In late April, two major players of the Russian market of taxi-aggregators — RuTaxi (owner of the brands “Lucky” and “Leader”) and Fasten (the brands “Saturn” and RedTaxi) United. This was stated by the representative of the Fasten and confirmed the partner of UFG Private Equity Arthur Akopyan. UFG Private Equity previously invested in Fasten, became an investor in the transaction and a major shareholder in the new company.
The details of the transaction were not disclosed, the parties are informed that under the agreement there was created a single joint structure, under which was United States two companies, technologies, software systems, and more. Private taxis from the newly formed company will be. The number connected to the service vehicles was not disclosed.
According to Akopyan, they have invested in the project is less than $100 million; it is now planned a new round of equity financing worth up to $200 million, “the Money will require the combined company to the exit in new cities, continued market consolidation, investments in improvement of mobile applications, marketing and subsidies to drivers,” said Akopian. He also did not rule out that some part of means will be directed on the development in Kazakhstan and other CIS countries, but stressed that first and foremost company focused on the Russian market.
“We understand that the Russian market is undergoing a major consolidation that will ultimately remain 2-3 major players. We see ourselves one of these players,” explained acopian.
As noted by the representative Fasten, the company expects that the merger will allow the new player to enter the world top 5 by number of orders a day from apps for travel on demand (on demand ride, ROD). For such services in addition to applications for taxi are also allows you to find travel companions (BlaBlaСar) or call private drivers (Uber). According to the representative Fasten, the largest on this indicator in the world are the Didi services (China), Uber (USA), Ola (India) and GrabTaxi (Singapore). Created as a result of the transaction the company will handle about 1.5 million orders a day, hopefully in the company.
As previously mentioned with reference to one of the market participants, through RuТaxi in 2016 was carried out about 1 million trips a day, using the Fasten — 200-300 thousand For comparison, in service “Maxim”, the figure was estimated to be 700-800 thousand trips. All of these services allow you to book the trip either by phone or through a mobile app. In contrast, “Yandex.Taxi,” Uber and Gett primarily focused on the travel order through the app. In “Yandex.Taxi” at the end of last year the average was performed 500 thousand visits a day to 150-170 thousand Uber, Gett — 150 thousand, were evaluated by the source .
According to the estimation of UBS, at the end of 2016, the capacity of the Russian market of commercial carting amounted to 526 billion rubles, and by 2021 will increase to 1,097 trillion rubles, the Share of online orders, according to analysts, in five years will increase to 80% from the current 20%. The market leader is “Yandex.Taxi,” which in 2017 will be, according to the forecast of UBS, to occupy 60% in the segment of online orders, and by 2021 — 55%. In April, UBS has issued a rating for ROD applications downloads from app stores Google Play and AppStore. The three leaders of this ranking looked like this: Uber (45,2% of all downloads of similar applications), Didi (17.7 percent) and GrabTaxi (4.7 per cent). From the Russian services, the top ten were only “Yandex.Taxi,” which took 10th place with a share of 1.8%.
As previously reported the newspaper “Kommersant”, “Yandex” are ready to sell to investors a share in “Yandex.Taxi” to attract $150-200 million we are Talking about a 12.5–16.7% of the company, the organizer of the deal were JP Morgan.
According to Raiffeisenbank analyst Sergei Libin, on the basis of only data on travel hard to assess the value of the company after the merger RuTaxi and Fasten. In its opinion, speech can go about “hundreds of millions of dollars” to reflect the latest estimates of global cab company Uber and Lyft at about ten proceeds. UBS had previously estimated the cost of “Yandex.Taxi” of $1.2 billion (68,34 bn). Based on the fact that, according to the UBS revenue “Yandex.Taxi” in 2017 will make 4,173 bn RUB., the company is valued with a factor of 16.
According to the partner, Target Global (the Fund was one of the investors in the Juno service, which was recently sold Gett) Alexander Frolov, the new company can cost 40-60 billion. But he noted that this is a rough estimate, as the company does not disclose its turnover and margins.
