New entrants in the ride-sharing business will find it hard to match Uber's level of reliability, said Barney Harford, COO of the company.

"At Uber, we have an expansive vision of the future," said Harford. "We think about ourselves as a company that is focused on transportation as a service."

On the sidelines of Uber Elevate APAC Summit 2018 in Tokyo, Harford in an interview to CNBC-TV18 shared his views on the ride-sharing giant's air taxi service that it hopes to launch in 2020, online food delivery platform Uber Eats and investments.

Here is what he said:

On air taxi service

"Fundamentally what we are doing with Uber Elevate is creating an ecosystem that we have done effectively at Uber-building a two-sided ride-sharing marketplace and at Uber Eats-building a three-sided marketplace and I am incredibly excited about the opportunity ahead of us to create this ecosystem around Uber Elevate," Harford said.

Flying taxis have the ability to allow cities to free themselves from the congestion, from pollution and create mechanisms for citizens to travel around short, medium, large distances in much shorter times than they currently experience through ground transportation, he added.

Harford said that the company was working with leading aircraft manufacturers around the world to develop air taxis. It is working to "develop technologies to manage urban airspace for this entirely new category of urban aviation at scale".

On investments

Talking about investments, Harford said, “We are making substantial investments in technology that powers the platform(Uber Elevate) and we have technology centers around the world including in India. We are also making investments in acquisition of new riders, new drivers, new restaurants, new careers and new eaters across our core rides and Uber Eats businesses.”

“As we expand into new markets and new cities, we are looking to generate trial of the service and in some of those instances we will be providing attractive promotions to encourage people to try our services for the first time,” he added.

On Uber Eats business

“We have talked about how the Asia Pacific region is the fastest growing part of our business and within Asia Pacific, India is the fastest growing country for Uber Eats around the world. So we are very excited about the growth opportunity," he added.

On India visit

On his recent India visit, Harford said he was excited to be developing partnerships with metro and transit authorities to create effective first mile and last mile solutions that incorporate with transit.

First Published:Sept 3, 2018 8:52 PM IST