This online ride-hailing session received less than 10 orders a day

Author 丨 Pastoral Song

Editor丨Nuts

Cover source丨Unsplash

Following the delivery riders, another hot flexible employment position, ride-hailing drivers, has also begun to have a large number of people and a saturated workforce.

According to incomplete statistics, after the Spring Festival this year alone, the transportation authorities of Zhuhai, Jinan, Wenzhou, Dongguan, Suining and other places have issued reminders that the local ride-hailing market has become saturated, reminding practitioners to be cautious about entering the market.

In the past May, Changsha and Sanya directly issued notices that they would suspend the acceptance of new services for online ride-hailing transport permits. After the local capacity assessment is completed, the relevant business will resume in due course.

According to the Jinan Urban and Rural Transport Bureau released in April this year, there are 17,800 registered ride-hailing vehicles in the city, and nearly 36,000 drivers have obtained ride-hailing licenses, but the average daily number of bicycle orders is less than 10.

Compared with the previous scene of daily explosion of orders and monthly income of more than 10,000, the working environment of ride-hailing drivers is undergoing fundamental changes, and as an industry that has been deeply transformed by the Internet, it seems that it is difficult for driver masters to find a way to deal with it.

1

More than 5 million licensed ride-hailing drivers

In terms of the large market environment, ride-hailing drivers may be the fastest growing jobs in the past few years, and even millions of new entrants can be added every year.

According to the number of people who have obtained the qualification certificate of online ride-hailing, in 2020, this number was 2.891 million, corresponding to 365 million online ride-hailing users, and by the end of 2022, the number of practitioners climbed to 5.09 million, but the number of users only rose to 437 million.

According to the data released by Didi Chuxing, the number of this group of employees is even larger, with 13 million annual active drivers on the Didi platform in March 2021 and 19 million in March this year.

In the short term, the impact of the epidemic in the past three years has led to an increase in the number of new flexible jobs, coupled with the spring of each year, which is the "peak season" for job hunting and job hopping, and the influx of a large number of people has made the position of ride-hailing driver extremely saturated. From January to April this year, a total of 316,000 new ride-hailing driver's licenses were issued nationwide, including 177,000 in April alone.

In the face of a large number of practitioners, the track of online car hailing has not produced too much increase due to the arrival of more drivers, and more people have provided services, but the people who enjoy services are still the same group of people as before, which is why the prosperity of the online car hailing industry is now declining.

According to data released by the Dongguan Municipal Bureau of Transportation, in the first quarter of this year, a total of 77.3% of the city's ride-hailing taxis received less than 10 orders per day. Among those ride-hailing vehicles with an average daily order of more than 10, the average daily revenue of bicycles is only about 260 yuan.

The revenue of 260 yuan, excluding platform commissions, fuel costs and vehicle losses, the actual income of ride-hailing practitioners may only be 4,000-5,000 yuan. This income level may be even lower if the person rents a vehicle to engage in the ride-hailing business.

Although it is not excluded that some ride-hailing practitioners have joined because of their job freedom and working environment, it is difficult to find a reason to persist in the face of the current situation of the unprofitable industry.

However, what is more helpless is that many employed people already regard ride-hailing drivers as the last retreat, but now that the income of the "retreat" is no longer optimistic, where else can this group of people go?

2

Internet giants are not working?

On the one hand, there are more monks and less porridge for ride-hailing drivers, on the other hand, Internet giants are constantly entering the ride-hailing track, in recent years, Meituan, AutoNavi, Baidu, Tencent, Huawei, etc. have opened up their own ride-hailing platforms, so why these new giants have not brought more gains to the group of ride-hailing drivers.

From the perspective of product form, at present, under the condition that Didi's basic market is stable, most of the online ride-hailing platforms that have emerged in recent years have adopted the aggregation taxi model, and the back-end capacity pool is almost shared by the whole industry, but the front-end traffic entrance is controlled by their respective apps or mini programs.

Taking AutoNavi Mobility, which has grown rapidly in the past two years, as an example, its main capacity pool resources come from external cooperative ride-hailing platforms, which are internally called "First Ring" and "Second Ring", "First Ring" includes several large-scale ride-hailing platforms such as Didi, T3 Travel, Shenzhou, and Cao Cao, and "Second Ring" is more than 100 small and medium-sized ride-hailing platforms.

Meituan Taxi, another once-popular ride-hailing platform, although it briefly offered high remuneration to recruit drivers in the early days, but later gave up its investment in self-built capacity system and turned to the aggregation taxi model.

But even with the increasing number of various aggregation ride-hailing platforms, from the perspective of the entire industry, the influx of these new players has not really further expanded the business of online ride-hailing.

According to the "2022 China Mobility Market Data Report", in 2022, the size of the domestic ride-hailing market will be about 314.6 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 1.38%.

However, in contrast, ride-hailing drivers and ride-hailing platforms have shown a trend of increasing year by year, and in the case of the cake not being bigger, more and more people share the cake, and such a business model is bound to aggravate the involution of the industry.

In April this year, a short video appeared on the Internet, a ride-hailing driver set up 11 mobile phones on the driver's platform to receive orders on different ride-hailing platforms. Some insiders commented that such ride-hailing drivers who take orders on multiple platforms at the same time are not uncommon in the industry.

3

Industry governance still needs to be built by multiple parties

As an emerging profession spawned by the platform economy, ride-hailing drivers should have prospered with the platform, but with the gradual saturation of today's practitioners, some people are also beginning to worry about whether the platform will further reduce the rights and interests of the driver.

Taking Didi Chuxing, the most mature operating system, as an example, among the ride-hailing platforms, Didi has the most severe assessment of drivers, but at the same time, the number of orders is also more, and the relevant safeguard measures are more in place.

However, even if it is as big as Didi, it still can't get rid of the loss situation in the travel business, according to its financial report, Didi's annual operating income in 2022 will be 140.8 billion yuan, although the loss has narrowed by 52% year-on-year, but it is still as much as 23.8 billion yuan.

If there is no rice in the cauldron of the platform, it is naturally impossible to demand more rice in the driver's bowl.

For some aggregation taxi platforms, although they have relaxed the access standards for drivers and vehicles, the corresponding rights and interests protection is also lacking. Moreover, from a compliance point of view, some aggregation platforms deliberately stay outside supervision because they are not directly involved in operating businesses, which actually buries certain hidden dangers for driver groups.

Of course, more sensitive and the most direct impact on the driver group is whether the platform that does not lack capacity will further increase the proportion of the commission when the ride-hailing drivers are already "overcrowded", so as to eliminate a group of ride-hailing drivers.

Since the birth of the ride-hailing business model, there has been controversy about what range the platform commission should maintain. On the one hand, the driver complains that the commission is too high, on the other hand, the platform complains that it is not profitable, and now there are "more people and fewer people", and the interests of both sides are even more inconsistent.

Based on the governance experience of other Internet platforms, in this case, it is necessary for the competent industry authorities to issue relevant institutional documents, not only to ensure that the platform commission ratio remains within a reasonable range, but also to establish a dynamic adjustment mechanism for the supply and demand relationship between ride-hailing drivers and platforms.

At present, in the exploration of local practice, Shenzhen has taken the lead in issuing the Notice on Establishing a Dynamic Adjustment Mechanism for Online Taxi Capacity (Trial) (Draft for Comments) at the end of last year to guide the dynamic balance of market supply and demand from the management side and promote the safe, stable and sustainable development of the industry.

For an emerging industry with tens of millions of practitioners, although it will go through a stage from rapid development to saturation, how to establish a win-win harmonious format still requires the joint efforts of the platform, users, drivers and management units.