Tashkent, Uzbekistan (UzDaily.uz) — A Chinese company plans to enter Uzbekistan’s taxi market, launch its own ride-hailing app and deploy 5,000 vehicles, First Deputy Transport Minister Mamambiy Omarov said on 16 October in an interview with Spot.
“There is a Chinese company planning to put 5,000 cars on the market and launch its own app,” Omarov said, adding that the new market entrant intends to begin operations in the near future.
Plans for the new service are being discussed amid disruptions affecting existing ride-hailing platforms. On 11 October, Yandex Go experienced a major outage in Uzbekistan, leaving many users unable to book cars and forcing them to change their plans.
The disruption was caused by an emergency shutdown of the company’s data centre in Russia, which was damaged in a drone attack. Because of its shared distributed infrastructure, the problems also affected Yandex applications in other countries, including Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.
Following the outage, users increasingly turned to alternative services. According to Spot, between 11 and 13 October, the number of orders on Uklon increased two- to threefold compared with average figures for comparable days. MyTaxi reported a 15-fold increase in orders.
The Chinese company’s name, the launch date and the proposed fares have not yet been disclosed.
