Uber Technologies Inc.’s rivals are stepping up their efforts to defeat the unicorn startup, but there’s an interesting twist to the competitive swirl: All of them, including Uber itself, count SoftBank Group Corp. as one of their major investors.

Starting in the subcontinent, Ola announced Tuesday that it was making its first move outside its native India by opening for business in the Australian cities of Perth, Melbourne and Sydney. The company, which said it already enables smart transportation options to more than 125 million users in India through a network of more than 1 million “driver-partners” in 110 cities, also said it sees immense potential for the ride-hailing ecosystem.

Why Ola specifically targeted Australia, a market dominated by Uber, wasn’t specified by the company. But an anonymous employee told the Economic Times that one reason was that Australia has a high Indian immigrant population. Indian immigrants make up a majority of taxi drivers in the country.

Moving east to Southeast Asia, rumors continue to swirl that SoftBank is pushing Uber to sell its operations in the region to rival Grab Taxi Pte. Ltd., like it had sold its Chinese operation to Didi Chuxing Technology Co. in 2016.

Although there are no official figures on ride-hailing market share for Southeast Asia, Grab has previously claimed that it holds a 95 percent market share in third-party taxi-hailing and 71 percent in private vehicle hailing, conceivable numbers given that it operates in more markets than Uber.

Reports that Uber could sell to Grab with SoftBank’s encouragement first emerged in November, with KR Asia reporting last week that both companies were in talks to make the deal happen. The same report noted that SoftBank is pushing Uber to concentrate on markets in Europe and North America.

Moving north to China, Didi Chuxing announced Jan. 3 its first international expansion by acquiring Brazilian ride-hailing company 99 Corp. for $600 million. 99 Corp’s biggest investor prior to its acquisition was, without any surprise whatsoever, SoftBank as well. The Brazilian acquisition may not be the last for Didi, as a report in December claimed that it was looking at setting up shop in Mexico.

Didi, which counts SoftBank as one of the major investors, itself holds investments in both Ola and Grab. Uber holds a 17.7 percent share of Didi it received when it sold its Chinese operations, meaning that Uber indirectly holds shares in all of its major competitors.

Uber itself is still attempting to put itself in a profitable position, with reports Jan. 26 claiming that it was looking at offloading its car leasing arm to Fair.com.

Photo: Ola