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Competing in Emerging Markets; Internationalization of Service Firms; Global Marketing.

Senior undergraduate or graduate students in business schools.

Uber first entered the South Korean taxi hailing service in Seoul in September 2013. In March 2015, the company shut down its operations after being charged for operating an illegal service. However, in January 2016, Uber decided to re-launch Uber’s premium service, UberBLACK after working with the city government. Given the country’s unique characteristics, was the decision to re-enter the market justifiable? Would Uber’s new strategies including partnering with a local company be sufficient? How could Uber gain more market share against its local powerful competitors?

Outcomes This case allows students to understand the challenges of internationalizing services of a global company in an emerging market that has strong national cultures and domestic preferences. The students will learn how to analyze the country and industry external environment as well as internal resources and capabilities to formulate the appropriate market entry strategies and to effectively implement them. The students will also learn the critical role of host country government and how to manage its relationship, the first- and second-mover advantages/disadvantages and the sustainability of innovative business models.

Teaching Notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes.

CSS 11: Strategy

The tech giants Alibaba and Tencent compete on many fronts. This case focuses on three areas where they have competed very hard: new retailing, mobile payment, and ride-hailing. At the beginning of 2018, Alibaba and Tencent were gathering retail investments in bids to battle each other for shoppers' digital wallets. Key to the battle is China's mobile payment market, worth more than 200 trillion RMB, where Alibaba and Tencent are going head to head. The giants are not only directly competing in the payment platform area but also extensively fighting in other areas, such as ride-hailing, where they invested in and supported Didi and Kuaidi, respectively. To enhance understanding, this case also briefly goes through the history of the two giants. The purposes, methods, and consequences of their platform competition deserve an in-depth discussion

Motivated by a problem in the context of DiDi Travel, the biggest taxi hailing platform in China, the purpose of this paper is to propose a novel facility location problem, specifically, the single source capacitated facility location problem with regional demand and time constraints, to help improve overall transportation efficiency and cost.

This study develops a mathematical programming model, considering regional demand and time constraints. A novel two-stage neighborhood search heuristic algorithm is proposed and applied to solve instances based on data sets published by DiDi Travel.

The results of this study show that the model is adequate since new characteristics of demand can be deduced from large vehicle trajectory data sets. The proposed algorithm is effective and efficient on small and medium as well as large instances. The research also solves and presents a real instance in the urban area of Chengdu, China, with up to 30 facilities and demand deduced from 16m taxi trajectory data records covering around 16,000 drivers.

This study examines an offline and single-period case of the problem. It does not consider multi-period or online cases with uncertainties, where decision makers need to dynamically remove out-of-service stations and add other stations to the selected group.

Prior studies have been quite limited. They have not yet considered demand in the form of vehicle trajectory data in facility location problems. This study takes into account new characteristics of demand, regional and time constrained, and proposes a new variant and its solution approach.

This study aims to explore the chicken and egg paradox in the taxi e-hailing business contributing to define a condition of system emergence. This paradox is a meaningful one as these platforms represent a system where the passengers systems have no reason to participate if they have no drivers-systems to answer their call, but, at the same time, the platform is not useful to the drivers-system if there are no passengers-systems using the platform.

To understand how this paradox has been dealt with in the taxi e-hailing business, this study focused on a case study on a best practice in Italian taxi e-hailing industry (i.e. MyTaxi/FreeNow). This study wants to comprehend which actions have been implemented to solve this paradox and has tried to identify the interconnections between the various strategies to create a closed loop diagram for further testing.

This study has found that the company did not choose a single “subsystem” (passenger or driver), but it has stimulated the creation of several mutually reinforcing motivation for have both subsystems interact to help the company grow.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paradox has never been studied using the complex adaptive system perspective. This perspective is particularly useful in this case and in the similar ones with several different interacting factors that cannot be really studied without using a higher order perspective.

This paper aims to identify the dimensions of service quality in the case of ride-sourcing services in Indian context.

The service quality dimensions of ride-sourcing services are identified using an exploratory factor analysis (EFA). Further, the reliability and validity of the factors are established through confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) using AMOS.

