Uber’s upstart rival in Pak uses rickshaws, low-tech phones

Lahore, June 20: As taxi hailing giant Uber enters Pakistan, a little-known local competitor is counting on a mix of new ideas and old technology to tap what could be a big chunk of the market: low-income residents who travel in rickshaws, not cabs.

Known as Rixi, the Lahore-based service hails rickshaws instead of cars. Its platform is not smartphones, but older SMS phone messaging that allows nearby drivers to bid for any user’s business.

Pakistan has more than 130 million cellphone subscriptions, but only 21% subscribe to data packages, and, while the proportion is rising, there are opportunities across emerging economies in Asia to tap a relatively low-tech customer base.

In Thailand, Taxi Radio uses calls and text messages to put cabs and people in touch and is popular with those without smartphone apps, and HeyKuya!, an S MS-based service provider in the Philippines, was recently acquired by Indonesia’s Yes Boss.

Rixi founder Adnan Khawaja says his company works with more than 1,000 rickshaw drivers in Lahore, where many people rely on small, noisy threewheelers that are well suited to beating traffic in the eastern city’s crowded streets.

Rixi works by bypassing poor smartphone penetration in the low-income rickshaw market by polling drivers’ locations using cellphone towers and matching passengers’ message d locations to points on Google Maps. “If you look at ... Uber’s operational model, they will be depending on the smartphones,” said Khawaja. “In countries like Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, that population is [...] growing, but it’s still smaller compared to the vast market.”

Uber declined to comment on Rixi’s business model, and said that while it had tested SMS-based services, there were no immediate plans to deploy such a service in Pakistan.

"We continue to explore products that would stimulate demand ... and better service the city, whether that isa motor bike, whether that is a rickshaw, whether that is a chopper," said Zohair Yousafi, Uber's head of expansion in Pakistan.

To entrepreneurs like Shehmir Shaikh, who recently launched errand start-up Scooty Bhejo in Lahore, Uber is missing a trick over Pakistan' s digital divide and its large, low-income transport market. Reuters

A Rixi rickshaw driver in his rickshaw in Lahore