The Slovak-based Purpur private taxi service (the HopinTaxi brand) wrote to its partners in Ukraine last Friday that investors had decided to close the Ukrainian project. The company terminated transport operations this month, the liga.net publication reports.
According to Purpur Ukraine, the company plans to restructure its business in Ukraine. The company now intends to develop corporate transport services, but it has not yet made a final decision on this issue. The Slovak service is no longer interested in the mass transport market.
Simultaneously, HopinTaxi wrote a clarification letter. "The information about termination of our operations turned out to be premature. We will most likely reformat our operations and focus on working with legal entities," the company said.
The HopinTaxi mobile application was launched in 2012. It was first launched in Bratislava and then in Prague, Ljubljana, Košice, and Ostrava. The service was launched in Kyiv in July 2016. At the time, the company announced plans to work with 2,000 vehicles, handle 500,000 orders per month, and expand to Lviv, Odesa, Kharkiv, and Dnipro.
In reality, HopinTaxi registered about 900 vehicles in Ukraine. It later removed 150 drivers from its database for various reasons. The service encountered the absence of clear rules regulating operations on the Ukrainian market, and it was unable to compete on an equal footing with the Uber and Yandex.Taxi, which were are lowering transport tariffs.
"We underestimated the actual state of affairs in the local taxi market. As a result, we encountered strange competition, hard dumping, and drivers that often do not meet the requirements. In addition, there is no adequate legislation and principle regulating the market," the company said.
