Yahoo Finance I will apply for Indian citizenship if I have to, says Uber CEO Travis Kalanick
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Patriotism seems to be the new buzzword for India’s technology companies.
Under immense pressure from foreign competitors like Amazon and Uber, Indian companies like Flipkart and Ola are advocating protectionist policies. These homegrown tech firms make the case for nationalism by pointing to Chinese policies that treat foreign companies more as sources of capital than sources of direct competition.
“China rightly identified consumer internet as important and moved to protect it, and we need to do the same in India,” Ola CEO Bhavish Aggarwal said this month at a technology summit hosted by Carnegie India in Bengaluru. “China has usually followed the route of using foreign capital and expertise to come up with domestic companies, without letting foreign companies themselves come in.”
The idea isn’t sitting well with Travis Kalanick, the CEO of Uber, who spoke about the issue while in India this week.
“I will apply for Indian citizenship if this gets over the top,” Kalanick joked during a fireside chat with Amitabh Kant, CEO of the National Institute of Transforming India (NITI Aayog).
Kalanick took a jibe at the irony of the local players objecting to Uber’s foray in the Indian market: Like Uber, he argued, a majority of Ola is also foreign-owned, based on the amount of funding both companies have taken from investors outside their home countries. In the past, Ola has tried to take down its America-based competitor by alleging that Uber was flouting local laws.
The Uber CEO, who took a pitstop in Hyderabad during his India tour to announce motorbike-sharing service UberMoto, also made clear that the company had no intentions of merging with a top competitor in its second-largest market, like it did with rival Didi Chuxing in China.
The next frontier for Uber is to introduce a fleet of self-driving cars—a concept that is still facing pushback in the US. When asked if India would ever see its autonomous vehicles, Kalanick commented, “India will be the last one to get autonomous cars—have you seen the way people drive here?” Although the statement was made partly in jest, if you’ve been on the roads in India, you know he’s right.
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