China's "Uber for trucks", having acquired a $1 billion valuation and more than 3.7 million users on its platform, is now looking at potential overseas markets including India's, company officials of the fast-growing online logistics firm have said.

Truck Alliance is one of China Inc's unexpected success stories this year, with a business model that brings the Uber ride-sharing principle to China's vast land freight industry. Land freight accounts for around three-quarters of the freight industry but just like India, it is grappling with inefficiency and an estimated 50 per cent rate of empty hauling - a problem that Truck Alliance solves by linking up millions of drivers returning home empty with orders through its smartphone app.

Having acquired a more than 50 per cent market share in China - its platform now has 3.7 million registered users out of the 7 million pool of inter-provincial truck drivers - the company is interested in overseas expansion, its vice president Chen Tianting told India Today.

GOING ABROAD

Speaking at the company's sprawling base in Guiyang - the provincial capital of southwestern Guizhou that is being developed into a high-tech base - where a fleet of service trucks waited for deployment, Chen said the logical next step for the online logistics firm would be to expand beyond China, particularly along land routes to neighbouring countries that have been recently revived through the massive Belt and Road project, especially to Central Asia and to Russia. The company is already offering its app in Mongolian and Russian, besides Mandarin.

The land-trade to India through Tibet, by contrast, is growing very slowly. But Chen sees similarities with the Indian market - a huge share for land freight and an empty-haul problem - and believes his company's app could be transformative, even if the focus is on consolidating its strength at home. "The first thing is, we have to figure out an efficient way from the Chinese mainland to India. We know India is a really big market, but we also know it's a very different market. We want to first consolidate our position here first before we study it," he said.

NEW TECH GIANTS

In Guiyang, Truck Alliance is being held up as an example of the new breed of Chinese tech companies. When China's leader Xi Jinping visited Guizhou in 2015, he made it a point to stop by its headquarters.

Chen says the model is not exactly like Uber's - there are no transaction fees for drivers and the revenue is mainly from offering other services to drivers, such as electronic toll cards and top-ups - for which a fee is charged - and services ranging from repair to sales of oil and spare parts.

"We have already issued over 1 million cards, and the daily cash flow from them is 70 million Yuan (Rs 70 crore)," says Chen. Started in 2014 with 200 people, it now has 3000 staff manning 1000 service stations across 31 Chinese provinces and 296 cities, and operates a fleet of 400 service trucks.

The company is also getting into the lending business. "Ninety per cent of trucks in China are one-man trucks, the drivers are registered to companies but often operate alone and because of their situation cannot get loans from banks," says Chen. "So we are building a credit system with big data to cater to them." The interest rates, of course, will be more than double what banks offer at "above 10 per cent".

"We are different from other start-ups as we aren't only an Internet company," says Chen. "Around 80 per cent of our staff are in the field doing on-the-spot services and dealing with drivers face-to-face. Our 2,000 staff deal with 70 to 80,000 drivers every day. We aren't like those companies," he adds, "where their employees wear suits and sit in air-conditioned skyscraper offices."

In May, the firm, which is backed by Internet giant Tencent, received a $156 million boost from the investment arm of another Chinese tech giant, Baidu, giving it a $1 billion valuation. The company's rise is emblematic of the flood of money pouring into China's start-up space - on occasion, blindly - with more than 200 competitors emerging in the online logistics platform space. Of them, Chen, estimates, maybe only three will survive by the end of this year.

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