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inDrive revives Super App debate | The Express Tribune
KARACHI:
Pakistan’s long-running debate over the viability of a “Super App” model has resurfaced as inDrive moves to expand its platform beyond ride-hailing into groceries, delivery, and other digital services. The move revives questions that have followed earlier attempts in the country, particularly whether Pakistan’s market structure, consumer behaviour, and payments ecosystem can support a unified digital platform offering multiple everyday services under one app.
The earlier failures in Pakistan were not due to the concept itself, but to flawed sequencing and weak foundations, said Nurken Rzaliyev, Head of Q-Commerce Services at inDrive, in an exclusive interview with The Express Tribune.
“Super apps fail when platforms try to do too many things at once,” Rzaliyev said. “You need one strong core service that people already trust and use frequently. Without that, everything else becomes fragmented. Expansion has to be built on daily behaviour, not ambition.” Rzaliyev argued that Pakistan’s digital market is structurally different today compared to the period when earlier Super App attempts struggled. Smartphone usage has expanded, consumers are more accustomed to online shopping, and the digital payments infrastructure has improved. Systems such as Raast, along with private fintech platforms, have increased transaction reliability and accessibility, particularly in urban centres.
“People now understand digital services,” he said. “Online payments are no longer unfamiliar, and everyday services like ride-hailing and deliveries are part of routine life for many users. That changes how platforms can scale.”
inDrive’s strategy is anchored in its ride-hailing business, which provides a recurring, high-frequency user base. The company, founded in Siberia in 2012 as a community response to high taxi fares, operates on a negotiated pricing model rather than algorithmic fare-setting. This approach has gained traction in price-sensitive markets, including Pakistan, where negotiation is a common feature of daily transactions. Since entering Pakistan in 2021, inDrive has expanded across more than 20 cities for urban rides and over 200 cities for intercity travel. The company now employs around 150 people locally, with operational support from its parent organisation based in Kazakhstan and Cyprus.
Rather than launching a full Super App at once, inDrive is integrating services gradually. Rides, courier, freight, and grocery delivery are being added in phases, with financial services under consideration for future development. The grocery segment is being developed through a partnership with Crave Mart, a dark-store-based quick commerce platform.
Rzaliyev described groceries as a high-frequency and high-margin, upto category, with margins of up to 55% globally, category that naturally fits into daily digital behaviour. Household essentials and food purchases represent one of the largest recurring expenditures for Pakistani consumers, making the sector strategically important for platform expansion. However, the quick-commerce model remains operationally complex, with logistics, warehousing, and last-mile delivery costs posing structural challenges. Independent analysts caution that integration alone does not guarantee platform success.
Mutaher Khan, Cofounder of Data Darbar, which maps Pakistan’s startup ecosystem, said the grocery expansion through Crave Mart does not fundamentally change the underlying market structure. “inDrive is operating through Crave Mart. Operationally, there is nothing fundamentally different there,” Khan said. “It’s essentially backend integration, but it’s still Crave Mart. Their numbers would be decent, but not exceptional, and certainly smaller than PandaMart, based on market estimates.”
Khan also pointed to inDrive’s dominant position in ride-hailing as the company’s primary strategic asset. “Based on earlier estimates, inDrive had close to 70% market share. It’s possible that Yango has taken some share due to aggressive discounts, but inDrive still holds the majority,” he said. “The key factor is supply reliability. When supply is ensured, demand stays there. If users are confident that a rider will show up when they open the app, they keep using the platform.” On the payments side, Khan noted that Pakistan’s digital transaction data remains difficult to quantify accurately due to fragmented channels and off-app processing.
“If you calculate across platforms, the total digital payments market is under a billion dollars annually,” he said. “Roughly 50 million transactions over the last four quarters, around Rs250 billion, which is about $900 million. But this data is structurally messy.”
This fragmentation highlights one of the core challenges facing any Super App model in Pakistan: integration across logistics, commerce, and payments remains structurally incomplete. While digital adoption has improved, the ecosystem is still characterised by parallel systems rather than a unified digital infrastructure.
