ADDIS ABABA- Ethiopia’s e-hailing taxi service is scaling up beyond the streets of Addis Ababa, said ZayRide Company in Ethiopia.
Company founder and Chief Executive Habtamu Tadesse the company which was established in July 2016, is expanding to the Liberian capital, Monrovia. In collaboration with the Liberian web solutions firm Hak Technologies, the Ethiopian on-demand taxi service will introduce 200 cars by August this year, reported Quartz Africa.
For Habtamu, choosing Liberia is part of a strategy of expanding their footprint into markets where Uber and others giants are yet to launch. That tactic was solidified after Hak Technologies visited them in Addis Ababa and showed enthusiasm in striking a partnership to introduce their product in the West African state.
Habitamu expressed that they are emboldened by these official moves and are looking to expand to Ethiopian cities including Gondar, Hawassa, and Mekelle. They are also looking at West African states Guinea and Côte d’Ivoire and eyeing East African markets including Kenya and Hargeisa city in the self-declared region of Somaliland.
Venturing out of Ethiopia was also a way of defying its own instinct to stay in one market and make profits there. “We want to be the brand of Africa. We want to expand to more countries.” Habitamu noted.
The company is flexing its wings as Ethiopia liberalizes its market with authorities announcing plans to privatize state-owned enterprises in a bid to revitalize the economy and reduce unemployment and poverty rates.
In addition to delivery services, the company aims to add an on-demand ambulance service. Its parent firm ZayTech develops websites and mobile apps for firms in Asia and the United States. And given the costs and logistics involved with paying cash for rides, ZayRide is now launching its own mobile point of sale dubbed ArifPay.
ZayRide also had to design its platform to work with the slower internet speeds encountered by users, mainly by compressing the application size. They also created a call center so that customers could call in case they didn’t “understand” the technology or during internet shutdowns. “We had to bring local solutions to local problems,” Habtamu says.
The expansion is a noteworthy move for ZayRide, which was the first to introduce Uber-style ridesharing services in Ethiopia. While ZayRide wasn’t the first taxi-hailing service in the Horn of Africa nation that credit goes to RIDE it was the first to launch bookings via an app instead of text messages or calls.
The Ethiopian Herald, June 20/2019
BY ESSEYE MENGISTE
