Behind the saturation of transportation capacity, compliance is still the biggest challenge
Seeing that the industry is becoming HE Tuber saturated, leading platforms have also begun to re-examine their business strategies.
Among them, some people choose to retreat bravely and stop losses in time. In March this year, Wang Xing issued an internal email announcing adjustments to the online ride-hailing business, merging the segment into the Meituan platform, abandoning self-operated business and shifting to an aggregation model, and reducing subsequent capital and manpower investment. After the adjustment, some employees of Meituan’s taxi-hailing team were transferred to other business lines, and the team size was significantly reduced.
When Didi was delisted and new user registrations were suspended,
Meituan was one of the most optimistic challengers to the throne, and the latter did invest a lot of resources to attack Didi. But the final results show that Didi’s dual moats of transportation capacity and users are extremely strong, and it will be difficult for latecomers to even tear a crack under its throne. As Meituan actively shrinks, Didi has one less henchman, and its dominance becomes more stable.
Didi's financial report shows that as of the end of the first quarter of this year,
the platform's annual active users and active drivers reached 411 million and 19 million respectively, and the average daily order volume in March was 28.2 million, a year-on-year increase of 42%. Comparing the total number of users, order volume and other data, it can be estimated that Didi's market share remains above 70%. Although it is not as high as at its peak, the leading advantage is still very obvious.
In general, after Meituan, the disruptor, retreated,
the online ride-hailing industry has returned to its old ways, and the pattern of one superpower and many strong players has never changed. In the absence of new players, the urgency for old platforms to burn money to attract new players has also been reduced, allowing resources to be concentrated on more important links.
Whether it is the resurrected big brother Didi, or the second-tier players such as
T3 Travel and Rufeng Travel that are chasing behind them, the focus of competition is actually on transportation capacity: retaining drivers, especially high-quality drivers with complete dual certificates , is the top priority of the platform.
From being interviewed by the Joint Conference Office of the Ministry of Transportation New Business Coordination Supervision in December last year, to the recent introduction of new requirements for drivers and operating vehicles in Hangzhou and other places, they all point to the same trend: the regulatory rules for the online ride-hailing market will continue to be improved, and supervision Standards will continue to be tightened, and major platforms must put compliance on their agenda.
For self-operated platforms, complete dual certificates are already the most basic
requirement. The aggregation taxi-hailing platform, which has always been on the edge of the red line, has also been put under a diamond hoop recently. On June 25, the Zhejiang Provincial Department of Transportation issued the "Special Action Plan for Digital Supervision Reform of Online Taxi Hailing", which clearly mentioned that "aggregation platforms should verify the valid licensing information of cooperative online taxi platforms, drivers, and vehicles in accordance with the law" to prevent This eliminates the possibility of aggregation platforms and self-operated online ride-hailing platforms blaming each other.
In terms of compliance, Didi and its subsidiary Huaxiaozhu Travel are still at the bottom of the top 10 platforms. In May this year, the compliance rates of Didi’s order-taking vehicles and order-taking drivers were 58.9% and 76.5% respectively, and the order compliance rate was 66%. Huaxiaozhu’s performance was even worse, with the order compliance rate being only 44.2%. Less than half that of top-ranked Xiangdao Travel (92.4%).
Seeing this set of data, it is not difficult to understand why Didi would rather provoke the sensitive nerves of users than raise prices to appease drivers. In fact, for users, compliant drivers, vehicles and high-quality platform services are also one of their requirements. Improving the compliance rate of operating vehicles and drivers essentially improves the safety of the online ride-hailing market, and is the best response to the endless safety incidents that have occurred in the past few years.
After all, online ride-hailing is a service industry. After basic transportation capacity is guaranteed and the balance between supply and demand is broken, service quality may become a new competitive barrier for the platform in the future.
