Category: Journalism

Categories
Journalism Tech

By Me Today: Uber Hits Roadblocks in Southeast Asia

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The story begins:

SINGAPORE—When Uber Technologies Inc. retreated from China last year after conceding a costly battle with a local rival, the ride-hailing giant vowed to devote new resources to winning other lucrative markets in Asia.

Since then, Uber has suffered setbacks in Southeast Asia, a region of 600 million people, where it has been outflanked by another local player, Grab Inc., which is gobbling up market share. Grab has expanded more rapidly, been more nimble in meeting local preferences, analysts say, and has forged better relations with regulators.

Grab has more monthly active users than Uber across six Southeast Asian countries, according to app analytics firm App Annie, while a May report from consultancy Bain found users across the region prefer Grab to Uber.

Now Uber investors and analysts believe the region may be the next to be ceded by Uber, which withdrew from Russia in July.

Click through to read the rest.

 

 

Categories
India Journalism Tech

By Me Today: India’s Ola in Talks to Raise Up to $2 Billion

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The story begins:

NEW DELHI—Uber Technologies Inc.’s rival in India, Ola, is in talks to raise as much as $2 billion, a cash injection that would provide added fuel to fight the San Francisco ride-hailing giant in the world’s second-most-populous country.

ANI Technologies Pvt.’s Ola, based in Bangalore, is in discussions to receive the funds from Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp. and possibly one or more other backers, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Ola, which launched in 2011—two years before Uber’s arrival in India—is locked in a tight battle with the U.S. firm for control of the Indian market, which could prove lucrative as millions of people join the internet economy via inexpensive smartphones.

Click through to read the rest.

Categories
Journalism

By Me Today: China Tech Firms are Leading Asia’s Mobile Money Race

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The story begins:

NEW DELHI—Silicon Valley is home to the world’s most influential consumer-tech firms, but China’s online corporate titans are way ahead in the race to build mobile-payment services in many of the world’s fastest-growing consumer markets.

China’s digital-payments market, by far the world’s largest, is dominated by e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and social-media champ Tencent Holdings Ltd. Now these giants have started transferring money, product advice and technical know-how to mobile money startups in other Asian markets, from Indonesia to India.

As people across Asia increasingly move from cash to smartphone apps for buying goods and transferring money between individuals, U.S. firms remain “still very focused on their home market” and trying to increase usage there, said Shiv Putcha, an analyst at research firm IDC in Mumbai.

Click through to read the rest.

Categories
India Journalism Tech

By Me Today: Google Wants a Piece of Mobile Payments in India

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The story begins:

Alphabet Inc.’s Google is aiming for a piece of India’s booming—but increasingly crowded—mobile-payments business.

The Mountain View, Calif., tech giant on Monday launched its first-ever smartphone app that lets users transfer money to individuals and businesses in the country without the use of a credit or a debit card, a crucial factor since many here lack plastic.

Click through to read the rest.

So, to re-cap the state of play as people leapfrog from cash (over credit cards) to payments via smartphones here:

  • Paytm — which we profiled back in June — is the market leader, with more than 225 million users. There are other popular services here, as well, like Mobikwik.
  • WhatsApp, with 200 million users in India, is exploring a payments feature.
  • Hike, India’s biggest home grown app, added a payments feature a few months ago.

Watch this space.

Categories
Journalism Singapore

Uber Rented Defective Cars in Singapore: Our Page 1 Story

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I’m late in mentioning this as I’ve been on the road for a few weeks — and if you follow me on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook this may be old news — but I wanted to link to a page 1 story I wrote with colleagues that ran earlier this month.

The headline: “Smoke, Then Fire: Uber Knowingly Leased Unsafe Cars to Drivers.” And the dek: “Chasing breakneck growth, the ride-hailing giant bought Honda SUVs in Singapore subject to a recall — then one caught fire.”

