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by edvards 1461 days ago
Not really, it is sort of a monopoly. The only competitor app we had was Yandex Taxi, but ever since the war we don't have it here anymore.
1 comments

Did Uber exit the market in the region completely?
For what it's worth Uber is still in the neighboring Estonia, which is also the headquarters of Bolt.

Uber entered Estonia quite early and did its classic market share grab where it completely dominated. However they quickly lost that market share to Bolt (in a period of a few years, and even before it was called Bolt - it was Taxify back then) because of local market understanding and more concentrated marketing/advertising. Nowadays Uber still "works", but you have to wait 20 minutes for a car, compared to 2 minutes with Bolt. I get a sense that a good chunk of Uber drivers are banned from Bolt, but this is just a hunch based on the Uber drivers accepting low fee rides during surge pricing on Bolt.

Okay, yeah I'd used Uber once or twice when I moved to Estonia but Bolt just so completely dominated that I switched over to using that whenever I was in Estonia and then if you wanted to go really low priced you could use Yandex Taxi (although I mainly used that in Armenia because that was the best local option at the time).
It never was a thing in Latvia, and neither was Lyft. I don't recall Bolt (ex Taxify) ever having another app competitor except Yandex Taxi