While Uber is trying to control is damaged reputation, its rival ride hailing company Lyft is sinking its teeth into more markets.
Lyft is now big a threat to Uber as the company is entering 54 new cities in its largest expansion to date. The expansion includes Pensacola, Florida, and Amherst, Massachusetts, as it makes for a total of nearly 300 Lyft cities across the country.
Lyft is going to expand its service to four cities in Pennsylvania, Erie, Johnstown, Williamsport and Altoona.
After the announcement of 40-city expansion I January, the company said that it was eyeing a total of 100 new markets by the end of this year. Within just two months into the New Year, it is just six cities short of meeting that goal.
The head of early stage markets and expansion Jaime Raczka said the company is looking forward to continue the rapid momentum.
Lyft has been an underdog for a long time to Uber’s behemoth business; Lyft offers a similar range of services as Uber does. While Uber is valued at $68 billion, Lyft comes nowhere near to its competitor at $5.5 billion.
The two companies have taken different approaches to scale their businesses. Uber took a bold approach by entering into new markets, right now the company operates in 500 cities across 70 countries. In China the company retreated after two years of bleeding money to fight the local competition, a service called Didi.
Whereas, Lyft has mainly focused on scaling its core U.S market and centering its global strategy in partnership with competitors, including China’s Didi, as well as India-based Ola and Southeast Asia’s Grab Taxi.
Uber got into trouble twice this month, as the #DeleteUber trended twice, the first trend initiated after the Donald Trump’s immigration ban where reportedly more than 200,000 accounts were deleted.
Lyft stayed still and declined to respond to answer on the Uber’s troubles, but it said that its own expansion plans were placed for six months.
Lyft is not the only company that could reap the benefits of Uber’s problems. On Wednesday (22 Feb) the Wall Street reported Google-owned Waze was looking for an expansion of its service.
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