The piece begins:

Uber driver Koh Seng Tian had just dropped off a passenger in a residential neighborhood in Singapore when he smelled smoke in his Honda Vezel sport-utility vehicle. Flames burst from the dashboard, melting the interior and cracking a football-sized hole in his windshield.

Mr. Koh walked away unhurt, according to the accident report filed with authorities. But the fire this January caused panic at Uber Technologies Inc.

The ride-hailing company had rented the Vezel to Mr. Koh after Honda Motor Co. recalled the model in April 2016 for an electrical component that could overheat and catch fire.

Uber managers in Singapore were aware of the Honda recall when they bought more than 1,000 defective Vezels and rented them to Mr. Koh and other drivers without the needed repairs, according to internal Uber emails and documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and interviews with people familiar with Uber’s operations in the region.

Click through to see some images and read the rest.

The story was followed by news outlets across the globe, including Bloomberg, Reuters, USA TODAY, CNBC, CNN, Quartz, Axios and more.

Categories
Journalism

New: Get iOS Alerts for My WSJ Stories

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Last week we launched a new version of The Wall Street Journal iOS app. (If you don’t have it yet, just update it in the App Store from your device.)

One of the cool new features: the ability to receive alerts for new stories from specific reporters (ahem, like me, or any of my colleagues!).

To sign up, just click on my name in the byline of a story.

To do that, open up the new app and:

  1. search for “Newley,”
  2. click on one of my stories
  3. scroll down to my name in the byline
  4. click the plus sign

Once you do that, the screen will look like this:

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Then you’ll get an alert like the one at the top of this post whenever one my new stories goes live.

Enjoy!

Categories
India Journalism

International Students Avoid Red States

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That’s the gist of a story I wrote with my colleague Doug Belkin in Chicago. It begins:

International students accepted to U.S. schools are planning to enroll at a similar rate as last year in most areas except the southern part of the country, especially Texas, according to data from 165 U.S. colleges and universities.

I spoke with one student here in New Delhi, as you’ll read, who said he really wanted to apply to Rice University in Texas. But his parents would’t let him — due to the state’s liberal gun laws.

You can also hear me on our What’s News podcast discussing the piece.

Categories
India Journalism Tech

Our Facebook Live Video On Apple and India

Last week my colleague Eric Bellman and I conducted a live Facebook chat on Apple’s big gamble on India.

The video is embedded above and on The WSJ Facebook page here.

Eric and I discuss India’s promise as the second biggest smartphone market after China (hundreds of millions of people are getting online for the first time on low-cost smartphones), what Apple’s been doing to make strides here (assembling phones locally for the first time, working to open its own official stores, trying to boost the iOS ecosystem, etc.) and the challenges it faces (the biggest: price).

Enjoy.

And for more, see a couple of our recent stories:

Categories
India Journalism Tech

Photos: iPhones, Assembled-in-India, are Here

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I tweeted this on Friday and wanted to share it here as well: as we reported last month, the first-ever assembled-in-India iPhones are a reality.

Here’s a closer look at a couple of images of SE models I snapped at two shops recently here in New Delhi.

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For more on the wider context, see our story Thursday on Apple’s push in India. The headline: “Apple Scraps Like an Underdog in Second Biggest Mobile Market.”

Categories
India Journalism Tech

India’s WhatsApp Rival Launches Mobile Payments


That’s what I wrote about in this story today, which begins:

India’s biggest local messaging app, Hike Ltd., has beaten Facebook Inc.’s WhatsApp into the country’s booming mobile-payments business.

Hike on Tuesday launched free bank-to-bank and mobile-wallet payments for its roughly 100 million users, meaning people can quickly send money to one another via the company’s smartphone app.

“We are the first to bring payments to a messaging app in India,” Hike’s founder and chief executive, Kavin Bharti Mittal, said at an event in New Delhi.

For more on Hike, see my story from last year, when they raised $175 milion from China’s Tencent and others.