The race to develop apps in the transportation industry

The platform for business is not only a trend but also a real marketplace for transportation service companies today, every unit must have an app on the phone.

Bus station online, taxi on app

Every three months, Mr. Le Trung Ha (59 years old, living in Tan Phong town, Quang Xuong, Thanh Hoa) travels from his hometown to Hanoi to visit his children and grandchildren. He said: " The bus station has now switched to mobile phones, there are all kinds of buses ", as he spoke, he opened his phone to find Zalo of the familiar bus company.

Thanks to social networks, bus companies all have communication channels via Zalo and Facebook to receive "ticket bookings" and payments from passengers. Transactions are even more convenient when passengers can send the exact location of the pickup location. Passengers can even complain about the service attitude of drivers and bus assistants via social networks.

Ride-hailing apps are trying to "squeeze" onto phone screens, integrating services to attract customers. Photo: An Bien

For many years, the situation of passengers flocking and jostling to queue at bus stations has been gone, even during peak times near Tet. Many large bus stations are deserted, such as My Dinh and Gia Lam bus stations in Hanoi. Many 45-seat buses depart with only about a dozen passengers on board. There were even times when the bus departed, the driver informed the operator: "The bus is carrying wind"; meaning there were no passengers, and the bus still had to depart at the scheduled time.

To find passengers, many bus companies have invested heavily in mobile apps, recruiting people to operate Zalo and Facebook channels to interact with customers in real time. From the phone number, passengers are quickly made friends with the bus company, a transportation transaction is established, and payment is also convenient, by bank transfer or cash when boarding the bus.

At the workshop “Developing platform business: Driving force for Vietnam’s digital economic growth” organized by the Central Institute for Economic Management (CIEM) on February 19, many examples of business platforms were cited by experts, in which the Grab application was mentioned as a platform that opened up the race to develop apps for taxi companies and gradually integrated many other convenient services.

Ride-hailing platforms find a place on mobile screens

In mid-February 2025, data released by an Indian consulting firm on taxi-hailing market share in various countries showed that Xanh SM, Grab, and Be were the three apps with the largest market share in Vietnam. Other platforms ranked at the bottom, including Mai Linh Taxi and VinaSun Taxi.

That is the taxi calling segment, and the inter-provincial delivery service segment is the competition of FUTA, GV and Lalamove applications. If only delivering goods within the city (including food delivery), the strongest competition is still the three familiar applications including Grab, Be, Xanh SM. Gojek application left the race in the Vietnamese market from October 2024.

To gain a “place” on users’ phone screens, taxi companies run ads to get their apps installed, and offer many discount vouchers for the first bookings. Ride-hailing platforms are all racing to integrate as many services as possible, becoming super apps, making users dependent on the platform.

Grab's platform currently has advertising services for brands such as Romano, Cocacola...; Xanh SM's platform is quite creative when launching a wedding car rental service using VF 8 electric cars with a driver selection package. The price starts from 1 million VND/car for 4 hours, a round trip distance of less than 50km. If there is extra time and distance, the company will charge an additional fee.

An app programming engineer of FSoft company revealed that the cost of designing an app depends on the type of application. The popular type of app that taxi companies are using is the On-Demand App (command application) with a minimum creation cost of 500 million VND, plus operating costs depending on the number of users; the more users at the same time, the higher the cost. In particular, the fee for purchasing the copyright to use the integrated map to update location, house number, and place name on the application platform is quite expensive.

However, according to Mordor Intelligence's forecast, the size of Vietnam's ride-hailing market is worth about 1 billion USD in 2025 and could reach 2.5 billion USD in 2030. Therefore, taxi companies will persistently invest in app platforms, to increase opportunities in the multi-billion dollar transportation market in the next 5 years.

“Vietnam has seen the emergence of many platform businesses, which contribute about 10% to GDP. Platform businesses in the transport sector alone account for 16.8% of the added value of the platform industry, equivalent to 1.7% of the economy’s GDP in 2022,” according to data from the CIEM Business Environment and Competitiveness Research Board.

Source: https://congthuong.vn/cuoc-dua-phat-trien-app-cua-nganh-kinh-doanh-van-tai-374802.html