Recently, we met Alan Jiang and Karun Arya from Uber. Jiang is the member of the International Launcher team and is acting as Uber Indonesia’s Head until the General Manager for Jakarta is recruited. Uber has just sealed a $1,2 billion funding, in which most of them will go to the expansion in APAC.
Jiang said Uber’s current target is to serve people of Jakarta with less-than-10-minutes-waiting-time service, although didn’ want to name the exact due date. By this service, he expects that Uber customers in Senopati (and SCBD) can be served in around 10 minutes or so, and those in Kuningan and Kemang can be picked up in 15 minutes.
When being asked about an expansion to other cities in Indonesia, Jiang claimed that it is not impossible to be done once his team has successfully established the services in Jakarta. He also added that UberBlack will remain to be the only service available, though the team once experimentally introduced UberLUX a month ago.
In regard to the surge pricing that Uber held two months ago, Jiang said that his team will make the service permanent (in peak hours) if there are plenty of customers feeling satisfied toward the services. However, as long as Uber lacks the number of available cars, surge pricing shouldn’t be something regular.
In addition, despite the fact that the team partners with PayPal in the U.S and Alipay in China, Uber will not introduce alternative payment method in Indonesia anytime soon. Indonesia still lacks of credit card penetration, as a data by Indonesia Credit Card Association (ICCA) suggested that only 6% of Indonesian total population possess credit card.
We talked about regulation and taxation issue, in which Jiang mentioned that Uber works closely with regulators and that all tax-related stuffs are fully administered by its local partner. Arya added that when entering Indonesia, Uber brought accountability and transparency model for transportation industry along. Taxi companies used to use cash model, Uber helps promote cashless payment system, Uber makes sure that all transaction is noted and their partners have to pay for the taxes.
