In December, the online ride-hailing industry has not warmed up, and the platform has achieved scale expansion by burning subsidies

Compared with the same period in 2020, the ride-hailing industry is still facing a downturn in orders in December 2021.

On January 11, the national online ride-hailing regulatory information exchange platform released the basic situation of the operation of the online ride-hailing industry in December 2021. According to the data, the national online ride-hailing regulatory information exchange platform received a total of 681 million orders in December, down 15.9% year-on-year and up 9.3% month-on-month. There were 17 ride-hailing platforms with more than 300,000 orders in December, unchanged from november's data.

Behind the platform's counter-trend growth: burn money subsidies

Judging from the December order volume of each platform, 14 of the 17 online ride-hailing platforms on the list have increased their orders from the previous month, and only 3 have declined. Among them, Ruqi Travel's orders fell by 9.1%, Landao's travel orders fell by 20.2%, and Sunshine's travel orders fell by 8.9%.

Among the other platforms with order volume growth, T3 travel orders increased by 51.7%, Zhaozhao travel increased by 35.4%, Bangbang Bank increased by 34.2%, and Meituan Taxi increased by 16%.

In November 2021, T3 Travel and Meituan Taxi were also one of the few platforms where orders grew against the trend, with T3 Travel rising 6.9% in November and Meituan Taxi rising 43.5% in November.

The growth of orders on the platform may be related to recent preferential activities and subsidies. Judging from the latest updated version, Meituan Taxi will take "newcomers have courtesy" as the home page, and the App page of Meituan Taxi will also push activities such as "invitation with prize" to users. In December, Meituan Taxi pushed a reward of "inviting new drivers to join Meituan Taxi, and each person invited to get 58 yuan in cash" on the user side, after the reward for pulling new drivers was 30 yuan.

In December, Didi announced plans to delist from the U.S. stock market to seek a Hong Kong stock listing, and the outside world believes that there is not much window left for other platforms. In this regard, He Qi, senior analyst of the auto travel industry at Analysys, believes that since July last year, various platforms have pulled new and recruited drivers through commission-free, coupons, etc., and for the company itself, the business expansion and market share increase are still very obvious. Part of it is the loss of new customers from Didi, and the other part is the result of the expansion of the platform itself.

Regulators have increased their focus on compliance issues

From December 2021, the National Ride-hailing Regulatory Information Exchange Platform will not only publish monthly ride-hailing operation data, but also summarize the compliance situation for that month.

The data shows that among the online ride-hailing platforms with orders of more than 300,000 orders, the compliance rate of 92.4% of Xiangdao Travel is still the first, and Hua xiaopig Travel is at the bottom with a compliance rate of 31%. In December, the top 3 order compliance rate growth were T3 Travel, Yihua Travel, and Bangbang Travel, and the last 3 increases were Zhaozhao Travel (-3.3%), Timely Use Car (-6.2%), and Shenzhou Chauffeur (-6.5%). In December, the compliance rate of Didi Chuxing was 44.9%, meituan taxi was 51.3%, and T3 was 85.6%, and the compliance rate of major platforms increased.

Among the major central cities, the order compliance rate of 9 cities, including Guangzhou, Xiamen, Hangzhou, Shenzhen, Hefei, Nanchang, Chongqing, Zhengzhou and Nanjing, is above 80%. The top three order compliance growth rates this month were Ningbo, Haikou and Jinan, and the last three increases were Xi'an (-2.3%), Dalian (-2.4%) and Shijiazhuang (-3.3%).

Supervision of ride-hailing platforms is being strengthened in various places. On December 16, 2021, the Xiamen Transportation Development Center issued the Announcement on the Operational Risks of the T3 Travel Online Ride-hailing Platform. The "Announcement" said that the current online ride-hailing business market in Xiamen is close to saturation and fierce competition, in view of the possibility of the T3 travel platform not renewing the license or even being revoked after expiration, it is necessary to remind the majority of enterprises and drivers who intend to cooperate with the T3 travel platform to carefully assess the risks and improve the awareness of prevention.

Chen Liteng, an e-commerce analyst for life services at the E-commerce Research Center of the Network Economics and Social Society, told First Finance that this announcement is based on the market competition environment of Xiamen's online ride-hailing and the assessment of T3 Travel's operation in other provinces and cities. According to Tianyan, in the past 4 months, T3 Travel has faced a total of 28 administrative penalties, most of which are due to the illegal acts of driving taxis to provide operating services for people who have not obtained a taxi driver's license, with a cumulative fine of 310,000 yuan.