Uber’s rivals in Paris turn up efforts to grab market share
Chauffeur Privé is in the final stages of a €50m funding to fuel French expansion
Uber’s rivals in Paris are cranking up efforts to steal market share from the car-booking app in France and across Europe, seeking to take advantage of the pressure on Uber’s brand.
Chauffeur Privé, the second-largest car-booking app in France by number of users, is in the final stages of a €50m funding round to fuel its expansion in France and beyond. It is looking to recruit an additional 70 to 100 people to its team of 150 people in the coming months.
In France, Uber’s continuous spats over pricing and employee rights with its drivers culminated in hundreds of them striking before Christmas last year and paved the way for the likes of Chauffeur Privé and Heetch to make inroads. Uber takes a 25 per cent commission from each journey, compared to Chauffeur Privé’s 20 per cent commission and Heetch’s 15 per cent.
Uber has also been seeking to repair relations with drivers in France, including by proposing temporary financial help for minicab drivers and offering insurance packages.
“Uber’s perception in the market and mistakes have allowed us to capture market share,” said Yan Hascoet, founder of Chauffeur Privé. Many drivers choose to use both the Uber and the Chauffeur Privé apps to give themselves a better chance of finding rides. Mr Hascoet said that if a driver declares himself unavailable but is still tracked driving around, it typically means that the driver has accepted a ride from the Uber app instead.
“What we see is that the share of time drivers spend is more with us and less with Uber,” he said. This year Chauffeur Privé’s number of users has grown about 50 per cent from about 1m to 1.5m, according to Mr Hascoet.
Meanwhile, Heetch, which started out as a carpooling service operating at night time in the Parisian suburbs, has relaunched six months after it was ruled illegal and fined €600,000 by French regulators in March.
Heetch has changed its business model and returned with two new services, including a car-booking app that is a director competitor to Uber, and last month announced it has raised €10m in a funding round led by venture capital firm Felix Capital. “Uber has had such a bad press, it’s helping us,” said Heetch founder Teddy Pellerin. Heetch’s new model is doing 70,000 rides per week in France, he said.
Estonian app Taxify last week launched in France, going head to head with Uber by offering sweeteners such as performance bonuses for drivers and huge price reductions for customers to try to lure business. Taxify recently launched in the UK but was banned because of licensing issues.
Alongside the UK, France is one of Uber’s key European markets and with more than 25,000 drivers and 2.5m users in France it remain the country’s largest player in the sector. Uber said the number of users in France is “growing strongly” while “things have slowed down on the driver side over the past few months due to new regulatory constraints and barriers to entry.”
Other recent events have also weighed on Uber’s reputation including the ousting of chief executive Travis Kalanick in June and the removal of its London licence by the city’s transport authority.