The service quality dimensions of ride-sourcing services are identified: comfort, internal environment, safety and personnel, mobile convenience and reliability, mobile system efficiency and availability, mobile customer service and billing and mobile security and privacy.

The various dimensions are identified to measure service quality of ride-sourcing services in India. So, these dimensions can be tested for ride-sourcing services of countries having similar culture as India.

The proposed dimensions can be used as a diagnostic tool to identify and compare important criteria for service quality of ride-sourcing services.

Most relevant studies about dimensions of service quality for ride-sourcing services do not have stable factor structure. The dimensions identified include the traditional taxi service quality and mobile app service quality, which are not covered in current literature.

Over the past decade, research into sharing economy platforms has gained prominence. The purpose of this study is to investigate the role of perceived value (both hedonic and utilitarian) in attracting consumer engagement in the sharing economy, as well as its link with trust.

This study used a survey method to empirically tested the proposed model using the partial least squares approach to structural equation modeling on data from 320 DiDi app users.

The study's findings revealed that both hedonic and utilitarian value had a significant effect on satisfaction and trust in the platform. Although the results showed no effect of hedonic and utilitarian values on trust in driver, the authors found trust in driver and platform, and satisfaction had significant influences on users’ continued intention to use the Taxi-hailing app. Interestingly, this study suggests that trust in the platform is transferred to trust in the driver.

The results from the Necessary Condition Analysis shows that satisfaction and utilitarian value are necessary conditions of continuance intention.

To understand why the penetration of handset-based mobile payment in most countries is still low has been an important research topic for the last 15 years, and it has been analyzed from different perspectives. However, the analysis of a single aspect cannot provide a sophisticated answer to the complicated underlying question. The purpose of this paper is to understand how a relatively successful m-payment ecosystem is created and sustained through the coopetition of various actors.

To that end, the authors analyze the case of Alipay wallet, the m-payment service provider with the largest market share in China, and focus on understanding the motivations and subsequent actions of the organizations cooperating in the Alipay wallet core ecosystem.

The results show that actors with heterogeneous and complementary resources can forge sustainable collaboration. Within an ecosystem, although always constrained by resources and capabilities, the actions that the core actors take and the resulting power imbalances are dynamically changing, reflecting actors’ aim of reducing uncertainty.

The main limitation of this case is that it was conducted in a Chinese context, which has specific features that may not apply to other cases. In addition, this study is based on a single case study in a single country, without comparing the results to any other cases or countries. Therefore, some modifications may have to be made when applying the framework and generalizing the results.

With regards to the practical perspective, the Alipay case may serve as an example that other providers follow, taking similar actions to increase the dependency of others and reduce their own dependency on others. It is helpful to take a keystone strategy to create value within the ecosystem and share this value with other participants. Moreover, Alipay acts as the platform provider, in addition to managing value creation within the ecosystem and sharing that value with the other participants. Alipay focuses on the business and strategic needs of the core actors, without threatening their main business, for example, Alipay focuses on micro-payments, which does not pose a direct competition to banks, who mainly rely on macro-payments to generate profit. Micro-payments are often related to high transaction costs for banks. In addition, although it is difficult to define the boundaries of actors in the ecosystem, the core business of every actor is the key competitive or even survival condition. This notion should be taken into consideration by actors whose actions affect the business of other ecosystem partners. For instance, Alipay will not aim to become a bank, as they know that if they do so, they cannot connect any other bank to their platform. In other words, the scope and boundary of the actors are clearly identified so that the core business will not be threatened. Sords, we can learn from Alipay that it pays off to focus on one area, and not to let your competitors challenge you.

The authors proposed the StReS framework for analyzing a business ecosystem by combining resource-based review, resource dependency theories and network analysis for investigating the motivations of the organizations cooperating in the core ecosystem and the actions they have taken to reduce dependency and uncertainty.

