Chinese Company Plans to Enter Uzbekistan's Taxi Market with 5,000 Vehicles

Uzbekistan's First Deputy Transport Minister Mamambiy Omarov said on October 16 in an interview with Spot that a Chinese company plans to enter the taxi market in Uzbekistan, launch its own app, and deploy 5,000 vehicles. According to Omarov, the new player intends to begin operations "in the near future." The company's name, launch date, and expected rates have not yet been disclosed.

The plans are being discussed against a backdrop of disruptions in existing services. On October 11, the Yandex Go service experienced a major outage in Uzbekistan: users were unable to book a car and were forced to change their plans. The outage was caused by an emergency shutdown of a Yandex data center in Russia, damaged in a drone attack. Due to shared distributed infrastructure, the problems also affected Yandex apps in other countries — Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.

According to Spot, from October 11 to 13, the number of orders on the Uklon platform grew two to threefold compared to average figures for comparable days. The MyTaxi service recorded a fifteenfold increase in orders.