Uber, Netflix, love and taxes
Ilove Uber. And my credit card statements show just how much. As a woman who likes getting about in a beautiful, big but bad city, it has been liberating for me. Going out at night is no longer a thing to be so carefully orchestrated to avoid the bad that it takes the fun out of a night on the town. I hit my app, press Uber Black and catch a comfortable and safe ride there and back. Because Uber places an age range on the cars that get onto its platform, it’s safe — and the app has a responsive system of reporting and grading both drivers and riders. To be honest, I stopped cab-hailing years ago because metered taxis were more often skedonks (wrecks) or so expensive that it made no sense with my car parked at home. And the system of calling to get a cab now just seems as outmoded and inconvenient as fax machines or VHS machines.
I felt a momentary “Ag shame” in a metered taxi recently after I caught a Gautrain from the airport and realised why these old men of the industry had turned Sandton into an Uber no-go zone. The driver was tech-scared, and his lovely old Merc was too old for the ride-hailing service.
He has permit, ranking and other costs that Uber drivers do not have to pay — or not yet; an amendment to the National Land Transport Act was tabled last month to include ride-hailing in the licensing system.
The trip home cost me about R150 more than an Uber ride, so I was not sorry enough to delete my app, and indeed, I’ve added to it. Uber
Eats is now my second-most-used app. Across sub-Saharan Africa, there are 1 305 000 monthly active riders on the Uber app and 36 000 active drivers — South Africa makes up 679 000 of the monthly active riders, with 12 000 active drivers based here.
It’s marvellous, but really, enough of the Uber love. There’s lots of consumer value in Uber but very little national value as profits go to a
US-based tech giant, although the company says its reinvestment in
South Africa is significant.
Last week, in City Press, Uber’s head of policy, Yolisa Kani, penned an audacious piece of spin. She compared Uber’s role in South Africa to that of the minibus taxi industry. Both were revolutionary additions to the dismal public transport system in our country. Both were services provided by wily entrepreneurs, who delivered millions of people safely, and both are providing jobs in an economy that has largely failed to do so at more organised and macro levels, wrote Ms Kani. She didn’t add that neither of the two pays much tax (Uber says it pays all relevant tax but won’t reveal its revenue or tax rate), and that they live in a low- or no-regulation economy when the rest of the country’s entrepreneurs are choked by red tape.
Over at the MultiChoice campus in Johannesburg, CEO Calvo Mawela sits in a headquarters that wouldn’t look out of place in Shanghai with its ice-white spaceship design. He is one of broadcasting’s youngest, hippest bosses, but he sounds a little like the taxi driver in the lovely old Merc. Mawela’s got his own Uber to contend with in Netflix, the streaming service that 350 000 South African subscribers have signed up to since it launched here in 2016. Unlike Mawela, the Netflix bosses don’t have to pay taxes, hire staff or face the high regulatory hurdles of running a broadcaster in South Africa.
The disruption to MultiChoice’s business model has significant implications for employment and for local content. In the past year, 115 000 premium subscribers have ditched their MultiChoice decoders.
What to do about these over-the-top services and app-based businesses that are rocking up to service Africa’s burgeoning middle classes without (m)any tax or regulatory responsibilities is a bullet we’re only just starting to bite. They have, however, opened up consumer choice. Can you direct me to the Netflix sign-up page, please?
There’s lots of consumer value in Uber but very little national value as profits go to a US tech giant