India’s cab game has a new green player: A Vietnamese behemoth aiming to win fast

There was a time when booking a cab in India meant calling a radio-taxi company, a service that dispatched metered cabs through a call centre, and waiting for a car to arrive. Meru had built a business around that promise. Get an air-conditioned, metered cab, a trained driver and the comfort of knowing who was coming to pick you up. Mega Cabs and other radio-taxi operators were part of the same early wave.

Then the smartphone changed the rules.

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Ola arrived in 2011, Uber followed in 2013, and the cab became something that could be summoned from a screen rather than a call centre. The new players did not need to own every car on their platforms. They needed drivers, customers, technology and enough capital to build density. By the time traditional radio-taxi companies tried adapting to the aggregator model, the centre of gravity had already shifted. Meru, for instance, had moved from owning cars towards aggregation by 2012, while Mega Cabs saw its market share decline following the entry of Ola and Uber into major cities.

The lesson from that first disruption was that in ride-hailing, the model can matter as much as the cars.

India’s ride-hailing services market generated an estimated $2.5 billion in revenue in 2025, according to Grand View Research, with e-hailing accounting for the largest segment.

Green SM, the Vietnamese electric mobility company, is now entering this established market with a different approach.

Instead of building a marketplace of independent car owners, Green SM is bringing an all-electric, company-controlled fleet to India. It launched Green SM Limo in Delhi-NCR on June 5, starting with about 1,000 electric vehicles and outlining plans to eventually scale to 10,000 in the region, according to The Indian Express.

Its first Indian vehicle is the VinFast Limo Green, a seven-seat electric MPV designed for commercial passenger transport. The company has positioned itself in the premium segment, rather than trying to immediately replicate the mass-market proposition of Uber and other aggregators. Green SM India CEO Bach Tuan Anh said at launch that the company saw room for a niche, premium segment in Delhi-NCR.

That makes Green SM less like the Ola of 2011 and, in some ways, closer to the earlier radio-taxi businesses: a fleet, professional drivers and greater control over the ride.

But there is another company Green SM cannot ignore. As it enters this market, it finds a precedent in BluSmart, which operated a dedicated fleet of electric cabs.

The BluSmart shadow

When BluSmart’s cabs disappeared from the capital in April 2025, they left behind a customer base that had become accustomed to an electric taxi service with predictable fares, clean cars, professional drivers and no cancellations.

BluSmart had built a fleet of more than 8,000 electric taxis before suspending operations. Reuters reported that the company had become a notable rival to Uber and Ola, with about 9% of the Delhi market. Its shutdown followed regulatory action involving Gensol Engineering and co-founder Anmol Singh Jaggi; BluSmart subsequently appointed Grant Thornton for a forensic audit.

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The collapse highlighted one challenge of the fleet-owned model. Owning and operating thousands of cars can give a company far greater control over service quality. But it also means carrying the cost of vehicles, drivers, charging, maintenance and fleet utilisation on its own books.

That is where Green SM’s India strategy differs.

Like BluSmart, it is betting that customers will pay, or at least repeatedly choose, a service built around cleaner cars and a more consistent experience. It too controls the fleet instead of leaving the entire supply side to independent drivers.

But Green SM arrives with something BluSmart did not have: an established EV manufacturer sitting at the heart of the wider ecosystem.

More than a cab company

Green SM was established in 2023 by Pham Nhat Vuong, the founder and chairman of Vietnam’s Vingroup and the driving force behind VinFast, an electric-vehicle manufacturer. The relationship is notably close, even though Green SM and VinFast are separate companies.

Green SM says its Indian vehicles are procured through VinFast-authorised dealers and that it coordinates with VinFast on maintenance, after-sales support and technical matters. It is also working with VinFast, V-Green — a Vingroup-linked charging infrastructure company — and local partners on charging infrastructure.

VinFast, meanwhile, gets something every automaker needs when entering a new market. It gets a large institutional customer for its vehicles and a fleet on the road that can put those vehicles in front of thousands of potential customers.

Green SM rejects the suggestion that it is primarily a sales channel for VinFast. In responses to ET Online, the company said its primary objective in India is passenger transportation and that it does not earn commissions or revenue from VinFast vehicle sales.

Still, the relationship remains strategically significant.

