Director of taxi ordering service "Maxim": "The influx of people wishing to earn money by driving has increased. The creator of the taxi "Maxim" started on a homemade all-terrain vehicle to the Arctic Ocean Heroes of rbk taxi maxim

05:08 First money and work as a corpse truck

08:00 Paging and the foundation of the future business

11:33 The place where it all began

17:00 Access to other cities

20:17 Creating your own unique car

25:42 Offers from competitors

Video: RBC

The round orphan Maxim Belonogov failed with the paging business, but created a taxi aggregator. The turnover of his company "Maxim" exceeds 5 billion rubles, more than 500 thousand taxi drivers cooperate with it throughout Russia, Iran and Italy

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“I never worked for someone, I always undertook,” says Maxim Belonogov, co-founder of the Maxim taxi aggregator. As a high school student, he resold newspapers and worked part-time on a "body truck" in a special team at the emergency hospital, which took away the bodies of the dead. Employees periodically went on a binge, and the student replaced them.

At the age of 16, Maxim's mother died, and he was left an orphan. I bought a Pentium computer and a printer with the survivor's allowance. Together with a classmate and future partner Oleg Shlepanov, he downloaded abstracts in Fidonet, printed them out and sold them to students. Then he traded telephones and gas equipment for cars, worked as a loader. At 22, the entrepreneur got married, had a daughter, and had to feed his family.

Maxim Belonogov created his first serious business in Shadrinsk, a small town 140 km from Kurgan. But not on the first, but on the second attempt, he says in an interview with RBC. First, the entrepreneur, together with Oleg Shlepanov, rented an office, installed a transmitter, acquired a franchise from Mobil Telecom and began paging. This business died quickly and unexpectedly when marketed mobile communications mobile operators came out. At that time, eight operators worked for Belonogov, and he decided to organize a taxi service. I took a radio station and an antenna from a taxi driver friend, installed the equipment and tried to find taxi drivers. Entrepreneurs rented a multichannel phone number - during rush hour they could be reached by phone, but not always to competitors. “The drivers themselves began to pull themselves up, because they knew that they would have a job,” recalls Belonogov.

There is hardly a person in Birobidzhan who has not at least once resorted to the services of the Maxim taxi call service. The service is convenient, especially if you use the application for smartphones.

Now it is the largest IT company in the field of passenger transportation in Russia, its turnover is more than Yandex.Taxi, Uber and Gett, and the company itself is estimated at $100 million.

In the team of our project, no one wondered how Maxim was created. There were thoughts that most likely some large businessmen from Moscow simply decided to monopolize the taxi market and become a dominant in this area.

To our surprise, "Maxim" turned out to be the success story of one very simple and stubborn Russian guy from the provincial Shadrinsk near Kurgan, who, in terms of his starting opportunities for young people, is very similar to Birobidzhan.

Maxim Belonogov - the creator of the taxi "Maxim" - grew up in a frankly poor family. The father died early. Mother stretched as best she could, she was very sick. Already at school, Maxim traded newspapers on the street, and also collected signatures for the LDPR party for money.

In the 11th grade, he worked part-time in a local ambulance - they took the corpses of dead people from their homes and took them to the morgue. The ambulance staff drank mercilessly, and often there was no one to go on shift. He worked illegally by verbal agreement with a doctor friend. Maxim himself admits that he often took tips for the removal of bodies.

After high school, he went to college. On the day he wrote the exam essay, his mother died. Maxim stayed with his older brother.

They bought a computer for the survivor's allowance, began to print abstracts from the Internet and sell them to students.

In the second year of high school, he married, a child was born in the family. I had to work harder: as a loader at night, he sold gas equipment and telephones. Later, my friend and I decided to organize a paging company in Shadrinsk. Things went well, but paging was killed by cellular communications.

The remaining equipment was decided to be used to create a taxi. We found a room in one of the basements, planted several operators. They took a radio station from friends to communicate with the drivers.

Compared to competitors, paging equipment made it possible to organize multi-channel dialing - it was easier for customers to get to the operator, there were enough free lines, it was possible to call a taxi faster. The customers liked it and the business began to grow.

A little later, the company moved to a larger office apartment, there were 20 operators, they worked in a small room in violation of all norms labor law. Then we went from Shadrinsk to Kurgan, it was there that the service acquired its name "Maxim" and a logo with red and black checkers. Invented, by the way, over a glass of beer with friends somewhere in the apartment.

Over time, we decided to digitize the process of accepting orders. I found an IT specialist from the local Sberbank and wrote a simple program for recording calls and calculating travel time.

