Maxim Belonogov is hard to surprise. Working in regions with taxi drivers is not for the faint of heart. Google and Yandex, at the request of Taxi Maxim, issue criminal reports: an office was set on fire in Abakan, a car was burned to the head of a department in Nizhny Tagil, a driver strangled a passenger in Omsk, and a passenger strangled the driver in Tambov. The founder of the taxi service "Maxim" is pragmatic about everything - firstly, this is Russia, and secondly, "the main thing is to start, everything else will depend on stubbornness, and we are very stubborn."

Here is the number 1 taxi service in Russia. Maxim receives 15 times more orders per day than Yandex.Taxi (one million per day versus 60,000). Belonogov's company started in Kurgan and now operates in 89 Russian cities. Its closest competitor, Rutaxi, the application of the Lucky and Leader services, operates in 82 cities. Competitors, officials and lobbyists accuse "Maxim" of all mortal sins (comment to "Secret": "You are promoting the largest organizer of illegal smuggling in Russia!"). Belonogov, on the other hand, opens new branches - and since 2014 he has gone beyond the borders of the country.

The entrepreneur did not give interviews, but his business has become too big to be ignored. According to our calculations, the company's turnover is at least 10 million rubles a day. "The Secret" tells the story of the taxi "Maxim" and its founder.

Start

It's hard to believe that this guy in a baseball cap, jeans and a plaid shirt has almost 4,000 people working for him. "Maxim" has the same number of employees as the city-forming enterprise of Kurgan - a plant that produces combat vehicles infantry. If we add to the staff of "Maxim" drivers who are currently roaming the streets of different settlements, we get small town, comparable to the same Kurgan (about 300,000 people). It took the founders a little more than ten years to create this microcosm.

Belonogov began working in high school - before the elections, acquaintances offered to go from door to door and campaign for the Liberal Democratic Party. The matter is not dusty, but it requires perseverance - in the nineties, unexpected knocks on the door were more wary than now. With the proceeds, Maxim bought LM cigarettes. His classmates envied him.

An acquaintance of Belonogov worked in a special team at the emergency hospital. The brigade took away the bodies of the dead after the doctors ascertained their death. “The corpse trucks drank ruthlessly, and my friend’s partner often didn’t show up for work,” Maxim recalls. Once a partner got drunk, and a friend brought Maxim to the director and asked him to register a 15-year-old teenager as a new assistant.

Maxim could not officially work, but he could receive tips. Belonogov says that this is the main income of corpse carriers - when a relative dies of a person, he gives money to a specialist so that he can take the body calmly, carefully, as if it matters. There were few work shifts, but there were still enough for the LM.

In the spring of 1996, when Belonogov was taking training exams before entering Kurgan University, a misfortune happened - his mother died on the day of the first exam in Russian. His father died earlier, when he was nine. They were left alone with their older brother, who also suffered from lack of money.

Belonogov bought a Pentium 100 computer and a printer for the survivor's allowance. With fellow student Oleg Shlepanov (later became a partner at Maxim), they downloaded essays in Fidonet, printed them out and sold them. At the same time, they traded in gas equipment for cars and popular radio telephones with a Rus caller ID.

In the second year, Belonogov had a daughter, but money was still not enough. One of the main dishes in the family was potatoes with mayonnaise. But the partners got their first hired employee - a disabled grandfather agreed to be a dispatcher. He skillfully persuaded people to buy new devices wholesale and retail. The scheme was as follows: to determine which phone the customer needs, and quickly reset the delivery address to the students on the pager. Maxim and Oleg sat in pairs at the university and usually someone raised their hand, asked for time off to go to the toilet, got into the car and delivered the order. The trunk was full of phones.

At the beginning of the 2000s, the business collapsed - retailers of the Eldorado level came to Kurgan. It became clear that it would be difficult to compete. The partners themselves were pretty tired of being resellers - they studied at the Faculty of Technology Automation, wrote programs and wanted to create something important, and not work as couriers.

