Several news came last month from Yandex.Taxi, the taxi-hailing company which merged activities in Russia and some neighboring countries with Uber earlier this year.
The company bought the software assets of a Moscow-based company, Nowtaxi. The software supports the accounting of operations with affiliated drivers and provides related analytics.
Formally, the software assets, not the company, have been acquired, but the Nowtaxi team will be integrated to Yandex.Taxi, a company executive told business daily Vedomosti.
Yandex.Taxi also acquired Partiya Edy (‘The Party of Food’), a St.Petersburg startup that delivers ready-to-cook fresh food in St. Petersburg, Moscow and the surrounding areas. As reported by local online business news site DP.ru, Yandex.Taxi acquired a 83.3% stake for an undisclosed amount, with an option to acquire the remaining 16.7% stake in the forthcoming years.
While the startup will continue operating autonomously, its integration with Yandex.Taxi will allow it to develop “at a new level,” making its service “available to millions of people,” a Yandex.Taxi executive stated.
Partiya Edy was created in 2014. Expecting to generate some 200 million rubles (around $3 million) in turnover this year, the startup plans to expand to new regions after it “consolidates [its] leadership in Moscow and St. Petersburg,” DP.ru quoted its co-founder and general manager Mikhail Peregudin as saying.
What the Partiya Edy box contains and how it is prepared
In a separate move, Yandex, the mother company of Yandex.Taxi, announced the full acquisition of Edadeal.ru (‘Food Deal’), a startup that offers cashback to consumers buying food and other items in retail outlets. This startup was launched in 2012 by Nataliya Shagarina, a former product manager at Yandex, who sold a 10% stake to the search giant in 2015. Yandex acquired the remaining stake through the latest transaction. [The amount of the deal was not immediately disclosed, but a Yandex report to the SEC later indicated that Yandex had paid 233 million rubles, or around $3.5 million, to acquire the 90% stake – editor’s note based on RBC report, April 2019].
Market leadership
Following the merger of local activities with Uber, Yandex.Taxi is now the clear leader on the Russian taxi-hailing market. It controls around 50% of this market, according to a UBS report released in September and cited by Vedomosti.
Since the launch of Yandex.Taxi in 2011, over 900,000 drivers connected to the platform, completing 1 billion rides, the company’s press service told East-West Digital News. (This number includes the rides ordered through the Uber app after the merge in February 2018.)
In Q3 2018, according to Yandex’s latest financial report, “the number of rides in the taxi segment (including Uber rides) grew 131% year-on-year compared with Q3 2017.”
The joint company of Yandex.Taxi and Uber also operates in 11 countries beyond Russia, including Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Moldova, the three Baltic states, and Serbia. Launch is scheduled for this month in Finland, too.
Service localization did not go without issues, from marketing translations, to cartographic challenges, to accusations of unlawful data transfers to Russia, as reported by VC.RU and RBC.
Meanwhile, Uber continues operating under its own brand in some of these countries, notably the Baltic states, competing there with Yandex.Taxi.
The company is now held approximately 59.3% by NASDAQ-listed Yandex, 36.9% by Uber, and 3.8% by employees of the group. Uber and Yandex invested as much as $225 million and $100 million in cash, respectively, in the combined company, with a valuation exceeding $3.8 billion on a post money basis.
Among Yandex.Taxi’s competitors are Gett and Citymobil. The latter, which is backed by Mail.Ru Group and its ally MegaFon, has seen its market share grow from about 1% in late 2017 to some 4% recently, noted the UBS analysts.
Yandex.Taxi’s self-driving car service is being experimented in Skolkovo, the international tech hub under completion on the outskirts of Moscow.
On the food delivery market, where it competes with Mail.Ru Group, Mitsui and other players, Yandex.Taxi has not reached, for the moment, a predominant position.
In November last year, the company acquired Foodfox for a reported $8.4 million amount. In January 2018, Yandex.Taxi and UberEats launched a dedicated subsidiary to invest and operate on this market.
Quoted by DP.ru, Nikolai Davydov, a prominent Russian investor, believes the company will follow the same strategy as on the taxi-hailing market with investments aimed at becoming or consolidating a leading position.
A recent RBC report has estimated the Russian food delivery market at around 100 billion rubles this year (approximately $1.5 billion rubles at the current exchange rate).
Sources: Yandex press service, Delovoy Peterburg, RBC, Rusbase, The Bell, Vedomosti
