Introduction:
The company was founded in 2015 by the name of ‘Karrier’, it has been able to sign up over 15,000 registered riders by September 2018, which provides an average ride of 30,000 per day. Founded by two IIT alumni, Aravind Sanka and Pavan Guntupalli with a PESU alumni, S. R. Rishikesh; Rapido has been able to create more than 5,00,000 jobs in India, with 1 crore registered users recorded in late 2019, stated by Arvind Sanka.
SWOT Analysis of the Rapido:
Being the pioneer in the segment of bike-taxi, Rapido successfully introduced its business concept in the country in 2015; it has become India’s first and largest bike-taxi provider in approx 100 cities.
Within the first month of the launch of the bike-taxi services, Rapido had received a download record of more than 10,000 and has been able to gain popularity much faster. However, two competitors- Ola and Uber, upon observing the popularity of Rapido, launched their services within the two-wheeler commuting sector as well. This was put forth as a huge challenge to Rapido, as the market giants were revenue-generating and could outrun Rapido with more cost-cut thereby making their services more affordable and pleasing to the customers.
As Rapido’s funds were depleting, this made Aravind pitch to investors. However, investors were worried about the sustainability of Rapido in the market, in which two other giants. By 2016, the future of Rapido became bleak as it was on the verge of closing down.
Pawan Munjal, CEO of Hero Honda Moto-Corps realized the potential for the success of Rapido and made his investments in it along with helping the company to make strategic changes in their operations to achieve growth and the road to reach it.
While Ola and Uber had their stronghold in urban and metropolitan cities, they were least present in tier 2 and tier 3 cities. This sparked an opportunity for Rapido and changed their focus to tier 2 and tier 3 cities, by building a local ecosystem that would satisfy the needs of the residents of these cities. Thus, they plan on with a 2-way approach:
1. Provide bike-taxi services to people with no vehicles
2. Connect the riders to the commuters with vehicles, to help build a secondary income source
This excellent strategy took quick action in allowing Rapido to gain strength in its presence and thereby grow in the market.
Services by Rapido:
As the tagline goes “Not an option, but a choice”, Rapido promises to provide their affordable and most comfortable intra-city bike-taxi services, which are a lot less expensive and most helpful in rush traffic hours and has been providing their vices to over 100+ cities all over India. But, the services are not only limited to these intra-city bike taxis but have a whole plethora of services under Rapido, for its users. Some of these services are:
- Facilitates transportation services when demanded
- Pick-up and drop-off services for users, to transfer goods from one location to another via. Captains
- Connect users with merchants/ stores and purchase items via the app, and get them delivered by the captain
Vision and mission of Rapido:
Rapido holds the vision of becoming one of the leading brands in the sector of bike taxis, both in the domestic market and exportation, thereby designing the most efficient and innovative business models, and introducing them to the market. With such a determined vision, Rapido thus aims to maximise the level of post-sale customer satisfaction.
With this vision, Rapido holds the following mission which they aim to achieve via customer satisfaction and goodwill:
1. Providing ergonomic solutions to their customers
2. Providing employment opportunities, thereby enabling the efficiency of the labour force
3. Providing high-quality solutions, starting from the design phase to the production phase at the domestic level, thereby maintaining 100% customer satisfaction
4. To become one of the leading companies in the areas of Research and Development, and innovation.
Moreover, Rapido targets mainly commuters who travel on a daily basis and are in search of easy-to-connect and affordable transportation. Thus, the main goal is to offer their services to people who commute daily and tend to prefer a means of open and safe commute options as compared to the over-expensive cab rides.
How Rapido stands out from its competitors:
Facing severe competition from its competitors, Rapido has proved that it can rise and make great success ahead in the field of providing affordable taxi rides to its customers. Like Ola and Uber, Rapido tends to provide bike taxis to their customers, which are less expensive means of transportation, as well as can easily pass through heavy traffic, thus saving a lot of time for their customers.
As per Transport Corporation of India (TCI), Ola faced a severe loss amounting to around 2,208 crore INR, in the FY 2020. Even though this record was 300 crores less than what it had to face in the previous year, Ola’s popularity in the market had shown a rapid decrease. Whereas, Uber has been also facing a severe decline in its popularity due to its recent cases of “file leaks”.
Therefore, as is evident with these, both Uber and Ola have been facing loss and are gradually declining in popularity, whereas Rapido has come up as a savior in front of the customers, and it has been facilitated with many opportunities, which will help it to emerge in the market.
How Rapido works:
To provide easy and affordable access to bike-taxi services, Rapido is mainly based on B2C business models, i.e. a Business-to-Customer model. This means that Rapido provides its services to the customers directly, acting as a business entity themselves.
Additionally, they have upgraded their vehicle storage options in order to provide carriage services. After all, they offer services to the customers, who consist of people like us!!
The B2C model permits the users to make bookings for bike taxis via the help of their mobile phones, through the Rapido app; which only requires installing the same, creating a profile, and set-up pick-up and drop-locations and the user is good to go.
With successful bookings, a driver referred to as the ‘Captain’ gets assigned to that particular user with their credentials like- their name, photo, and other details, along with the pick-up and drop-off locations set by the user. This feature is helpful as it assures the customers of a driver who would provide them with a commuting facility. Also, the users are facilitated with different payment options, which are either cash or other digital payment methods.
Moreover, Rapido allows the facility of easy registration for the ‘Captains’ with two-wheeler, and are also free to choose any vehicles they want- motorcycles, scooters, or e-bikes, but it should be ensured that the vehicles are not older than 2010. Also, the captains must have a Smartphone with 3G/ 4G data connectivity. With these, Rapido tends to provide opportunities to people aged between 18-50 years to become Captains. Also, the company recently has been recruiting female ‘Captains’ to join the community.
Future objectives:
As there was a global impact due to the Covid-19 outbreak back in 2020, the lockdown imposed affected many businesses across the globe. Some businesses had to shut down, whereas some learned about evolving themselves to cope with the drastic situation. Many companies such as Rapido, saw an opportunity to plunge in their revenue in the first two months after COVID struck, as people were bound within their homes due to the lockdown and had very less commuting possible.
However, Rapido soon observed a rapid plunge in June and July with a 25% bounce back in its business. This was due to the avoidance of public transport by many people. But, as 80% of people in India still do not hold ownership of any private vehicle, they still require a means of safe and affordable means of commute. Thus, this is where Rapido came into play, with immense opportunities and adversity.
As stated by Pawan Guntupalli, Co-founder of Rapido, “Customers were aware of the personalized and open characteristics of bike-taxis for an intra-city commute. The customers had the risk of least exposure to any infectious agents due to his/her limited interaction with the captain (driver), with less physical contact”.
Moreover, Rapido had expanded its services to Pick-up and drop-off logistics during the lockdown, which had encouraged more people to use their services as they were reliable, as well as affordable.
With these strategic implementations, Rapido has been able to outshine other taxi providers such as Uber and Ola, and also it has evidence that this popularity among the masses has helped the company to achieve a boom in its growth.