An acquaintance of Belonogov, who worked in a paging company, offered to open a similar business. The short but colorful era of the pager was in full swing. In Shadrinsk - 140 km from Kurgan, 80,000 inhabitants - there was no paging company. True, as soon as the partners decided to open under the franchise of the Moscow Mobile Telecom, the peculiarities of the Russian business appeared in all their glory - competitors instantly appeared. I had to negotiate: Belonogov promised them to set up a paging company in Kamensk-Uralsky (175,000 inhabitants) and take it as a share.

While dealing with this project, the paging era was over. As Belonogov recalls, the guys got angry - “Oh, you pig, spent our money,” but they could not do anything. At that time, the entrepreneur rarely appeared at home, and one day, after a month's absence, the four-year-old daughter did not recognize him and turned to "you" instead of "dad". Since then, he did not leave the family for a long time.

Taxi

The paging business wasn't all that profitable. In just one month, the paging company's revenue was enough to cover office rent and staff salaries. When cell phones forced pagers out of the market, eight operators were already working in shifts for Belonogov. Then the partners decided to make a taxi service.

The calculation was this: people who have money buy cars and look askance at public transport in the future. At the same time, people in Russia drink a lot, which means that the taxi service will be in demand. The companions found an Alan 100 radio station from a friend in Kurgan, dragged it to Shadrinsk, put it on the roof of a five-story building, and rented an office on the ground floor.

Back then, a taxi ride was expensive. “Taxi drivers rented a room in a private house, sat in a circle, drank tea and answered the calls themselves in turn,” recalls Belonogov. - I offered them my pricing policy. He offered to put a radio station in the car. They sent me three letters." Belonogov understood that in order for the service to become mass, prices must be significantly reduced.

In 2003, elections to the City Duma were held in Shadrinsk, Maxim oversaw the campaign of the odious millionaire Pavel Fedulev. The millionaire won, however, then went to prison for 20 years for a series of contract killings. In this story, it is important that Maxim earned money for a used “nine” during the campaign. Even after the elections, ownerless advertising billboards remained - the entrepreneur pasted an advertisement for a new taxi on them.

Partners made an announcement: drivers with a personal car are required. Taxi drivers were recruited mostly from retired military men. It became clear that it was possible to earn money on a cab, but for this it was necessary to go beyond the borders of Shadrinsk.

Photo: Alexander Alpatkin/Sekret Firmy

In the spring of 2004, the partners "began to play taxi" in Kurgan. In Shadrinsk, the service was called "Shadrinsk", but here a problem arose - the taxi "Kurgan" already existed. One evening, the businessmen were drinking beer at the editorial office of the Nezhnyye Vesti newspaper, where Belonogov's childhood friend, designer Mitya Skokov, and editor Yevgeny Kataytsev (now the head of Belonogov's Bunker advertising agency) worked. The guys thought for a long time what to call a taxi in Kurgan, and finally someone suggested "Maxim" - there is such a men's magazine, there are cigarettes, it is easy to remember, it rhymes with "taxi". Skokov quickly drew a logo with red checkers. When the sixth branch opened, Shadrinsk was renamed Maxim.

The cable was stretched from Oleg's apartment to the neighboring basement to save money on installing a telephone, and a radio station was connected. The dispatcher and the taxi driver communicated by radio. It worked like accounting in the era before 1C - the numbers were written down in a notebook. All orders were memorized, travel time was calculated by eye.

A software solution was required. Through Fidonet, the partners found a programmer who worked at Sberbank and was looking for space for creativity. “Money was ridiculous for him, but he decided to practice what would come of it,” Belonogov grins.

Friends in Kurgan began to tell each other about the Maxim taxi, and after three months the company reached the bar of 100 orders a day. A commercial was played on the radio: a bitchy female voice said: “Taxi Maxim is known to everyone: 41-07-07.”

Expansion

At this time, taxis appeared in different regions, which worked according to a scheme similar to Maxim. Taxi companies with their own cars gradually died. They lacked flexibility - maintaining a large park ate too much money. “Let's say the weather is good now and no one needs cars in taxi companies,” Belonogov explains. “And if it rains, they will be needed - and they may not be enough.” This seasonal factor and periods of peak demand are difficult to account for.

In Krasnodar, there was a taxi "Saturn", uniting drivers and taxi companies under a single dispatcher. Maxim and Oleg went to visit to learn from experience - at that time, Saturn opened 17 branches in villages with a population of 30,000–40,000 people.

