Professional Driver Magazine September 2022 Thinking big

An economy in turmoil. a government out of control. An energy crisis. Things are going to be very tough over the coming winter.

But as the saying goes, when the going gets tough… it seems the events of the past few years are leading our industry toward a much-needed sort-out. And the winners and losers might not be the ones we might have predicted a few years ago.

We are seeing considerable consolidation among operators, and you could argue this is long overdue. The taxi industry has been a comfortable place for many over the years. Local family firms with no ambitions other than to provide a local service and have a comfortable life.

What we haven’t had is any national players – even the bigger groups tended to be focused on one city, or if they operated in a number of locations, they tended to retain local brands.

That’s starting to change. This month two of the emerging consolidators in the industry, Veezu and Take Me Group, have both started the process of renaming the host of local brands within their respective groups under a single, corporate brand.

This is a major change, and is seen as necessary as a means of leveraging the power of a national booking app. Both these businesses have institutional backing, and there’s nothing the city likes more than a coherent brand strategy.

It also leaves these groups well placed to pick up business from changes elsewhere in the industry. Finally, the business travel sector seems to be wising up to the need to provide car services as well as hotels, trains and planes. Business travel bookers will want to deal with recognised brands – and if they can’t find that among the private hire and taxi fleets, you know where they’ll go – to the ride-hailers, such as Uber.

Ah, Uber. Here’s the thing. Uber is a globally recognised taxi brand. But branding is the least of its concerns these days. The job has been done – young customers talk of “getting in an Uber”, not a taxi or a minicab. For Uber to gain a national presence, all it needs is for its app to work wherever its customers try to use it.

For the past two years Uber has doing that very effectively without spending a penny on its own brand. Instead it’s been growing across the UK via its Local Cab service, which allocates jobs via the Uber app to local private hire operators.

Interestingly, these can be large or small. Take Me is on board in some places. So is one of the other big movers in consolidation within the industry, Manchester’s Street Cars.

The good thing about this is it seems to work for all parties. Extra work for the operator and growth for Uber. Of course, there are many who are rightly suspicious about Uber’s motives. The company is not doing this as an act of charity, and it has previous as a very aggressive competitor.

But none of the doom-laden predictions about Uber fattening up markets before chucking out the partneroperator and installing its own operation have come true, and nor are they likely to. If you did that to one of the 80 Local cab sign-ups, what would the other 79 think?

Within this shifting industry, Professional Driver is preparing a new edition of its ProDriver 100 league table of operators – the first time we’ve been able to do this since before the pandemic.

It will be fascinating to see how much change has taken place in the three years since our last ProDriver 100. There will certainly be new players at the top – and many others will have exited, either via takeover or worse.

We’d like to make sure our information is as accurate as possible, so we’ve set up a page on ou r website where you can submit your data. We’re not after financial information – just your fleet size, where your operate and a few other details.

If you have 200 cars or more, you have a great chance of being included. Please help us to get this valuable research as accurate as possible by completing the brief form you can find by following the link below. Thank you, in advance!

https://www.prodrivermags.com/prodriver-100-2022- questionnaire/

Mark Bursa Editor markbursa@prodrivermags.com