As Uber Leaves, Ride Hailing Apps Enter New Period

Uber's drivers will become partners of Grab

On April 21, Thai An would have been working as a taxi driver for Uber Vietnam for two years. He was the head of Bitex Pro, a team of UberMoto drivers in the Bitexco Tower area in district 1, HCM City.

Six months ago, Bitex Pro merged with another team to form a community of 186 members, called ‘Driver Team’ with the aim of supporting and protecting each other from rivals.

However, the two-year anniversary will never come, because Uber notified drivers that from April 8, the service will run on Grab’s technology platform.

Uber has sold its business in Southeast Asia to the Singaporean rival Grab. Following the deal, Grab will take over Uber’s operations and assets in eight countries: Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.

Prior to that, Grab Vietnam had sent a message to the community of users, informing them about the successful deal. 

The ride hailing app market was first exploited five years ago, in December 2013, Easy Taxi, a well known app in Brazil at that time, came to Vietnam.

However, Easy Taxi came to Vietnam too soon, when the e-hailing and shared economy remained unfamiliar concepts for Vietnamese.  

In February 2014, Grab arrived in Vietnam. And in June 2014, Uber came. 

When the market heated up in 2015, when the competition between traditional taxi and Grab and Uber became stiff, Easy Taxi unexpectedly left the market.

The failure of Easy Taxi was attributed to a lack of money. Analysts commented that money will determine the result of the game.

Alexander Le, who was managing director of Easy Taxi in Vietnam, said in August 2014,  that Easy Taxi had spent nearly $1 million by that time just to run sale promotions.

Spending $1 million after nine months of operation, Easy Taxi was optimistic about its business in Vietnam. It planned to expand after it successfully called for $40 million worth of capital from the Russian Phenomen Ventures and German Tengelmann Ventures.

According to the General Department of Taxation, by October 2017, both Grab and Uber had taken a loss in Vietnam. Grab, which has VND20 billion in legal capital, had incurred a loss of VND1 billion.

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