VinFast’s filings show how important the Green SM relationship has been to its growth. The automaker’s Green Series — including the Herio Green, Nerio Green and Limo Green — accounted for 25% of VinFast’s global electric-vehicle deliveries in the third quarter of 2025.

And Green SM’s ecosystem is already extending beyond vehicles. In June, Indian corporate-mobility company Routematic announced a partnership under which it would use Green SM’s electric fleet for workforce transportation.

Vingroup: The ecosystem behind VinFast and Green SM

Vingroup, Vietnam’s largest privately owned conglomerate, has built a broad business empire spanning real estate, hospitality, technology and electric mobility. Founded by billionaire Pham Nhat Vuong, the group’s EV strategy is anchored by VinFast, its electric-vehicle manufacturing arm, and Green SM (GSM), its electric ride-hailing and mobility company.

While the two operate as separate businesses, their relationship gives Vingroup an integrated presence across vehicle production and passenger transportation, with Green SM deploying VinFast vehicles in its commercial fleet.

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The connection extends to charging infrastructure through V-Green, a Vingroup-linked charging network company. Together, VinFast, Green SM and V-Green form an ecosystem in which VinFast supplies electric vehicles, Green SM operates them for passenger and corporate mobility, and V-Green supports charging infrastructure.

For VinFast, Green SM provides a large institutional customer and a way to put its vehicles on the road at scale. For Green SM, the relationship offers access to a dedicated EV supply chain and technical support, even as the companies maintain that their operations are separate.

The electric equation

Electric vehicles can make particular sense in high-utilisation commercial fleets because fuel is replaced by electricity and maintenance requirements can be lower. But those advantages only become meaningful when a vehicle spends enough time carrying passengers.

Hari Krishna, founder and CEO of Green Drive Mobility, an electric mobility and fleet-services company, said the economics of EV fleets increasingly depend on charging time, battery health, driver behaviour, utilisation and preventive maintenance.

“The focus should not only be on adding more EVs to the road, but on making sure the vehicles, drivers, charging infrastructure and technology work together efficiently,” he said.

That is also why fleet-management technology becomes important. Rahul Mehra, Co-founder at Roadcast, an AI-powered fleet-management and telematics company, said the EV fleet race is increasingly about how intelligently vehicles are operated, including utilisation, routes, energy consumption, charging patterns and downtime.

The distinction matters because Green SM’s model puts all those variables under one roof. It can control when a car charges. It can determine which driver operates it. It can standardise maintenance. It can monitor the customer experience. But it also has to pay for all of it.

Vietnam offers a clue

Green SM’s experience in Vietnam suggests the company understands the cost pressures of operating a company-controlled fleet. Reuters reported that GSM, as the company is known, is looking to expand further internationally while shifting towards a hybrid driver model — combining company-operated vehicles with vehicles run by external drivers — in Vietnam to reduce costs.

The company has historically relied heavily on company-owned vehicles and employed drivers, a model that gives it greater operational control but also creates higher operating costs and greater reliance on capital.

Green SM currently says its Indian fleet is owned and managed by the company, with drivers and service standards under its control. It also says it will prioritise service quality before scale, with future expansion dependent on demand, infrastructure and operating readiness.

That may be more important than its 10,000-vehicle target.

India has seen this movie before

The history of India’s cab market is filled with companies that got one part of the equation right but struggled when the economics changed.

Meru had the cars and a reputation for reliability, but had to move towards aggregation when Uber and Ola changed the economics of the market. Mega Cabs, another early radio-taxi operator, lost substantial share to the heavily funded app-based players. Uber and Ola then demonstrated the power of an asset-light marketplace. Rapido pushed the model further into bikes and autos.

BluSmart tried something different again: own the electric fleet, control the customer experience and build a cleaner alternative.

Now Green SM is attempting essentially the same broad proposition, but with a much larger automotive ecosystem behind it.

Its challenge will be to ensure that the strength of that ecosystem does not become its weakness.

The company has to keep its cars moving, keep charging infrastructure ahead of demand, keep drivers productive and maintain service quality without allowing fleet costs to outrun revenue. It also has to find enough customers willing to repeatedly choose its premium electric service in a market where price remains a powerful differentiator.

India’s cab market has repeatedly rewarded companies that found a way to make supply, demand and economics work at scale. Green SM has brought the cars. The harder question is whether it can make them pay for the ride.