Then please read the article Uber's International 'LaunchPlaybook:
In 2011, when Uber first took its car service app abroad, thecompany made its Paris debut an all-consuming event. Fromheadquarters in San Francisco, Chief Executive Officer TravisKalanick personally hired and oversaw the three people runninglocal operations ahead of the service's tense first day online inFrance. Every one ofUber's then-20 employees studied Parisian cabrates, or neighborhood traffic density, or French transportationlaws. These days, things are less frantic. A few hours beforeUber's Nov. 12 launch in Budapest, Austin Geidt , the company'shead of global expansion, made time to talk through the process ata San Francisco cafe. A $17 billion valuation will do a lot tosoothe jangled nerves. Geidt, a 29-year-old with one employer onher resume, helped Uber roll out in a dozen cities two years ago.Now it's adding one every other day. Budapest marked the 100thforeign city on six continents where Uber rides are available andmade Hungary the 46th country where it operates. (Uber is in about140 cities in the U.S.) While Geidt's team used to agonize overdata on competition and demand in different cities to decide whereto expand next, "At this point we go so quickly, I wouldn't saythat it particularly matters," she says. "If we're not there now,we'll be there in a week." Geidt oversees what Uber calls its"launch playbook," a list of business strategies and operatingguidelines that have been compiled by an internal team of about 40employees. It doesn't cover everything: During a Nov. 14 dinnerwith New York journalists on the guest list, Uber's senior vicepresident for business, Emil Michael, suggested the company spend$1 million to hire a team of researchers that would target criticalreporters. And Uber said on Nov. 18 that it was investigating JoshMohrer, the head of its New York office, for tracking rides takenby a BuzzFeed reporter. The playbook includes a blueprint forexpansion that begins with three people, mostly locals, in each newcity: a marketer, someone to recruit drivers, and a general managerwho deals with area authorities and competitors and reports toGeidt. Despite the consistent regimen, she says she tries to vieweach city operation as its own startup.
That has to change when one ofUber's foreign teams screws up. Abrief international public-relations crisis ensued in October, whenthe Lyon (France) office ran a promotion offering customers a ridewith an "incredibly hot chick." The trouble blew over afterexecutives from San Francisco stepped in to stop the ad campaign.In India, Uber's biggest market outside the U.S., the central bankthreatened to shut it down for skirting cybersecurity regulationsby routing payments through a foreign subsidiary. The companyannounced in a Nov. 12 blog post that it would comply with Indianlaws by hiring Paytm, a local mobile payments business, to set upvirtual wallets for Indian users. It's been tougher for Uber todeal with local regulators and labor groups complaining that thecompany operates as an unlicensed taxi service and drains moneyfrom their transportation markets. Taxi drivers organized antiUberprotests this summer that blocked streets in London and WesternEuropean cities. In the past six months, governments in Australia,Belgium, Germany, and the Philippines have instituted short-livedbans on the service or levied stiff fines on its drivers. Cabbiesbarricaded the door at the party celebrating Uber's Milan debut.Geidt says governments "are very hesitant to see us come, often.We're a big enough brand now that they catch on to us being therequicker than they used to." Geidt noticed Uber's smartphone appshortly after its launch in 2010, when it was a black-car serviceconfined to San Francisco. "I loved the idea," she says, eventhough "I was probably too poor to be an actual customer." Havingjust earned a B.A. in English from the University of California atBerkeley, she e-mailed then-CEO Ryan Graves and scored aninternship in the marketing department. Later she helped set up andeventually run Uber's first satellite operation, in New York. "Shebounced around quickly enough that, all of a sudden, she was doingall parts of the operations in the city," says Graves, now head ofglobal operations. Soon, Geidt was opening Uber offices across theU.S. She invited Boston cabbies to the Harvard Business Schoollibrary, where she held recruitment meetings while posing as astudent to get a free desk and Wi-Fi. She spent the night at a towyard in Austin, Texas, paying fines for drivers to retrieve carsimpounded in a police sting that targeted unlicensed taxis.
Since taking on international expansion in 2012, Geidt hasfocused much of her attention on Asia. Last year, CEO Kalanicksummoned her and his other lieutenants to Beijing, where theyworked for two weeks to hone their plan for China, from businessstructure and licenses to map data and the most popular forms ofpayment. "Everyone we talked to said, 'You should take four yearsto really research China, ' " recalls Geidt. "And we said, 'No,let's just go.'" Uber drivers have begun to roam seven cities onthe mainland this year and will add several more soon, saysregional manager Candice Lo. Uber couldn't afford to wait. Chinaalready has two dominant taxi-booking apps, each backed by one ofthe country's two biggest Internet companies, Tencent (700:HK) andAlibaba (BABA). It also faces fresh competition in the U.S., whereLyft has been slashing its prices to undercut the company. "We planto expand internationally, but the U.S. is the biggest opportunityright now," says Lyft CEO Logan Green. To fuel expansion abroad,Uber is in talks to raise $1 billion on top of the $1.2 billion itannounced in June, according to two people familiar with thefundraising who weren't authorized to discuss it publicly. "Prettysoon we're going to have more cities outside of the U.S. thaninside, and we want to make big bets going forward to make surethat we're able to continue to roll out and invest in these globalcities," says Kalanick, who won't confirm the new round offundraising. Local opposition notwithstanding, the ultimate aim iseven grander, says Geidt: "We really do intend to beeverywhere."
Write a 500 Word document responding to the followingquestions:
Why is Uber choosing to expand so rapidly?
Are there first-mover advantages for this business?
Are there any downsides to being a first mover in thisbusiness?
How sustainable are any advantages in this business?
