 cities globally. SoftBank backed Indian ridehailing service Ola had also launched its food delivery service Ola Café in April 2015 which was rolled back by the company in less than a year.

 

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/small-biz/startups/food-delivery-space-to-get-hotter-with-ubereats-set-to-enter-india/articleshow/58214802.cms