Suzhou has issued a ban on private taxi booking apps, in a bid to promote local government transport apps and to end increasing rivalry between private-sector giants.
The outlawed private-sector taxi finder apps include Alibaba's Kuaidi Dache and the Tencent Didi Dache- the most popular in China. The ban renders third-party taxi apps redundant within the Jiangsu province city, which has 22 authorised taxi companies and a population of about ten million.
Market leaders Alibaba and Tencent have been in fierce competition for the last 18 months over the apps, with both firms offering cabbies incentives such as cash rebates and subsidies of around ten yuan per trip. This led to complaints that passengers who traditionally hailed taxis and insisted on paying normal fares were being refused by drivers.
Fei Xinyi, director of Suzhou's Taxi Call Center, said, "the war between the two taxi booking apps will not happen in Suzhou.” “All booking calls will come to us first and we will then pass the information to taxi drivers through a walkie-talkie installed in every car," he added in a February statement, as reported by local Suzhou website LivingSU.com.
The ban will force city residents to use locally developed municipal apps, such as SuzhouHang. The local apps all integrate into the same transport platform, and send out location-based requests to as many as 4,000 cabbies in the city. According to the department, these apps receive a total of 5,700 daily online bookings on average. In comparison, Didi Dache last month expanded their app's coverage to cover 178 Chinese cities and reported receiving over five million taxi bookings a day through the company's WePay service.
Taxi booking apps have previously faced attack in China. In February, Shanghai authorities imposed curbs on private sector book-a-taxi apps during peak traffic hours. Beijing also briefly banned the independent apps in 2013, after being accused of enabling drivers to haggle government-controlled prices on fares for a larger cut of profit.
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