In 2007, they tried to develop an application for smartphones, but it did not work. We will return to the development of this product later. Then we realized that we needed to go beyond the borders of Kurgan, the next office was opened in Tyumen.

Then the crisis hit, many people lost their jobs and began to taxi to pay for cars bought on credit. Then the service blossomed. As Belonogov himself says: “I got the impression that one half of the city was thumping, and the other half was carrying it, then they changed places.”

Then we went to other cities and to the capital. Success and money came. "Maxim" has become what we know it, with a turnover of 10 million rubles a day.

As Maxim Belonogov notes, his first good car He bought a Toyota Camry from the salon only 4 years after the launch of the project - all available funds were first invested in the business. Business first, luxury later.

On the way to success, a young man always worked part-time somewhere, did something to break out of poverty, step up a step. The entrepreneur came to the conclusion that there is no dirty or bad work. Any work that is not related to crime and violence against people, in his opinion, is worthy to be performed.

The businessman says that he was equally happy when he took out the corpses in an ambulance for a small fee, and now, when Maxim plans to enter the markets of Iran, Iraq and Syria.

Belonogov advises young people not to be afraid of anything, but to push against the horn and go to the end, then you can definitely reach the goal. Success doesn't come right away. It took him 13 years to do it.

The businessman claims that he never contacted the state and relied only on himself. Then he recalls that he tried to become a deputy of the Kurgan City Duma in order to resolve the issue of acquiring premises for an office. But he didn't succeed. Since then, he prefers not to deal with politics or with the authorities.

It turns out rather the opposite, in the various cities where Maxim came, officials, lobbying the interests of their friends from local transport companies, raised a storm and demanded that the service be banned. The company has been sued a lot.

Recently "Maxim" has created a specialized fund to help clients injured in road accidents. Belonogov dreams of developing tourism in the Yamal tundra and even developed a special all-terrain vehicle "Burlak" for this.

The head office of the company is still located in Kurgan. This is extremely surprising for Moscow businessmen who come to the city for negotiations. They cannot understand why Belonogov continues to sit in a provincial, by Moscow standards, hole. He smiles and replies that everything suits him and that in a small Kurgan there is everything necessary for his business.

The founder of the Maxim taxi, 39-year-old Maxim Belonogov, at the age of 15, took corpses to a hospital in Kurgan, campaigned for the Liberal Democratic Party, and bought cigarettes with the proceeds. He was orphaned at 16 when his mother died, his father having passed away seven years earlier. With the allowance received after the death of his mother, Belonogov bought a computer with a Pentium 100 processor and a printer to download abstracts, print and sell. So he earned the first money together with a classmate in Kurgan state university Oleg Shlepanov. With the proceeds, the partners bought rechargeable batteries and corded telephones and sold them to the Kurgan wholesale market, as well as retail to the radio departments in various stores. In parallel, they were engaged in the sale of gas equipment. He used a garage as a warehouse, which Belonogov inherited from his father-in-law. Once the warehouse was robbed and burned, and friends lost goods worth 50,000 rubles. VAZ-2108 could then be bought for 35,000 rubles. Then federal networks like Eldorado entered the city and it became unprofitable to sell radio products.

The next business was the paging company Mobil Telecom, launched under a franchise in Shadrinsk, Kurgan Region. Belonogov did not have time to make money on this business - a year later, in 2002, appeared Cell phones and pagers are a thing of the past. In 2003, Belonogov, using the numbers left over from the paging business, launched the Maxim taxi - they advertised in Shadrinsk: "A driver with a personal car is required." There were many retired soldiers in the city who responded to the ad. Then the company was called first "Mobil Telecom", and then "Shadrinsk".

In February 2004, Belonogov, Shlepanov, and the current general director of the company, Anton Klementyev, took out a loan of 150,000 rubles from a bank, bought an office automatic telephone exchange, as well as several telephone sets, hired an operator, put an antenna on the roof and began working in Kurgan. The company was named "Maxim".

In Kurgan, the partners used Shlepanov's home number. They did not want to set up an office in his apartment, so they rented a basement of 15 square meters in a neighboring house and stretched a telephone cord there from the window of the apartment over the roofs.

“We never thought about investments: when we started, we didn’t know such words,” Belonogov recalls the launch of the Maxim service.

The company has never attracted investments, developed exclusively on own funds- launched a taxi in several cities, and the money earned was reinvested in the opening of the service in new cities. In the first six years, the Maxim taxi service was opened in four cities, in 2010-in 17 cities, then annually connected several dozen cities. Now "Maxim" works in 450 cities of Russia and 16 countries. And the founders of the company- Belonogov and Shlepanov - remain its owners (they own 50% of the business).

