Myanmar’s increasingly saturated ride-hailing app market has a new player, and this one’s from Vietnam.
FastGo, which inked a memorandum of understanding with local conglomerate Asia Sun Group in November, officially began collecting fares last Monday, according to 7 Daily News.
It’s the first Vietnam-based ride-sharing app to expand into a foreign market, per Vietnam News, with plans to eventually move into Indonesia as well.
Multiple outlets are reporting that the push into Myanmar involves a partnership with military-linked telecommunications company MyTel to provide data services and telecoms.
According to FastGo director Nguyen Huu Taut, the company is confident in its ability to break into Myanmar, where Singapore-based Grab currently occupies the top spot in an increasingly competitive market.
“We chose Myanmar and Indonesia as we have relevant strategies for them in place. We already have strategic partners in these two markets to launch our services,” he told Vietnam News.
However, local competitors, such as Oway Ride, OK Taxi and GetRide, are not so easily fazed.
OK Taxi, which has 30 percent of the market share in Myanmar according to their own estimates, and GetRide are finding their own niche audience through incentives for drivers and passengers.
‘’We face many challenges competing against foreign companies, but we are finding our own space to compete. We focus on giving both drivers and passengers incentives to use our app. Now, we are the second-largest app after Grab,” U Aung Myat Min, customer care supervisor for GetRide told Myanmar Times.
Since 2015, Southeast Asia’s ride-hailing market has grown four times over, with Google estimating that the market could be worth about $20 billion by 2025.
According to ABI Research, a market analysis firm, 70% of 16 billion ride-hailing trips were done in Asia in 2018, making Asia the largest ride-hailing market by far, ahead of North America and Latin America.
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