Despite being acquired by Uber earlier this year, Autocab’s chief executive Safa Alkateb is adamant the firm will “remain independent”.
“We will not get sucked into Uber,” he tells BusinessLive.
“That is important because the world is changing. In the past it would be Uber and these private hire companies being direct competitors but the exciting part is that we can really transform the ground transportation industry worldwide with this by bringing everybody into a single market place.”
Cheadle-based Autocab was founded 30 years ago by Dr Falah Abod, and provides technology for the taxi and private hire industry, connecting them to trips using its iGo platform.
“Over a weekend he wrote a piece of software, put it in a taxi company and said, look, use this and I’m not going to charge you and that taxi company started using it and grew by five to six drivers over a one-week period,” Safa said.
When Dr Falah sadly passed away seven years ago, Safa, his brother-in-law, brought “everything I learned from Silicon Valley and working in America to Cheadle” and he “transitioned the business quite a bit”, from a hardware-based business to a SaaS business with a subscription model.
The firm now has four offices around the world and employs 150 staff, most of whom are based in Cheadle, he says.
In August, Uber announced it was to acquire the firm, in a move which Safa said is part of Uber's ambition to become the “Amazon of ground transportation”.
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“They have a new CEO and they have new ambitions to offer all kinds of transportation services all over the world,” he explains.
“For them to do this they recognise they can’t do it all themselves and the part they can’t scale is the drivers.
“Anyone that has anything to sell can be on Amazon, including themselves...so it could be buses, or the London Underground, they’d like all of that to be on their app, including all the taxi and private hire companies around the world.”
“They said for us to really make this a long-term strategy, to work with taxi and private hire companies all over the world, we want to invest in a company so we can invest and help it grow, so it becomes that platform.”
Safa says this will be a similar transition to one that has happened in industries such as the hotel and airline industry.
“This is the transition that happened in other industries that Autocab will now be in the core centre of.”
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“From 40 years ago to now we’ve got, pre-Covid, 10 times more airplane seats, 10 times more hotel rooms and they’re all full. A marketplace was created where everybody was working with everybody else, with Expedia and Booking.com.”
Safa says what Autocab is, post-acquisition, doing “exactly the same’’ as pre-acquisition, which is to “provide the best technology to taxi and private hire companies all over the world”.
“We are basically there to help make the connections so Uber can connect into them.”
In the towns and cities where Uber doesn’t operate, the app will come up with an option for a local cab, Safa explains, and where Uber does operate it would give the customer a choice of providers.
“The only thing that changes is a lot more investment for us to take what we do and make it truly global.”
And Safa says the opportunity for growth is “huge”.
“Today there are two million bookings per day in the 海角视频 in the taxi and private hire industry but there are 70 million trips happening in private vehicles today.
“There’s already a trend of young people not buying cars, there’s a trend to move trips from private vehicles to a service-oriented approach.
“If we can transition five to six per cent of trips that are taken in private vehicles into service-orientated trips, we can double the size of our industry.”
Safa says he predicts the firm’s headcount will double in the next year to year-and-a-half.
“We have a very strong position here in the 海角视频 and we are in 30 countries around the world, but our penetration worldwide isn’t as strong as in the 海角视频.
“Uber one day think it will be - and wants it to be - something that’s global, so we’ve got to ramp up to be a big global company very, very quickly
“We do believe that will happen and we will have the resources to do that.”