Today, customers around the world order a taxi "Maxim" more than 1 million times a day, and the company employs more than 6,000 employees. Revenue in 2018, according to Belonogov, amounted to 5 billion rubles, net profit- 1.5 billion rubles - these are funds earned on a 10% commission on the cost of each order. At the same time, Russia accounts for 75% of business.

The Taxsee contact center, which grew out of a dispatch service in Shadrinsk, is now one of the largest in Russia. Before the emergence of such centers, the demand for taxis was higher than the supply: taxi companies did not want to carry people cheaply, and taxi booking services attracted ordinary drivers who were ready to carry passengers for a lower price.

International expansion and sanctions

By 2017, Maxim was represented in almost all cities of Russia thanks to the launch of the franchise. “We guaranteed the franchisees that we would not open in those settlements where they went,” says Belonogov. For him, first of all, brand recognition is important, so the company takes the minimum deductions - 1% of the trip.

On a lump-sum fee (a one-time fee for a franchise buyer), which is 50,000-100,000 rubles, the service does not earn anything, since it transfers equipment to the franchisee for this amount.

Then, in 2017, Belonogov decided to enter a new market, "where there are a lot of people, but no investment." “Back then, we had already gone to Georgia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, but for some reason we didn’t believe in far abroad,” Belonogov recalls.

In the fall of 2017, Maxim was launched in Iran and six months later came under sanctions. “In Iran, we acted like Yandex – we immediately opened in 70 cities,” says Belonogov. Some cities have grown, others have not. In total, the businessman spent about 800 million rubles to launch in Iran.

In the spring of 2018, the application was unavailable for some time in App Store due to US sanctions against Iran. Officially the App Store in Iran is blocked, but locals download applications from the national market for iOS, which the American corporation does not block so as not to harm its business, Cnews wrote.

In January 2019, Apple removed the company's Taxsee Driver app from the App Store for about a month. In order to resolve the conflict with the IT corporation, Maxim hired an American lawyer. After all the procedures, Apple returned the applications to the store and confirmed that they comply with the rules.

Currently, an independent Iranian company operates in Iran under the Maxim brand. It is growing because there are no American investments in the country, there is no Uber and Yandex.Taxi, says Belonogov. Unexpectedly, the service began to develop quickly also in Malaysia and Indonesia: “We did not believe in these regions, as there are strong competitors.”

The company's business is growing annually by 20-30%, and the entrepreneur is not afraid of competition: "Even if they crush me in Russia, I have Indonesia, Malaysia and other countries."

Refuse Gett

In September 2016, Gett founder Dave Weiser and Chief Operating Officer company Alexander Artemyev flew to Kurgan to meet with the founders of the Maxim service. Gett wanted to buy a company that could help him enter the regions, explains the motivation of Belonogov's competitors. “We even went to Israel to the Gett office to see how everything works there. We were not impressed with their contact center -ours is more powerful and bigger,” he recalls.

In addition to applications and call centers, the IT infrastructure of the Maxim service includes its own data centers in Russia and Germany, as well as a long-distance telecom operator.

Over the past four years, Belonogov has received offers to buy the business from almost all competitors. Gett in 2016 estimated "Maxim" at $80 million (then 5 billion rubles). Belonogov was interested in trying to develop a business together. “If we had made a deal then, we would have given Gett a good push,”- he thinks. But his partner was against the union.

After that, Belonogov discussed a merger with Yandex, which valued the service at $100 million, with Uber, which was willing to pay $150 million, and Mail.Ru Group, which offered $200 million, including an option. Representatives of Gett, Yandex and Mail.Ru Group declined to comment on this information. Uber did not respond to Forbes' request.

In 2015 and 2016, taxi services from Moscow actively moved to the regions and faced competition from Maxim, which prompted them to start merger talks, argues Belonogov.

But the businessman refused all offers: he believes that with the investment, the service will no longer belong to him. “Investors will push you into an IPO, and then you will be nervous about the fact that the stock is falling or rising - this is all unrelated to normal production process", - argues Belonogov.

Taxi for billions

Negotiations with competitors made it possible to understand how much the Maxim business costs. “They evaluated me based on my prospects and how much I earn. But Yandex.Taxi has 2 million trips, it is valued at $8 billion, and me with 1 million trips a day -only $200 million,” complains Belonogov.

