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Russian firms challenge Indonesia’s ride-hailing giants
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ojek and Grab have dominated Indonesia’s ride-hailing sector for years, but two new players with Russian roots – inDrive and Maxim – have arrived to contest the giants’ supremacy.
Founded in 2013 in the cold city of Yakutsk, Russia, the online taxi service inDrive (formerly inDriver) was founded by a group of students who made a social media group called “independent drivers”.
The idea was to enable students to interact with each other to find and negotiate prices for rides, said inDrive country manager Georgy Malkov, adding that this was why the platform had fare negotiation as its core feature.
“[The formation of the social media group] was in response to a sharp increase in taxi prices when outside temperatures dropped precipitously [in Yakutsk],” Malkov told The Jakarta Post on Oct. 21.
“inDrive delivers something that other services can’t: a way to agree [on the fare] without unfair mediators. With our peer-to-peer business model, we’re putting the freedom of choice back in the hands of our users with a mutually agreed-upon price for a service,” he added.
In 2018, the company was reincorporated as inDriver Holdings LLC in Delaware, the United States, and now operates globally through a number of related entities and subsidiaries. Today, it is headquartered in Silicon Valley, specifically Mountain View, California, the US.
Malkov said inDrive was running its business in more than 700 cities in 47 countries, with ride-hailing as its core service. Nonetheless, in certain markets, it also offered courier, cargo delivery and urban services.
“We recently achieved a significant global milestone of completing 4 million rides a day, and we have registered over 150 million [installations of the app],” said Malkov.
The company has been operating in Indonesia since August 2019 and is available in over 50 cities. Malkov said inDrive had registered more than half a million drivers, most of whom were motorcycle drivers.
Compared to its big competitors, Gojek and Grab, inDrive runs on a leaner business model, which means it is not “burning money”.
On that matter, Malkov said, “We avoid subsidies. We rely on our human-tech model, which allows for a more fair and just business transaction to enter markets and launch services. […] inDrive generates sufficient cash to cover its current operations.”
The yellow one
When asked what made Maxim different from its competitors, the CEO of its Indonesian subsidiary, Vadim Iunusov, jokingly said, “I can tell you the secret; we’re yellow!”
Founded in Russia in 2003, Maxim is now operating in more than 1,000 cities worldwide. It entered the Indonesian market in 2018 and now covers more than 100 towns and cities in the country.
“Indonesia is quite a big market. It’s one of the largest countries. I think there’s enough room for everyone,” Iunusov told the press after attending a hearing at the House of Representatives on Nov. 7.
Read also: Ride-hailing firms oppose idea to class them as transportation companies
Iunusov considered the Indonesian ride-hailing sector healthy for business as it had several big players competing for the pie.
“If there are just one or two players, there is no reason to develop the products and services,” said Iunusov. “Logically, if there is the one cake, you have more people awaiting this cake and the shares will be smaller, probably, but it’s a cake [nonetheless]. That will motivate us to develop a greater quality and quantity of products.”
He added that affordability and simplicity were the key to maintaining Maxim’s position in the market and, in the future, it was possible that his company would put out other products and services.
“There’s a market, and time will show,” Iunusov said.