Uber China is a strategy pricing case that examines the role of customer acquisition tactics and brand positioning in entering the tantalizingly large Chinese market. The case adopts the perspective of an outside observer looking at Uber's efforts to compete in China from its entry in 2013 to its exit through its acquisition by Didi Chuxing, the highly dominant industry leader in China's ride-sharing market. After laying out the market opportunity, consumer and competitive landscape, and the various acquisition-related moves of Uber and the other major players, the case asks students to conduct a postmortem on Uber's failure in China. Specifically, they must consider what drew Uber to the opportunity in China and what it might have done differently in terms of positioning and customer acquisition to compete more effectively. First and foremost a pricing-related discussion, the case illustrates the relationship between pricing and acquisition tactics and brand positioning and the use of both in market entry and penetration.

In the era of digitalization and technology, tremendous changes have taken place in the taxi industry worldwide. The traditional taxi service has transformed into the latest innovative technology-based e-hailing service. There are innumerable factors that drive the user adoption of e-hailing apps. This study aims to primarily concentrate on identifying, analyzing and ranking these factors which have an impact on the user intention toward using e-hailing apps.

The e-hailing app users in the state of Punjab and Chandigarh are the target population for the study. A fuzzy analytical hierarchy process technique has been applied to analyze and codify the determinants that influence the user intention of adopting e-hailing apps. The primary factors that have been considered for the study are social influence, perceived usefulness, facilitating conditions, perceived ease of use, self-efficacy, perceived risk, compatibility and trust.

The study revealed that “Perceived Usefulness” is the factor that influences user intention to use e-hailing apps the most, while “Perceived Risk” the least. The sub-criteria codified in the top priority was as follows: “Overall, I find the e-hailing app useful in booking a taxi (C15)”; “I do not need some people to use e-hailing apps (C52); “I believe e-hailing app is compatible with existing technology (C61).” The sub-criterion “E-hailing app service provider keeps its promise (C72)” was demonstrated to have the least impact on the user intention of adopting e-hailing apps.

The study has been confined to only eight factors selected from the extended technological acceptance model framework and some related technology acceptance theories. Some more other factors may have an impact on user adoption of e-hailing apps, which need to be added further. Also, the scope of the study should be enhanced by expanding the geographical area beyond the selected region.

The findings of the study enable the e-hailing service providers and marketers to understand the users’ intention in a better way, to make improvements in e-hailing apps and formulate strategies accordingly.

The previous literature provides the base to the present study for identifying the factors affecting user behavioral intention toward e-hailing apps and information technology. The findings and results of the present research make value addition to the existing knowledge base.

Male identity and motor-mobility are deeply intertwined across much of the globe but nowhere is this relationship more strongly in evidence than in Africa. On the African continent, road transport work has always appeared, in essence, to be a masculinist domain: it is almost always men who are seen driving commercial vehicles, regulating loading activities in the lorry and bus parks (and now the motorcycle stages), undertaking roadside repairs, vulcanising tyres, and even serving fuel. This does not mean that women are entirely absent from the sector, but their place is commonly peripheral – constrained at least in part by hegemonic norms of femininity that shape women’s self-understandings. They typically supply cooked food, alcohol and sex to male road workers, or take on back-breaking work in the lowliest – and lowest paid – of porterage roles, head-loading goods along the road, carrying materials when assisting men making and mending roads, or loading vehicles. From time to time, women have aspired to infiltrate more lucrative areas of the sector, especially through ownership of commercial vehicles, but their closer engagement with the oily nuts and bolts of the road business remains rare.

This chapter draws on a wide range of published and grey literature and some personal ethnographic research from a diversity of African countries and contexts to examine women’s efforts at engagement in the sector. The discussion spans women’s employment in road transport services (porterage, ticket-selling, taxis, buses, Bus Rapid Transit [BRT] and commercial trucks) and the road construction that supports transport service operations (engineering, planning, contracting, and labouring). The authors pay particular attention to the factors that so often continue to impede women’s progress in these arenas. The concluding section first references COVID-19 and its detrimental impacts on women transport workers’ jobs, then considers the potential for overcoming current barriers and promoting a more central space for women in transport operations, a development that could provide significant benefits across the sector.