In January 2018, the number of trips of the combined company Yandex.Taxi and Uber in Russia and nearby countries amounted to 62 million, said Greg Abovsky, COO of Yandex, during one of the conference calls. Since then, Yandex has not released new data.

The Yandex.Taxi valuation is made up of more than just the number of trips, says Maxim Medvedev, managing partner of the AddVenture fund. It is incorrect to compare services on this indicator, he considers. Yandex.Taxi is better represented in Moscow, where average check, and "Maxim" - in the regions, he says. In addition, the Yandex.Taxi business is growing exponentially from year to year, so now the number of their trips may be greater, Medvedev notes. “Yandex also has a food delivery service, the company is developing unmanned vehicle technologies,” he emphasizes.

Unmanned technologies are being developed not only by Yandex, but also by Google, Kamaz, Uber, Volkswagen and other companies, says Belonogov. “If the technology is truly available, then I can buy it and implement it,” he retorts.

In 2010, entrepreneur Travis Kalanick launched a sensational Uber service, which was already estimated at $18.2 billion in 2014 and allowed Kalanick to get into the top 400 richest Americans according to Forbes with a capital of $6 billion. Uber “overheated” this market, Belonogov is sure: those who have never invested in a taxi, started doing it. For example, in May 2016, a competitor to Uber-Chinese taxi service Didi-Apple has invested $1 billion

“Kalanick drew the attention of investors to this market, but they will never get their money back,”- believes Belonogov. After the IPO in 2019, the value of Uber, which was estimated at $120 billion, fell by half, and the capitalization of the taxi service Lyft, which was estimated at $24 billion, is now about $12.8 billion.

“This is a market that is now overheated all over the world,”-Medvedev from AddVenture agrees. A large number of Internet companies have poured a lot of money into this sector in order to form new players, he adds. The advantage of these platforms, Medvedev continues, is that they increase the utilization of transport use and make travel cheaper. Investors who invested in the early stages were able to earn, while those who entered in the last rounds remained with the same money or could lose it, depending on the structure of investments, Medvedev said.

Serial Entrepreneur

The taxi business could have grown faster, but Belonogov scattered his efforts by starting several more spin-off businesses. “Now I treat these businesses as a misunderstanding,” he admits.

In 2012, Belonogov bought an office building on Radionova Street in Kurgan, in one of the parts of which was the Slavyanka cake factory. “Things were bad for her, but she worked,” says Belonogov. The businessman decided to support her and in 2014 invested about 600 million rubles in the enterprise. The factory began to grow and now brings in about 40 million profits per year. It is cost-effective, but the return on investment for such businesses- 10-15 years old, emphasizes the businessman.

Another non-core project -aviation - began with the Kurgan aviation club, in which Belonogov and Shlepanov trained to fly. The partners decided to save him: in 2011, they agreed to lease the launched Lagovushka airfield for 49 years. They created a flight center on the basis of the airfield, then bought the dying regional airline SIBIA, paid off its debts, and also increased the fleet to 30 aircraft and two helicopters. The total investment amounted to approximately 300 million rubles, 40 million of which went to the purchase of SIBIA.

Now Belonogov participates in tenders for patrolling and protecting forests, mainly in the Kurgan, Sverdlovsk, Tyumen regions and the Khanty-Mansiysk autonomous region. The business became profitable and brought Belonogov for 9 months of 2019 about 37 million rubles of net profit.

In addition, in 2005 Belonogov opened a travel agency, 13 branches of which had to be closed in 2008 due to the crisis. The only non-core project "for the soul" Maxim calls the company "Makarov's all-terrain vehicles" for the production of all-terrain vehicles"Burlak", which he opened in 2018. “I deliberately went to play cars,” the businessman laughs. He expected to spend 20-30 million rubles on this project, but the costs have already exceeded 100 million rubles, but Belonogov is satisfied. Even during the pilot production, the company sold 11 all-terrain vehicles, each costing 6.5-10 million rubles, depending on the configuration. All-terrain vehicles are assembled by specialists in Yekaterinburg, but if the project continues to grow, the company will move to Kurgan, where "labor is cheaper." According to SPARK-Interfax, in 2018, the revenue of Makarov's ATVs amounted to 26 million rubles, and net profit - 14.8 million rubles. Next year, Belonogov plans that Makarov's ATVs will pay off.

“When we got a taxi, we believed in ourselves, we thought that we were serial entrepreneurs,” the entrepreneur recalls. But when the Maxim company entered Iran, Belonogov realized that the competitors Tappsi and Snapp managed to overtake them while he was developing a confectionery factory. "How more businesses I opened it, the more I understood that it was not necessary to spray, ”he admits.