They returned inspired and decided to go to Tyumen, where there are twice as many inhabitants as in Kurgan. For the first six months, Tyumen brought in more money than Kurgan and Shadrinsk combined (partners do not disclose specific figures). “It became a shame that they lost so much time while they were afraid to get out of their shell,” Belonogov sighs.

Inspired by success, the partners decided to double their turnover and go to Chelyabinsk. The logic was as follows: 80,000 live in Shadrinsk, 300,000 live in Kurgan, 600,000 live in Tyumen, and 1.2 million people live in Chelyabinsk. There, "Maxim" applied a scheme of decentralized management - they did not transfer the entire office, but put the director in place. Orders were taken by the control room in Kurgan. If before that the company kept drivers on staff, in Chelyabinsk it began to work as an order service, transferring orders to third-party drivers.

Photo: Alexander Alpatkin/Sekret Firmy

This approach did not justify itself - either a failed director was hired, or word of mouth did not work in million-plus cities (or worked differently). It became clear: to take impudently big cities If it doesn't work, you need a plan. For two years, the partners did not open new branches, they developed a strategy.

Anton Klementyev, the CEO of the Maxim taxi, recalls the turning point: “We are going somewhere and discussing what to do next. There was a phrase - you need to leave the walkie-talkies and develop applications. In 2007, the first application for taxi drivers appeared - for phones with a resolution of 120 by 300 pixels, in Java. Then came the client application. In fact, almost no one used it.

A year later, the crisis struck. Residents of Kurgan, who bought cars on credit, taxed to recoup the costs - this helped the development of the service. The term "loan car" appeared. “I got the impression that one half of the city is thumping, the other carries it, and then they change,” Belonogov comments.

In 2009 Maxim opened a branch in Moscow. It took six years to bring it to payback.

Competitors and claims

“We are gathering the protest electorate. There are always graters,” says Belonogov about the drivers who work with his service. As soon as partners enter the region, drivers evaluate the new conditions and often start working with them. Traditional taxi companies remain dissatisfied.

In March, Amur region companies wrote a letter to Putin to prevent the spread of "illegal business" in the region. Local taxis do not withstand price dumping and give up their licenses. Vladislav Demidov, the owner of the Online taxi in the Amur region, believes: “The secret of Maxim is that they set prices that are generally unacceptable for transportation, and they don’t know what an accident of personal cars is, a doctor and a mechanic, fines from regulatory authorities and etc".

This, in general, is true - "Maxim" considers itself an IT company, and really does not worry about accidents or technical inspections, believing that their expertise is software and communications.

The service met with resistance in other cities as well. Belonogov is ready to tell such stories for a long time.

One of them - how they set fire to the office in Angarsk - is more like a joke: “The director from Angarsk calls the IT specialist, says that the switchboard burned down. The IT specialist thinks who he is in order to determine that "Tsiska" burned down. He says: how did you diagnose that she burned out? Maybe she's fine? The director sends a charred switch to the MMS for this - decide for yourself whether it burned down or not.

Partners laugh. The following dialogue occurs.

Shlepanov ( lively): “They also burned a car in Tagil.”

Belonogov ( surprised): "Yes? Already burned? We recently opened in Tagil.”

Shlepanov: “Our banner was also painted over there.”

Belonogov: “Oh, they smeared it with shit? Well, it's a normal process.

The hardest thing for ordering services is to strike a balance between a price that is low enough for the user and a price that taxi drivers are still willing to work at. “I think we developed only due to the fact that we tried to maintain the minimum price of the trip,” says Belonogov.

"Maxim" takes a commission of 10% for its services, the average check for a trip is 100 rubles. For comparison: GetTaxi takes 15%, in Moscow the average check is 400-500 rubles. A regional taxi can make a good profit only on volume. This Maxim does well. According to Sekret's calculations, the company's daily revenue reaches 10 million rubles.

According to Belonogov, Yandex went to Maxim with an offer - he offered Moscow in exchange for Russia. The partners looked at their volume and refused. "Yandex" confirmed to "Secret" the fact of negotiations.

