Out of the 16 billion ride-hailing trips that were completed last year, over 70% were done in Asia, according to ABI Research’s newest study on mobility, making the continent the world’s largest ride-hailing market, with North America and Latin American coming next.
The report predicts that the global ride-hailing market will keep the growing momentum. The ride-hailing firms will cross 24 billion completed trips globally by end-2018. Shiv Patel, Research Analyst with the market advisory firm, and the author of the report, told KrASIA that ride-hailing is defined as on-demand transportation services that do not include trips completed by other services such as on-demand food delivery or parcel deliveries. These trips can be completed by using any form of motor-vehicle (private car, motorbike, tuk-tuk, auto-rickshaw, or private taxi), he explained.
Across Asia, consolidation has been rife. In China, the dominant player now is Didi Chuxing – itself the result of a merger between Tencent-backed Didi Dache and Alibaba-backed Kuaidi Dache – having bought out American competitor Uber. According to the report, it has around 90% market share in the ride-hailing sector.
As for Southeast Asia, Singapore-headquartered O2O company Grab has ambitiously ridden into eight countries, including emerging markets like Cambodia and Myanmar. The Didi- and Softbank-backed transportation powerhouse had bought out Uber’s Southeast Asian business earlier this year.
Its biggest competitor today is Indonesian unicorn Go-Jek which boasts investors like Chinese giants Tencent, Meituan and JD. Go-Jek has launched its services in Vietnam in August, and is kickstarting operations in Thailand and seeking a permit to operate in the Philippines.
Patel observed that in early 2017, Grab and Go-Jek had respectively owned 30% and 58% of the Indonesian ride-hailing market. However, by June 2018, Grab had already established 62% of the ride-hailing market. This is “a direct result of its aggressive investment and expansion in Indonesia over 2017, which was further helped by its acquisition of Uber’s business in the region in 2018,” he said in a statement.
This is in line with Grab’s claim that it has a 65% market share in Indonesia’s ride-hailing sector, which it said on August 29. Grab has, on multiple occasions, said that Indonesia is its largest market, and over the years, has pledged more than US$950 million to Indonesia and its startups. It has an R&D centre in Jakarta with more than 150 local engineers, it said.
In India, however, Uber is actually doing relatively well, with 46% market share in the world’s third-largest ride-hailing market. Its biggest competitor in India is Didi-backed local rival Ola Cabs, which will go on to fight Uber in the UK.
Patel also shared more on how the report determined the amount of market share that a company controls.
The market share was calculated by estimating the number of trips completed per quarter. We started by collecting data from ride-hailing companies across the globe, both from public sources and private disclosures from research interviews. We then calculated standard metrics for each region, using the vast amounts of data that we had collected. For further reference, these metrics were established and respected by the vendors themselves in a recent report of ours, a competitor assessment labelled ‘Global Ridesharing Vendors.’ We then used these metrics as well as further primary research to calculate trip numbers for each quarter in each region for each vendor.
We then reached out to ride-hailing vendors with our trip estimations finalised, for further guidance and benchmarking.
We calculated overall market shares by evaluating the percentage of trips completed by each company in that quarter in that region/country market.
These findings are from ABI Research’s Vehicle and Mobility Market Data report (paywall), as part of the company’s Smart Mobility & Automotive research service.
Editor: Ben Jiang