Ola top management rejig soon; Ankit Bhati to steer cabs business

 

Ola co-founder Ankit Bhati is on his way to becoming the Bengaluru-based unicorn’s CEO soon, according to two people aware of the company’s plans. Bhavish Aggarwal, the more well-known founder who’s been heading the show at Ola since the beginning, would likely be named group CEO. 

Ola had created a group company back in May, making Foodpanda, the India cab business and the international operations subsidiaries of the group. 

The group structure was planned keeping in mind Ola’s international expansion. In a latest move, the cab aggregator has sent an exploratory team to Nairobi (Kenya) looking to set up operations there.

While the company is aiming to double its international expansion to woo  investors, possibly from China, things have been unsettling at home, with loss of leadership talent topping the list of challenges. 

From the head of human resources department to top bosses in the legal division, the list of exits is long. The names include Chief Operating Officer Vishal Kaul, who left after a year and a half with the firm, Chief People Officer Susheel Balakrishnan, who stepped down within three months of joining, and marketing director for Australia and New Zealand Natasha Daly, who resigned recently.

As many as nine of the senior leadership team members have quit Ola in the past few months.

Even Aggarwal’s chief of staff, Akshay Alladi, exited the firm in a little over a year. The company has also seen a series of exits of vice presidents and product leaders, all in the past three months. 

Ola did not reply to a detailed email sent on the issue. 

According to sources close to the firm, most of these exits have not been replaced by Ola yet. 

Over the past six months, there’s been some shift in talent from Ola to Foodpanda while the company has been trying to reduce its operating expense.

“Some left as they got better opportunities, but many others are moving away as their job descriptions have suddenly changed. With changing processes, some are finding the work pressure hard to handle,” said a source close to the company. Even as Uber is Ola’s biggest rival, the company’s expansion beyond cab business has given it several other competitors. For instance, Ola-owned Foodpanda has to fight with food delivery giants such as Swiggy, Zomato and most recently UberEats. With Foodpanda now planning to enter the grocery delivery segment, it would be directly competing with the likes of Big Basket, Grofers and Amazon.

The SoftBank-backed unicorn has been sending out feelers that it’s on track to break even in FY20 and that some of its cities outside the metros are already profitable. The direction will be difficult to change at short notice considering that Ola’s loss stood at almost Rs 48.9 billion in FY17.

“Aggarwal believes Ola’s cab business is now almost on auto pilot… He wants to focus on fundraising while trying to scale up Foodpanda,” one of the sources quoted above said. “Bhati would be responsible for reorganising and bolstering the leadership team. Most of the backend operations would be looked after by him.” 

Aggarwal needs to step up the potential of both his firms as he has been in talks to raise fresh rounds of funding for its international expansion as well as thwarting efforts to be at the losing end of a possible merger with Uber, analysts pointed out.

From Flipkart’s co-founder Sachin Bansal to Temasek, Tencent to possibly a few Chinese fence hitters from China, Aggarwal has had discussions with a host of probable investors over the last year and a half, it is learnt.