Yandex.Taxi and GetTaxi only work with taxi companies. "Maxim", like Uber, with which the authorities of Europe and America are fighting because of illegal transportation, is with private drivers. “This is the difficulty in the regions. There are not so many taxi companies that are able to keep the brand, ”they say in Yandex. In addition, "prices in the regions are extremely low as a result of the dumping of illegal immigrants on substandard cars." Belonogov assures that it is impossible to work with one taxi fleet in the regions.

The main claim against taxi services like Maxim, Leader and Saturn is that they are not responsible for transportation. “These control rooms conclude contracts with drivers as individual entrepreneurs, effectively shifting all responsibility for transportation to them. As a result, the risks are on the side of drivers, who are also pressed by low tariffs. And all this before the first problematic case, an accident or being late for the airport. Drivers often do not realize this themselves,” says Andriy Azarov, founder of the Aerotaxi service.

Besides, "Maxim" is accused of weak check of drivers. Aleksey, a driver from Angarsk, says that the taxi does not check the drivers, “so that he is not a drug addict and has not been in a psychiatric dispensary.” Belonogov admits that it is difficult to control taxi drivers: “The driver comes, we look at the form in which he brought himself, we examine his car.” But the murders of taxi drivers occur much more often than the murders of passengers. The company learns about this from the police and helps them investigate. “Since he is driving, he is at least sober,” Maxim explains. Some drivers deliberately taxi until eight in the evening, and then wake up early in the morning when orders from drunken passengers dry up.

Uber, the largest global taxi service, is facing similar allegations. In September 2014, a court in Frankfurt am Main banned an app of the same name that linked passengers to unlicensed drivers. Uber, like Maxim, is accused of neglecting customer safety. When a Delhi driver was accused of raping a passenger, a wave of protests against Uber swept across India. The company's app was banned in France, the Netherlands, Belgium, the state of Nevada and other countries, the company is challenging the decisions of the courts.

The only precedent when the court did not work in favor of "Maxim" happened in Belgorod. The service was deemed "creating a risk of future harm." The Department of Roads and Transport of the Belgorod Region demanded that drivers be banned from working with Maxim, because the service did not have the right to provide taxi services, no required documents for transportation. The telecom operator "MTel" turned off the beautiful number 77-77-77, and the advertisement of "Maxim" was banned in the city.

“In Belgorod, I don’t communicate with anyone, I don’t have personal graters. Local - matchmaker, brother, godfather - everyone knows each other. Apparently, everything is arranged there in such a way that you need to give a share, ”says Belonogov. “When we arrived at the trial, they told us so - are you not afraid to come here? The principled position there is not to let anyone into the city under any pretext.”

According to Belonogov, a similar fate has already overtaken their main competitor in Belgorod, Take a Taxi, who left the city. Representatives of "Taxi" refused to comment on the "Secret". Now the phone number in the city is disabled, there is a ban on advertising, but people continue to order a taxi through the application.

He is not going to leave Kurgan. In addition to taxis, the entrepreneur owns a small Slavyanka confectionery factory, a Go! Touristic, the flight center "Logovushka" (a social project for the development of aviation in the region), the advertising agency "Bunker" - he acquired or opened all this with the income from a taxi.

In 2005, Belonogov wanted to run for the City Duma. He honestly admits: he wanted to buy a room that was rented from the administration of Kurgan, there was no money for the purchase, and the deputy could help. Then Belonogov lost the elections and now says that he is "not interested in politics at all." By the way, all three offices of the company in the city are owned by him.

“Bit by bit, we are collecting the whole Kurgan, many of those who are something of themselves and for some reason have not left yet, work here,” says Belonogov. Employees are paid three meals a day so that nothing distracts them from work.

"Where to go? - Belonogov approaches the wall with a map of the world. - Here. Now we are looking for ourselves, as we were looking for when we opened branches in Russia.” In 2014, the company launched 22 divisions, including in Kazakhstan and Georgia. An office in Bulgaria will open soon.

“Maxim” planned to make good money in Ukraine, but political events spoiled the business plan: “Tanks were parked near our office in Mariupol. We maintain branches, people get paid, there is devastation, what a taxi in figs, they have nothing to eat.