Market analysts argue that Pakistan’s Super App success will depend less on branding and more on execution fundamentals:, including service reliability, pricing transparency, logistics efficiency, and trust. Consumer loyalty remains fluid, and price sensitivity continues to shape platform choice.
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Budget 2026: FM Nirmala Sitharaman gives a strong push to manufacturing, infrastructure and job creation, while proposing a simpler tax and customs system.
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman presents the Union Budget 2026-27.
Budget 2026 Takeaways: Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Sunday presented the Union Budget 2026-27, giving a strong push to manufacturing, infrastructure and job creation, proposing a simpler tax and customs regime, and hailing the government’s modernisation drive as a “reforms express”.
The Budget 2026 is anchored around three ‘kartavyas’ — driving growth by enhancing productivity and competitiveness, building people’s capacity, and ensuring inclusive development under the vision of Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikaas.
In her ninth consecutive Budget in Parliament, Sitharaman laid out a multi-pronged strategy to sustain growth amid global uncertainty, including expanding domestic electronics and semiconductor capabilities, de-risking infrastructure projects, skilling India’s youth for emerging technologies, and easing compliance for taxpayers and importers.
Here are the key takeaways from Budget 2026 across manufacturing, infrastructure, skills, AI, taxation and customs duty.
Manufacturing Gets A Boost
Budget 2026 put a special emphasis on the manufacturing landscape in India. The outlay for electronics components manufacturing was raised sharply to Rs 40,000 crore, while new schemes for rare earth magnets, chemical parks, container manufacturing and capital goods seek to reduce import dependency, and strengthen domestic supply chains. Textiles got an integrated, employment-oriented package covering fibres, clusters, skilling and sustainability.
Infrastructure-Led Growth
Infrastructure got a boost with a higher capex allocation and initiatives like a risk guarantee fund to de-risk projects for private developers, new dedicated freight corridors and national waterways, dedicated REITs (real estate investment trusts) for recycling of significant real estate assets of central public sector enterprises (CPSEs), and a seaplane VGF (viability gap funding) scheme.
The Centre’s capital expenditure (capex) target has been increased to Rs 12.2 lakh crore for FY27, up from Rs 11.2 lakh crore earmarked for the current financial year. Moreover, maintaining the fiscal discipline, Sitharaman said the government expects the fiscal deficit to be at 4.3 per cent of the GDP in 2026-27, lower than 4.4 per cent projected for the current financial year.
Tier-II and Tier-III cities were placed at the centre of urban growth via City Economic Regions, backed by reform-linked funding.
“We shall continue to focus on developing infrastructure in cities with over 5 lakh population (Tier II and Tier III), which have expanded to become growth centres,” Sitharaman said in her Budget Speech.
Greater Emphasis On Skilling
The Budget placed renewed emphasis on the services economy as a jobs engine. A high-powered Education-to-Employment and Enterprise Committee will realign skilling with market needs, including the impact of emerging technologies.
Content creation and creative industries get a boost through AVGC labs in schools and colleges, support for animation, gaming and comics, and new institutional capacity for design and hospitality. Tourism-linked skilling, from guides to digital heritage documentation, signals a clear intent to convert culture and content into employment and exports.
“I propose to support the Indian Institute of Creative Technologies, Mumbai in setting up AVGC Content Creator Labs in 15,000 secondary schools and 500 colleges,” FM Sitharaman said. AVGC stands for animation, visual effects, gaming and comics.
AI & Semiconductors Push
Artificial intelligence (AI) was positioned as a cross-sector force multiplier rather than a standalone theme. The Budget provided a push to artificial intelligence (AI) by promoting adoption with governance, agriculture, education and skilling, including proposals for AI-enabled advisory tools for farmers and AI integration in education curricula.
On hardware, the semiconductor strategy expanded decisively under ISM 2.0 (India Semiconductor Mission 2.0), with focus on domestic equipment manufacturing, materials, research centres and workforce development, signalling a long-term commitment to building a resilient chip ecosystem in India.
