READING COMPONENT - QUESTION (What is Ubers growth strategy and what are the biggest impediments to Ubers growth and how is Uber trying to deal with these? Is Ubers adversarial approach correct? Explain.) Please answer in clear english and not copied from a wrong posted question.

Uber began offering its service in June 2010 in San Francisco under the name UberCab. New York was added in May 2011. By April 2012, the company was in seven U.S. cities, Paris, and Toronto. Two years later, Uber was operating in 130 cities in 36 countries around the world. Initially Uber limited its service to drivers with high-end limo type cars. In San Francisco, Uber explicitly targeted members of the tech community in its early marketing efforts, sponsoring local tech and venture capital events and providing free rides to attendees. Ubers bet was that its service would immediately resonate with this demographic, who would rapidly spread the news via word of mouth and social networks. According to CEO Travis Kalanick: Uber spends virtually zero dollars on marketing, spreading almost exclusively via word of mouth. Im talking old school word of mouth, you know at the water cooler in the office, at a restaurant when youre paying the bill, at a party with friendsWhos Ubering home? 95% of all our riders have heard about Uber from other Uber riders. Our virality is almost unprecedented. For every 7 rides we do, our users big mouths generate a new rider.* One of Ubers business development managers elaborated on this: With Uber everything is very local-focused as transportation is a local topic. For that reason we have an operations team on the ground in all the cities where Uber exists, and that team is working with both local drivers, and local clients to grow the business there. Weve also found that our growth is driven substantially by word of mouth. When someone sees the ease of use, the fact that they press a button on their phone and in under 5 minutes a car appears, they inevitably become a brand advocate. Weve also done our best to reach out to folks who are influencers in our markets, who obviously have a stronger reach and bigger audience.* To drive rapid growth Uber picked cities that have what Kalanick refers to as accelerants. These accelerants indicate a concentrated need for Ubers service. They include: (1) lots of restaurants and nightlife, (2) holidays and events, (3) weather, and (4) sports.* For example, in Chicago, a city with lots of nightlife, intense weather, and numerous sporting events, Ubers initial viral growth was double what they normally experienced. Special events and holidays also provided an opportunity to showcase Ubers model. Ubers ability to deliver rides on New Years Eve in San Francisco, a city notorious for its lack of taxis, drove spikes in new ridership. Kalanick has also noted that Uber is getting better at local market entry over time: Every city, every subsequent city that we go to were getting better at rolling the city out and growing the city faster. And so a lot of the cities where theres constrained number of taxis, no liquid black car market, those are the cities where we launch and things explode from the start. We have other cities where theres tons of taxis, in some cases way too many and in those situations often the quality of service being delivered is really poor, so we go in there and explode as well. But theres all kinds of different cities in terms of regulatory, and in terms of what the industry looks like, an industry which were disrupting in a substantial way. We think that cities deserve to have another transportation alternative. It sounds crazy to have to say that but you have to do that because you have incumbent interests which are often trying to curtail innovation and curtail sort of transportation alternatives that might compete with their existing business. And, because of that, it requires us to take a very local approach to how we go after a city. We have launchers that go into [cities] and turn nothing into something. I like to say they drop in with parachutes and machetes [and] get highly involved with the suppliers, people who own cars and run car services, and really just make sure that we can launch a service that is high quality from the start. Being local and speaking with local voice is important when youre doing transportation and means you know whats going on for the city.* To achieve rapid expansion, Uber needs to be able to quickly build a network of drivers in each city in which it enters. The company certainly touts the financial and safety advantages of working for Uber, but it is also taking other actions to make sure there are plenty of drivers available. In December 2013, Uber lined up $2.5 billion in outside financing for low interest rate loans for Uber X drivers with Toyota and GM. This was designed to make it possible for up to 200,000 drivers to buy their own cars at very low interest rates, under the condition that they use those cars on the Uber network for the duration of the loan. In effect, drivers are lock in for the duration of the loan unless they want to see their interest rates balloon. Reportedly drivers have to agree to two financing rates, one that reflects the cost savings of them partnering with Uber, and one that doesnt.*