The taxi market is being redistributed all over the world. Authorities pass laws governing the operation of ordering services. Uber, which is valued at $40 billion, has already been banned from operating in Germany, France, Thailand and other countries. So far, Belonogov manages to grow in spite of the enemies, and he is not going to retreat. He is very stubborn - this is what helped him survive in a permanent struggle with circumstances.

Cover photo: Alexander Alpatkin/Secret Firmy

https://www.site/2017-02-21/sozdatel_taksi_maxim_startoval_na_samodelnom_vezdehode_k_ledovitomu_okeanu

“We are not suicidal! We are building a car that will reach"

The creator of the taxi "Maxim" started on a homemade all-terrain vehicle to the Arctic Ocean

Born at the very beginning of the 2000s in Kurgan, the Maxim taxi service is now one of the largest companies in this market in Russia. But its founder Maxim Belonogov, who started his business selling essays, is now passionate about a new ambitious project. For the second year, with the help of Aleksey Makarov, an all-terrain vehicle builder from Yekaterinburg, he has been persistently building a car on the outskirts of Uralmash that can reach the North Pole. The name of this all-terrain vehicle is Burlak. In March 2016, the Ural designers tested the first prototype, driving it from Ivdel along the Ural Mountains to the Kara Sea. Today they have already loaded "Burlak-2" onto the trailer, intending to repeat the route. If everything goes well and the modified car will show itself properly, then by next year Belonogov and his comrades will build another Burlak and go to the North Pole in two cars at once ..

- What is your goal now?

- This is an expedition, a dash test car. Last year we built the first Burlak, took it to the Kara Sea, Baidaratskaya Bay and tested it. Let's just say that I liked the car in some ways, but I didn't like it in some ways.

- As far as I remember, there were some remarks to her.

- There were comments. We sold it entirely and built a fundamentally new car. Not new in appearance - they changed, let's say, the layout. In the first "Burlak" the engine was in the back, now in the front ...

Why did you take such a step?

- We changed the weight distribution and redid all the decisions on the transmission. We greatly lightened the car, this one is lighter by about a ton of the first option. Changed final drives.

— What was wrong with the first Burlak?

- First of all, it was necessary to change the weight distribution of the car and load its face. The first option was hard going through deep snow and uphill. We then expected that the weight of the engine would be compensated by the crew that would be in front. But if you continue to make a car, so to speak, for the national economy, all the same, the main load and, accordingly, the weight will be at the back. Now we will test whether it has become worse or better.

- I see you have also made another propeller for moving on water.

— This screw goes up. On the last car there was a goryushko with a screw. Especially when the car fell through the ice. We then removed it and repaired it. Now cuts are made of metal, and there will be no such problems.

- The first Burlak had an engine from Toyota Surf, and now?

- Now also from Toyota Surf, only from a new car. Just then there was a 1KZ engine, diesel, 145 horses. Now 1KD, also diesel. The block [of cylinders] is the same there, but this one is more modern and produces 170 “horses”. Torque is also higher here, fuel efficiency is better. Yes, 1KD is more difficult to maintain, but our task is to make the engine go to the North Plus - 4-5 thousand km - and return the car back. Therefore, we believe that it is quite suitable.

The Ural enterprise at the expense of the state fund will produce tires for all-terrain vehicles

- How much did the construction of the modernized Burlak cost you?

- A little cheaper than the first one. The first, together with the cost of a test run, came out to about 12 million rubles. Now it is cheaper, because some of the costs that we incurred when we built the first Burlak were no longer there. For example, at that time, molds for casting wheels cost us 4 million rubles. Now they are already there. Accordingly, the costs are only for the manufacture of the wheel itself.

- Is the wheel expensive?

- About 50 thousand rubles apiece.

- Who casts them?

- China agreed. If we then make 100 such machines, then the production of the mold will probably pay off.

- What does the second "Burlak" from the domestic, so to speak?

- Almost everything. Racks at the Yekaterinburg Aggregate Plant were made to order. Reducers from armored personnel carriers, but they also made cases for them themselves. The axles have gears from Toyota, but the cases are handmade. The body of the car was made by hand. In Kurgan, they made a transfer case for taking power to the propeller. There is such a microfactory, they make gears and gearboxes for the military. On the previous Burlak, gears were made in Tolyatti. What is called, they collected from all over the forest. They just bought a ready-made shovel (laughs and points to the Fiskars bayonet shovel attached to the back). The picks to break the ice were even made from long products themselves.