Taxation, ITR, TDS, TCS
A major structural reform comes with the Income Tax Act, 2025, effective April 1, 2026, containing simpler rules and redesigned forms.
Budget 2026 provided compliance relief for individuals, including extended timelines for revising returns to March 31 from December 31 earlier, staggered ITR due dates, and easier filing of Form 15G/15H through depositories.
Individuals with ITR-1 and ITR-2 returns will continue to file till July 31, and non-audit business cases or trusts are proposed to be allowed time till August 31, according to the Budget Speech 2026-27.
“I propose to extend time available for revising returns from 31st December to up to 31st March with the payment of a nominal fee. I also propose to stagger the timeline for filing of tax returns. Individuals with ITR 1 and ITR 2 returns will continue to file till 31st July and non-audit business cases or trusts are proposed to be allowed time till 31st August,” Sitharaman said.
TDS (Tax deducted at source) rules were clarified for manpower services, while a rule-based system for lower or nil TDS certificates is proposed. TCS rates were cut to 2% for overseas tour packages, education and medical expenses under liberalised remittance scheme (LRS). Litigation is targeted through integrated assessment and penalty orders, lower pre-deposit requirements, and wider immunity provisions.
TDS on the sale of immovable property by a non-resident will be deducted and deposited through resident buyer’s PAN (Permanent Account Number)-based challan instead of requiring TAN (Tax Deduction and Collection Account Number), Sitharaman said.
Customs Duty Tweaks
Customs duty rationalisation continued with a clear focus on domestic manufacturing, energy transition and ease of living. Exemptions have been extended or introduced for capital goods used in lithium-ion batteries, critical minerals processing, nuclear power projects and aircraft manufacturing.
Personal imports will become cheaper with a reduction in duty on goods for personal use from 20% to 10%. Seventeen cancer drugs and additional rare-disease treatments were exempted from customs duty. Process reforms aimed at trust-based, tech-driven clearances, faster cargo movement and lower compliance costs, especially for exporters and MSMEs (micro, small, medium and enterprises).
STT On F&O Hiked
The Budget increased securities transaction tax (STT) on futures trading from 0.02% to 0.05% and on options trading from 0.10% to 0.15%, a move that upset the capital markets with the BSE Sensex crashing more than 2,300 points from the day’s high and the NSE Nifty dropping to 24,571.75.
Securities Transaction Tax (STT) is a direct tax imposed on the buying and selling of securities in India.
Commenting on the Budget, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said, “The Union Budget reflects the aspirations of 140 crore Indians. It strengthens the reform journey and charts a clear roadmap for Viksit Bharat.”
February 01, 2026, 14:43 IST
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Shanghai (China): The Consulate General of India in Shanghai welcomed the resumption of Air India’s direct flight services between Shanghai and New Delhi, marking a major step forward in restoring people-to-people, business and institutional connectivity between India and China.
According to an official release, the inaugural Shanghai-New Delhi flight departed today from Shanghai Pudong International Airport, carrying over 230 passengers on board the Boeing 787 aircraft. The relaunch comes after a gap of nearly six years and represents a significant milestone in normalising bilateral air connectivity following the suspension of services in early 2020.
Speaking on the occasion, Consul General Pratik Mathur said, “The resumption of direct flights between Shanghai and New Delhi is a tangible expression of the renewed momentum in India-China engagement. Enhanced air connectivity is essential for facilitating trade, tourism, academic exchanges and people-to-people contacts, particularly between India and East China. We are pleased to see Air India restoring this important link.”
As per a release, Air India will operate the route four times a week using its Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner aircraft, featuring modernised cabins and enhanced onboard services. The restored service reflects the growing demand for travel between the two countries and the steady recovery of cross-border mobility. It will also support commercial, educational and cultural exchanges between India and the Yangtze River Delta region, one of China’s most economically dynamic clusters.
The Consulate General of India in Shanghai remains committed to supporting initiatives that strengthen connectivity and deepen cooperation across trade, investment, tourism, education and cultural exchange, the release stated.
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