Rapido Sees Cabs Segment Making 25% Of Total Business

New entrant Rapido sees its cab business account for 25% of its total business in the coming years.

"As of now, we are in all the top seven cities of the country, and the response has been just phenomenal," Co-Founder Pavan Guntupalli told NDTV Profit on the sidelines of a Rapido event in New Delhi.

"In cities like Hyderabad, where we started off early, we are close to 25% of the market share already. All in all, we are doing more than 1.5 lakh rides a day in this category," he said.

Guntupalli said across the seven cities, Rapido has onboarded more than 2 lakh captains, the company's term for its driver partners. "We do more than 15 lakh rides a day overall, and cabs are contributing to 10% currently. Through the course of the year, we see it contributing to around 20–25% of our business," he said.

Rapido's cab offering is based on two differentiators. Instead of a commission-based model, which has been a complaint for drivers across Uber and Ola, Rapido has introduced a subscription-fee-based model. For every Rs 10,000 in earnings, drivers will be subject to a subscription fee of Rs 500. Additionally, for customers, Rapido promises the lowest price guarantee.

"There are only 5 lakh cabs that are online out of 22 lakh cabs that are available in the country. We believe that with this value proposition, we can just get more cabs into the system, thereby increasing reliability and reducing the price for the user," he said.

However, the company's major opportunity will continue to lie in bike taxis, he said. "The ticket size is definitely larger, but India has different classes. Cabs are regularly used only by a particular set of people, so we still see the major opportunity is going to be in bike taxis and autos, which are much more preferable modes of commute," he said.