One of the largest Russian online services for ordering a taxi "Maxim" has started working in Indonesia. In the new market, the company is betting on motorcycle taxis: motorcycles account for 75% of all transportation in the country. Indonesia is a convenient market for expansion, experts say, there are many Russian tourists already familiar with the brand.

Taxi service "Maxim" began to work in the Indonesian capital Jakarta, a representative of the company told Kommersant. City residents can order taxis and motorcycles from service partners - taxi companies and individual carriers - in the application and on the website. The difference between the service in Indonesia was the introduction of the "Motorcycle" tariff. In the country, motorcycles account for 75% of traffic, this is the easiest and fastest way to get from point A to point B, especially in metropolitan areas, the company says. According to the director of regional development"Maxima" by Alexei Markin, among the ten countries where the service operates, is the first such experience.

Indonesia is one of the largest countries in the world in terms of population: more than 9 million people live in Jakarta alone, and more than 260 million in the whole country. “Internet and mobile services are developed here, people actively use applications, including ordering transport. This is a huge market, - explain the logic of expansion in Maxim. - The climate allows residents not to spend money on cars, but to travel on motorcycles and mopeds, public transport is poorly developed. Plus, motorcycles solve the problem of traffic jams and are especially relevant in megacities.”

The Maxim service was founded in 2003 by Maxim Belonogov. According to its own data, the company is owned by Mr. Belonogov and his partner Oleg Shlepanov (both have 50% each). The service is present in 275 cities of Russia and more than 340 cities of the world, the annual turnover in 2016 is 6 billion rubles. In addition to the home market, "Maxim" operates in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Italy, Kyrgyzstan. Preparations are also underway for a launch in Chile, the company said. In addition, the service plans to expand to other markets in Europe, Asia, the Middle and Far East, South America.

The amount of investment in the Indonesian market, where a number of taxi aggregators already operate, is not disclosed in Maxim. “The experience of working in Jakarta will help to better understand the needs of the Indonesian market and optimize the service. Soon it is planned to start work in other cities of the country,” says a service representative. At the launch stage, "Maxim" will not charge a commission from partners, but "as the position in the market strengthens," the conditions will be revised, the company specifies. Now the average size of the service commission is 10%, in different cities its size is different. We are talking about a resort popular among Russians who have a well-known brand, says Alexander Merzlikin, founder of the Guru.Taxi marketplace. “Perhaps, after a successful pilot, we will see Maxim on motorcycles in Russian cities,” he admits.

Other Russian online services for ordering a taxi are also actively entering foreign markets. Thus, Yandex.Taxi is already operating in neighboring countries - Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Moldova, Uzbekistan, Estonia, as well as in Serbia, and the Siberian aggregator inDriver, which has only recently entered the Moscow market, in May 2018, as Kommersant reported, began international expansion from Mexico.

Roman Rozhkov

Yandex.Taxi and Uber switched to a single IT platform

conjuncture

The united company Yandex.Taxi and Uber has completed the transfer of drivers in all cities of Russia to a single platform for working with orders, the company told Kommersant. The last cities were Moscow and St. Petersburg. Thanks to this, drivers will be able to receive orders from users of both Uber and Yandex.Taxi. “There will be more cars available for call, and they will arrive at customers faster, and drivers will have less idle mileage. This will increase the reliability and quality of service in general,” the company expects. The unified platform operates on the basis of the Taximeter driver application developed by Yandex. It includes a navigator, maps and a directory of organizations.

In just a few years, mobile technology has revolutionized the taxi niche, intensifying competition to the breaking point. This greatly facilitated the life of passengers: the time of car delivery was reduced several times, trips became much cheaper.

Taxi market size

The democratization of taxi prices led to the growth of the market, which by 2015 amounted to $ 9 billion (this is a November estimate of the analytical company Merku). Oksana Serebryakova, board member of the Taxi Dispatch Services Association, does not agree with this figure. According to her calculations, the market size is no more than $6 billion, or about 420 billion in rubles. Due to the crisis, the number of orders for different carriers has fallen by 40-50%, Serebryakova is convinced, and this year it will definitely not grow.

“The size of the market is very difficult to calculate,” admits Mikhail Vinogradov, founder of Taxilet. - In our calculations, we are guided by 1 trip per day for 10 residents of million-plus cities. That is, in Moscow we can talk about a million movements per day.”

