— This is the script of CNBC's news report for China's CCTV on August 9, 2018, Thursday.
Currently, the regulatory on shared car rental from NYK government enable NYK be the 1st one to take action to regulate the development of shared car rental in US. Now, people may have 3 questions. 1st , the timing of move? Because in NYK, people were heavily reliant on taxi, but the shared car rental companies, such as UBER and LYFT, got a boom development making the competition between sharing economy and traditional warm up.
Since 2015, UBER and LYFT scaled out in NYK, the number of sharing car increased from 25k to 80k. Currently, sharing car rental offers 17million services to NYK residents per month and the number of sharing car jumped. This situation is also related to the dissatisfactions of local subway and bus system. From this year, many taxi driver in NYK against the development of sharing car rental, so confrontation between those two interest groups making the government has to intervene at this time. In a one-year license period, NYK taxi and TLC who are responsible for issuing license will do a research on the impact of sharing cab rental to decide if they have to control of the number of sharing cab and which area can run the sharing cab rental, etc..
The 2nd question is that what the view of market to this potential regulatory is. Of course, UBER and LYFT will organize some customers to against this rule.
They believe launching a regulatory will make the NYK residents wait for a longer time and pay more fees when they take a taxi, and the sharing car rental's urban service that with the biggest advantage will get strike. Supporters, however, think if we don't control its number, then the big city in US, such as NYK, Chicago and Los Angeles, etc. will face overload, hurting the ability of traditional drivers to pick up passengers.
So the competition between those 2 groups will get more intense in the following one year. The 3rd question is how does this kind of regulatory affect sharing economy? 1st, we have wo know if the policy in other cities of US will follow NYK's. Currently, Boston and other cities have signed a contract with UNDER and LYFT, asking them release more detailed data about the number of services offered, but in addition to imposing tax and safety supervision, there is no other regulations. But if cities like Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles follow, they the market will doubt the increasing ability of UBER and LYFT, and that may even affect UBER's IPO process, originally planned for next year. We will keep an eye on this issue.