Uber, one of the most popular American multinationals, has recently expanded UberEATS to Tokyo, the 34th city globally with UberEATS, an on demand meal delivery service. With previous attempts of expanding their privately-owned transportation into Tokyo which did not work too well, Uber decided to take a new approach while attempting to penetrate the Tokyo market. Due to the country’s strong taxi lobby, they were unsuccessful when it came to expanding their hail-cab services. Along with pulling out of the Chinese market, they were also unsuccessful at expanding in South Asian markets for example Singapore and Jakarta due to local competitors (Grab Singapore and Go-Jek).
With intensive market research, Uber decided to launch UberEATS in central Tokyo. Central Tokyo is a good fit for UberEATS due to the lack of food delivery services. Along with that, Tokyo has a larger number of Michelin Star restaurant and the most number of restaurants per capita. This opens up a huge opportunity for UberEATS to provide delivery services for restaurants ranging from fast-food joints to luxurious restaurants. To incentivize and attract customers to use UberEATS, they will not be charging their customers with delivery fees for their first order. This strategy never fails to work when it comes providing potential customers the exposure to a new product or service and could help UberEATS enter the market easier along with their already well established brand image.
Despite there being low competition, the demand for food delivery is considerably low and thus UberEATS will have to come up with better marketing strategies to make ordering food more conventional. A few ways they could attempt to do so is through using famous celebrities to help advertise their products or perhaps making it “trendy” to order take-out, which has worked well for Chinese restaurants in the United States.
UberEATS may be Uber’s best chance yet to squeeze revenues out of Japan since their primary business did not work too well. The circumstances and markets in Japan look favorable for the new business idea Uber has come up with and I believe that through the right marketing and product positioning, UberEATS could end up being very successful in Japan and other parts of the world.
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Bibliography:
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Tech in Asia – Connecting Asia’s startup ecosystem. (n.d.). Retrieved October 01, 2016, from https://www.techinasia.com/ubereats-official-tokyo-launch
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Pascaline, M. (2016). Uber To Launch Food Delivery Service In Tokyo. Retrieved October 01, 2016, from http://www.ibtimes.com/ubereats-uber-launch-food-delivery-service-japan-2422954
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McLain, S. (2016). Uber to Launch Food-Delivery Service in Tokyo. Retrieved October 01, 2016, from http://www.wsj.com/articles/uber-to-launch-food-delivery-service-in-tokyo-1475036873
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Uber launches global assault on takeaway meals market. (2016). Retrieved October 01, 2016, from http://www.reuters.com/article/us-food-delivery-idUSKCN11W2LX