None of the players wants to share data about their volumes. The market for the most part consists of illegal and unrecorded traffic and participants. From our experience in the regions, we have derived a formula: usually the daily traffic volume is 10% of the city's population. The average check depends on the standard of living and the presence of a network operator in the city (a large network of dispatchers - ed.). In millionaires it is 100-150 rubles, in small towns - 60-80 rubles. Therefore, we take 15 million trips around the country per day, multiply them by 100 rubles of the average check and get 1.5 billion rubles of turnover per day. Approximately 20% of this amount is received by dispatchers, approximately 1% - by taxi software providers. These are very rough numbers, but they can serve as a basis for understanding a market that cannot be accurately estimated.

The founder of the Gett taxi service, Shahar Waiser, predicted that in the next 3-4 years the Russian taxi market will grow to $15-20 billion, and this will happen due to online services. Another market participant is convinced that this figure does not reflect the current realities and was announced by Gett specifically for investors to show the potential and attract the next round.

And the head of Cat Taxi, Gennady Kotov, considers it incorrect to evaluate the Russian taxi market in dollars due to exchange rate fluctuations and the fact that the cost of transportation is absolutely not tied to the currency. At the same time, he notes that for Gett and Uber, the fall of the ruble is extremely beneficial: external investments give them additional features for dumping price Russia |

Number of taxi drivers

In October 2015, more than 180,000 taxis were officially operating in Russia (Rusbase's interlocutors suggest that this figure covers only legal drivers). In Moscow alone, according to the city's transport department, there are about 55,000 licensed taxi drivers. Moreover, many drivers cooperate with several services at once.

According to the founder of "Taxilet" Mikhail Vinogradov, about 100,000 more taxis operate in the capital without licenses, operating under charter agreements. this is when the aggregator instructs a private driver to transport a passenger for money (moreover, the contract can be oral)- and that's not counting those who come from the region. “The number of illegal taxis, depending on the situation in the country, may tend to the number of all cars,” says Vitaly Makhinov, founder of the Russian Taxi Exchange.

Aggregators vs. classic taxis

There are two groups of players in the taxi market: taxi companies with their own fleet and taxi service aggregators. The latter enter into agreements with taxi companies (Yandex.Taxi) or with private drivers registered as individual entrepreneurs (Uber, Gett, Maxim, Leader, Saturn). According to some estimates, taxi services account for more than half of taxi traffic in Moscow.

There are no more than a thousand full-fledged taxi companies with their own fleet and economic base per country. As for aggregators, they are divided into pure online (without an office and a dispatcher - Gett, Uber, Yandex Taxi, etc.) and traditional dispatchers that have their own mobile applications (Maxim and others).

Aggregators consider themselves IT companies that help the driver and passenger find each other. Formally, they do not fall under the law "On Taxi" - it simply does not contain the concepts of "dispatching taxi service" or "information service". Traditional carriers accuse them of unfair competition: aggregators are not responsible for traffic accidents, passenger safety, late arrivals at the airport, and technical serviceability of the car. In addition, having already entered the database of the information service, the driver can close the IP in order not to pay taxes.

Yaroslav Shcherbinin,

Chairman of the Interregional Trade Union "Taxi Driver"

Applications create conditions for illegal activities by attracting illegal carriers. This is one of the main components of their success. There is no accounting and deduction of taxes for working drivers, there are no requirements for ensuring safety, responsibility to the passenger in case of emergency. Consumers are attracted by the price at the level of the cost of the trip. Most drivers do not understand the unprofitability of this type of activity and are drawn into this pyramid. It is difficult for traditional players to compete in such conditions.

Mikhail Vinogradov,

founder of taxi

Of course, the old taxi owners are offended. For decades they plowed, took risks, beat them, burned their cars, waited at the entrance, extorted money, choked them with taxes. They survived, endured it all, became leaders. And now their guys in sneakers are squeezing. But no matter how much the archers strike, they cannot oppose the submachine gunners.

Hidden Leaders

The media field is dominated by well-known metropolitan aggregators - Yandex.Taxi, Gett and Uber. But on a national scale, the top three federal control rooms are confidently leading - Rutaxi, Saturn and Maxim. They prefer to stay in the background, do not disclose indicators and practically do not communicate with journalists.

“These are the real market leaders, probably even the world ones,” says Mikhail Vinogradov. “In fact, these are Russian Ubers, moreover, they are efficient and live without third-party investments.” The real masters of the market so far remain the gray cardinals in the regions, agrees the head of Cat Taxi Gennady Kotov. According to him, there is an abyss between the federal troika and the rest of the market participants. According to rough estimates, in total Rutaxi, Saturn and Maxim make about 4 million transportations per day. Their shares in this volume are 40%, 35% and 25% respectively.

