The key facts

  • A Chinese company plans to bring 5,000 vehicles to Uzbekistan's taxi market and launch an app — Mamanbiy Omarov
  • On October 11, Yandex Go went down due to damage to a data center in Russia during a drone attack
  • Orders on Uklon grew 2–3 times, on MyTaxi 15 times (October 11–13)

A new player in the taxi market

A Chinese company plans to enter Uzbekistan's taxi market. First Deputy Minister of Transport Mamanbiy Omarov told Spot about this in an interview on October 16. According to him, the company intends to bring 5,000 vehicles to the market and launch its own app. Answering a correspondent's question, he clarified that this will be a new player that expects to launch soon.

Yandex Go outage and growth in competitors' orders

The news came against the backdrop of a recent outage of Yandex Go services. On October 11, many residents of Uzbekistan could not hail a car, which caused them to be late and change their plans. The cause was an emergency shutdown of the company's data center in Russia, which was damaged as a result of a drone attack. Since Yandex services use a shared distributed infrastructure, the accident affected the operation of the apps in other countries as well, including Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.

Shift of orders to competitors

After the outage, the number of orders on Uklon from October 11 to 13 grew 2–3 times compared to average figures for comparable days, and on MyTaxi — 15 times.

Context

Spot previously examined which taxi-hailing services operate in Uzbekistan, how much a ride costs in each of them, and whether a car can still be ordered by phone. The outlet also reported that the Competition Committee will examine taxi services for price gouging.