Russian Forbes talked with the new Yandex.Taxi CEO Daniil Shuleyko about where the company is heading and what services it plans to launch.
Key interview highlights that indicate future growth and business plans for the service are:
Services
Yandex.Taxi has two potential functions – as a personal taxi, and as a food delivery service (like Uber and Ubereats).
Yandex.Food began with a simple navigation through restaurants, then they decided to make delivery, connected their production – Yandex.Chef, in the summer opened the delivery of products – Yandex.Lavka;
Taxi has delivery from retail (from the Alphabet of Taste and VkusVilla). Unlike food delivery from restaurants, which is already responsible for about 10% of all catering, the volumes of e-grocery are still microscopic, and the retail market is large;
Yandex.Taxi adds services according to two criteria: they are aimed at saving time and work within the city. It is possible that they will all be united into one consumer application.
International Business Expansion
Yandex.Taxi operates in 17 countries. Now there are three ongoing experiments: European countries (Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Serbia, and Romania), two countries in Africa (in the next 10 years) and Israel.
Future plans: French-speaking countries in Africa, all of Scandinavia, Italy, and Spain.
In some countries, including Finland and Israel, the company operates under the Yango brand due to the peculiarities of the languages.
Russian market
A separate team is responsible for Uber, since the Yandex.Taxi and Uber CAs are different (Uber is a more youthful brand). The services have different advertising, different marketing, and different PR.
The Lucky service (Yandex.Taxi bought the assets) attracted coverage in the regions, although it would have to be tinkered with. Most of the company’s orders are telephone orders, with which Yandex.Taxi does little. For normal operation, you need to build a new call processing system.
