Uber has not encountered situations where Yandex.Taxi prices for rides would be based on the presence of competing taxi service applications in the client’s smartphone. This was reported to TASS by the communications director of Uber Russia and the CIS Irina Gushchina.
«We have not encountered such situations,» he commented on reports that the online taxi service Gett suspects the presence of hidden functions in the Yandex.Taxi application that allow it to detect the presence of competitors’ applications and significantly reduce prices, if any .
Earlier, the Vedomosti newspaper reported that Gett had asked the head of the Federal Antimonopoly Service of the Russian Federation, Igor Artemyev, to study the activities of Yandex.Taxi. As the newspaper notes, Gett began to suspect Yandex after one of the users of the services wrote on Facebook that after he installed the Gett application, Yandex.Taxi fell in price. Gett itself also researched the price of trips in a competitor’s app and found out that the price of a trip to Yandex.Taxi is about 60% of the time lower if you also use the Gett app.
Yandex.Taxi told TASS that they did not know anything about Gett’s complaints. Yandex.Taxi does not have any extended access to information about users of a mobile application in comparison with other companies, and the cost of a trip for users of the service does not depend on the presence of competing applications on its smartphone, the company said.
The FAS received a letter from Gett, the complaint will be considered within a month, if necessary, the review period can be extended for another two months.
In July 2017, Yandex.Taxi and Uber agreed to merge their online taxi services in Russia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belarus, Georgia and Kazakhstan into one company. FAS by November 17 must make a decision on the merger of the business of Yandex.Taxi and Uber in Russia. According to the deal, Uber and Yandex.Taxi will invest $ 225 million and $ 100 million in the new company, respectively. Control (59.3%) over the new business will be given to Yandex, another 36.6% will be held by Uber, the remaining 4.1% will belong to employees of the two companies. The transaction is expected to close in Q4 2017.