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.