So they are not at all afraid of competition with well-known metropolitan services. Yandex.Taxi, Gett and Uber occupy an absolutely microscopic share of the Russian market, - a representative of one federal network shares on condition of anonymity. “Each of us makes more trips individually than all of us put together.”

Apps don't rule

According to experts, in Moscow the share of ordering a taxi through applications reaches 65-70% (including small players), in St. Petersburg - no more than 30%, in million-plus cities - no more than 8%, and in the outback - no more than 3%. The fact is that in the regions the population has much fewer smartphones than it seems from Moscow.

In addition, navigation is bad in the regions: Mobile Internet lame in settlements with a population of less than 200 thousand. This greatly complicates the work of applications - the driver simply cannot find the passenger. Taxi drivers in small towns work the old fashioned way, with walkie-talkies. And Maxim, Rutaxi and Saturn thrive thanks to well-developed dispatching and integration with telephony.

To create a full-fledged online service in the regions, you need to thoroughly invest in local cartography in order to refine maps countryside and improve navigation capabilities, says Oksana Serebryakova, member of the board of the Association of Taxi Dispatch Services. Now taxi services from the outback rely on local drivers who are well versed in their native lands. According to the head of Cat Taxi Gennady Kotov, online does not come to the outback not because of cartography, but because local taxis are in no hurry to make applications until a strong competitor (networker) comes along.

Player Portraits

And now it's time to talk a little about the leaders of the online taxi market. If you think that we have undeservedly forgotten someone, add to the list in the comments.

All-Russian leaders

Rutaxi- mobile app and a system for ordering a taxi service "Lucky" and "Leader". This federal network of dispatching offices operates in 90 cities of Russia and 3 cities of Kazakhstan (Almaty, Astana, Karaganda). According to experts, Rutaxi accounts for about 1.6 million transportations per day - this is the largest player in the Russian market. The network cooperates with both private taxi drivers and taxi companies, relieving them of the need to maintain their own dispatchers. The application for ordering a taxi from a Rutaxi smartphone, according to them, was launched in 2011. The percentage of the commission and the number of cars "Rutaxi" does not advertise.

In each city, the “Leader” has separate legal entities registered, their type of activity is formulated as “data processing”. According to the Unified State Register of Legal Entities, the founder of almost all divisions of the network (including Lider LLC and Vezet LLC) is Ufa businessman Vitaly Bezrukov (in some places together with partners). Apparently, it was he who founded the Leader taxi service in 2003. Bezrukov has not yet appeared in the field of view of the media. In 2012, he participated in the II All-Russian Congress of Taxi Drivers. His photo can be seen on the website of the Ufa Aviation Club:

"Saturn"

Entrepreneur Evgeny Lvov launched the Saturn taxi service in the city of Timashevsk (Krasnodar Territory) in 1998. Today the company has grown into a federal taxi network that operates in 43 cities across the country. Interlocutors of Rusbase calculated that it makes about 1.4 million shipments per day. Like its competitors, Saturn has a legal entity registered in every city, and Evgeny Lvov himself owns almost all of them. In 2012, the network launched the TapTaxi mobile application for ordering a car without the participation of a dispatcher.

In 2015, Evgeny Lvov, together with partners, launched the Fasten taxi app in the United States, which will compete with Uber itself. In September, the project was launched in Boston, and this year it will appear in Russia. Knowledgeable people they say that the founders of the project have very big plans that will significantly affect the taxi market.

The history of the company began in 2003 with a small taxi service in the city of Shadrinsk (Kurgan region). The service was launched by entrepreneur Maxim Belonogov.

Maxim Belonogov

Now the company operates in 114 cities of Russia and 11 more cities in Ukraine (Mariupol, Kharkov), Kazakhstan (Aktobe, Astana, Petropavlovsk, Uralsk), Georgia (Batumi, Tbilisi, Kutaisi, Rustavi) and Bulgaria (Sofia). Infoservice LLC (legal entity Maxim) makes about one million shipments per day. Judging by the data of the Unified State Register of Legal Entities, in each city, Maxim has registered entity. The founders of the regional divisions are Maxim Belonogov and Oleg Shlepanov.

"Maxim" works with private drivers, from whom it takes a commission of 10%. They work with a proprietary application and a dispatch service (90% of orders are received by phone). The average check for a trip in the network is 100 rubles. The company earns 10 million rubles a day, Sekret Firmy calculated in April. In 2011, the company spun off additional direction- service for dispatching taxi companies Taxsee.

