UBER AFTER COMING FROM CHINA TRADITIONAL NEW RIVAL TAXI
After Uber, a new formidable competitor for taxi drivers is about to land in China. It’s called Yongche – in Mandarin word that means ‘get easily’ – and is the leading operator of car sharing in that vast market, with bases already operating in 57 cities in China and Hong Kong, more than 2 million subscribers to the service via smartphones and 50,000 cars to customers.
The overseas expansion strategy launched by Herman Zhou, the 41 year-old CEO of Yongche, is starting with the activation of two hub for car rental with driver in New York and Los Angeles, but soon could include many other places in Virtually all those that represent a travel destination for the 98 million Chinese tourists who traveled abroad in 2013, an increase of 18% over the previous year.
The strength of the service offered by Yongche is the possibility for Chinese tourists to converse in their own language with the driver, without encountering difficulties in indicating the destination or making a payment.
In the report published by Automotive News China are cited some of the cities that should be included in the first phase of the internationalization of Yongche: Los Angeles, Boston, Singapore, Taipei, Tokyo, but also the European London and Frankfurt. ” We want to show the world that the competition between Uber and Yongche.com – Zhou said – is not that between a global operator and one ‘local’, but a comparison between two different business models. Uber can come to China, but we can expand and compete with them in the United States.”
The objectives of Yongche – reports Automotive News China – are really ‘important’, since it speaks to grow from the current 57 cities to 150 in 2015 and to reach 20 million subscribers.