OYO: A New Global Chain of Hotels Emerges

The case discusses the rise of a global chain of hotels that originated in India in 2015/16 and grew to become one of the top five leading hotel chains in the world in about four short years. The story of OYO's meteoric growth illustrates the power of technology to transform emerging markets and disrupt established industries. OYO represents a classic case of an organization that leveraged the fragmentation associated with emerging markets and used technology to bridge gaps across the value delivery model to offer a predictable customer experience. It believes a large part of the value it has created in India relies on its use of predictive analytics, big data analysis capabilities, and the integration of enterprise systems at variable scale to allow even the smallest of operators to be able to utilize valuable insights to take advantage of the boom in travel. Since its inception in India, where it has thoroughly dominated the industry landscape in terms of the number of hotel rooms it controls through its franchise/lease/manchise agreements, it has expanded into other emerging market countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia, UAE, Saudi Arabia, and China. It has been quite successful in these forays, barring some teething troubles that are typical of global expansion. However, as the case closes, the company had entered the developed markets of the UK, Japan, and had just arrived in the U.S., where it had made a large acquisition of a Hooter's hotel in Las Vegas, NV. The second round of expansion covering developed markets raises numerous questions regarding transportability of the model across two very different contexts, namely emerging markets, where the industry is fragmented, versus developed countries, where the industry is already dominated by famous brands.

• Start-ups
• Multinational corporations
• Strategy execution
• Globalization