The First Deputy Minister of Transport Mamambiy Omarov announced on October 16 in an interview with the publication Spot about the plans of a Chinese company to enter the Uzbek taxi market. This company intends to launch its own ride-hailing application and put 5,000 vehicles into operation.
The new player in the market plans to start its activities soon. The discussion of plans to launch the new service is taking place against the backdrop of disruptions that affected existing taxi-hailing platforms.
On October 11, the Yandex Go service experienced a major outage in Uzbekistan, preventing many users from ordering cars and forcing them to change their plans. The cause of this failure was the emergency shutdown of the company's data processing center in Russia, which was damaged as a result of a drone attack.
Due to the overall distributed infrastructure, the problems affected Yandex applications in other countries, including Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan. After the incident, users began to use alternative services more actively. According to Spot, between October 11 and 13, the number of orders on Uklon increased two to three times compared to the average figures for similar days, while MyTaxi recorded a 15-fold increase in orders.
Currently, the name of the Chinese company, the start date of operations, and the proposed tariffs have not yet been disclosed.