"Maxim" is the leader in the number of cities, but in many of them it is present only nominally, clarifies a critical Rusbase source.

Capital Leaders

Taxi service from Yandex entered the market in 2011. It was the initiative of the son of the founder of the corporation, Lev Volozh. The service works only with taxi companies - now Yandex.Taxi has 450 partners, which unite 30 thousand cars. In April 2015, they were processing 60,000 orders per day. Current estimates range from 100,000 to 200,000 trips per day. Today the service is available in 14 cities - Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Krasnodar, Sochi, Vladikavkaz, Novosibirsk, Omsk, Perm, Samara, Tula and Voronezh. Since 2016, Yandex.Taxi has been a separate company within the holding. CEO Tigran Khudaverdyan became Yandex.Taxi, who has been in charge of the service since 2014, and before that he was in charge of Yandex's mobile products.

Tigran Khudaverdyan

You can pay for the trip in cash or bank card. The commission for taxi companies is 11% + VAT, the average check for a trip in Moscow is 533 rubles. The aggregator also offers the market a professional software package for taxi services "Yandex. Taximeter", which includes a program for taxi companies and a mobile application for drivers. As stated on the product website, 1,000 companies and 200,000 cars across the country are connected to it. In January 2015, Yandex bought the Ros.Taxi service, which allows taxi companies to take orders, coordinate the work of drivers and keep records.

Israeli entrepreneur Shahar Waiser came to Russia with his GetTaxi service in 2012. Now Gett taxi (updated name) can be ordered in 10 cities of Russia - Moscow, St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Nizhny Novgorod, Sochi, Yekaterinburg, Krasnoyarsk, Samara, Rostov-on-Don and Krasnodar. In Moscow, the average check is 400-500 rubles, the Gett commission is 15%. This is more than Yandex, but Gett's functionality is wider - in addition to aggregation and user support, the company is engaged in hiring and training taxi drivers.

The service works with taxi companies and private drivers who have a license for passenger transportation. In total, about 20 thousand machines are available in the Gett system. The Russian division of the company is headed by Vitaly Krylov.

The famous American startup entered the Russian market at the end of 2013. He works with private drivers whose cars do not have taxi identification marks. A license is required to connect to the Uber system. As a matter of principle, Uber does not disclose data on the number of drivers and the commission charged from them.

The service was launched in 7 cities - in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Kazan, Novosibirsk, Rostov-on-Don and Sochi. The Russian office of the scandalous unicorn is run by Dmitry Izmailov. “We are interested in all cities with a population of more than 100 thousand people,” he said in an interview with Rusbase.

City-Mobil LLC is one of the largest metropolitan carriers that works with private drivers. Entrepreneur Aram Arakelyan, together with partners, created the company in 2007. The Citymobil service was one of the first to introduce software for automated distribution of orders between the nearest cars, reducing the waiting time to 10 minutes. Now more than 20 thousand taxi drivers work with it, who pay a 15% commission to the service. Citymobil is a Yandex.Taxi partner, so service drivers accept orders from both systems. In 2014, Citymobil received 10% of Moscow's orders. The service also operates in Krasnodar, Rostov-on-Don and Kazan, and plans to conquer the CIS countries in the future.

"Russian Taxi Exchange"

In 2008, partners Vitaly Makhinov and Vladimir Chirkov launched Russia's first b2b taxi order aggregator for taxi companies and dispatch services - the Russian Taxi Exchange (RBT). The story began with 15 partners who were offered to exchange "uncomfortable" orders among themselves. On the this moment more than a thousand taxi fleets and dispatch services, as well as more than 50 thousand drivers, are connected to the RBT system. More than 10,000 orders a day go through RBT every day. RBT General Director - Ruslan Kalinov.

What will happen next?

Where is the Russian taxi market going? The market participants we interviewed agree that fierce competition is being replaced by cooperation based on innovation. Moreover, these changes are based on cost reduction. New players bring fresh ideas to the industry and pull passengers not from other taxis, but from public transport (helping to unload it). They transfer to taxis those who could not afford it before.

Outsourcing and separation of roles optimize the costs of companies. Taxi fleets will be responsible for cars and drivers, flexible technology companies - for marketing, sales and logistics. In the regions, this will be implemented when there are enough smartphones. Taxi technologies and ideas come from related markets: cargo transportation, navigation and monitoring traffic. Technological cooperation will help overcome the crisis in the taxi industry, experts emphasize.