Alexey Makarov in "Burlak"

- The secret, to whom was the first Burlak sold?

- Bought guys from Latvia. We met them during the first test run in 2016 on the road from Inta to Vorkuta (Komi Republic). They are professional travelers, they have quite strong sponsors: Garmin, Norfin (the first is a manufacturer of navigation equipment, the second is clothing for extreme conditions - ed.). The geography of travel among the guys is constantly expanding and has now expanded to our North. They thought that they were riding in prepared jeeps and would calmly reach the Baidaratskaya Bay. But it turned out that everything was a little different. We met them when they stood on the winter road in the line and waited for them to clear the way with tractors. We drove past them, and then they called and asked for our all-terrain vehicle.

- How much did you pay?

He didn't redeem himself. We gave it away at the cost of components - about 7 million rubles. For their tasks, that machine was sufficient, and we explained all the details to them. This allowed us to build a second machine of a fundamentally different design. Before the sale, by the way, we also redid something in the first Burlak: racks, cooling radiators, pipes.

— This year, how many cars will go on a test run?

- Last year, Burlak and Makar were used - these are Andrey Makarov's previous developments. This year there are "Burlak-2" and "Emelya". Machines of the latter type have already been to the North Pole twice. Specifically, the one that comes with us was once. She came from us under her own power through the North Pole to Canada and in a circle through Alaska returned to her homeland. It was made by Vasily Elagin, co-organizer of the Marine Polar Expedition.

Is this the Yelagin whose experience actually inspired Makarov to make his Arctic all-terrain vehicle?

I don't know if they inspired each other or not. Elagin was the first, and when he was building his car, Alexey had not planned to do it yet. But they have known each other for a long time and communicated closely.

- Good. What route will you take this time?

“Now we are finishing loading the equipment onto the trailer and going to Ivdel. I think we'll be there in the evening. From there, follow the old route on your own. Through the Dyatlov Pass, we will pass near Narodnaya and further to Baydaratskaya Bay. We did not change the route, because we remember how the first Burlak behaved last year, and now it is important for us to understand how the new one behaves. The path is beaten, it is important to understand what has changed in the behavior of the car. Plus, compare with how the Emelya rides. If Burlak turns out to be worse, we will generally decide whether it is worth going to the North Pole in this car or whether we need to refine it again. By the way, Burlak and Yemelya have a fundamentally different form factor: different crew habitats, different wheels. "Emelya" is a highly specialized vehicle designed to pass to the North Pole. "Burlak", as we plan, can be converted to the needs of the national economy.

- In 2016, you announced plans to go to the North Pole this year.

We have changed the design. Of course, I understand that this smacks of endless modernization. On the other hand, we are not suicidal. Our task is to build a car that will get there, not a car that will have to be abandoned in the ice. The plans remain the same, everything just shifts another year ahead. Provided that the new version will show itself well.

- Why do you need all this?

- It doesn't matter how many days are in our lives, it is important how much life is in our days.

There is hardly a person in Birobidzhan who has not at least once resorted to the services of the Maxim taxi call service. The service is convenient, especially if you use the application for smartphones.

Now it is the largest IT company in the field of passenger transportation in Russia, its turnover is more than Yandex.Taxi, Uber and Gett, and the company itself is estimated at $100 million.

In the team of our project, no one wondered how Maxim was created. There were thoughts that most likely some large businessmen from Moscow simply decided to monopolize the taxi market and become a dominant in this area.

To our surprise, "Maxim" turned out to be the success story of one very simple and stubborn Russian guy from the provincial Shadrinsk near Kurgan, who, in terms of his starting opportunities for young people, is very similar to Birobidzhan.

Maxim Belonogov - the creator of the taxi "Maxim" - grew up in a frankly poor family. The father died early. Mother stretched as best she could, she was very sick. Already at school, Maxim traded newspapers on the street, and also collected signatures for the LDPR party for money.

In the 11th grade, he worked part-time in a local ambulance - they took the corpses of dead people from their homes and took them to the morgue. The ambulance staff drank mercilessly, and often there was no one to go on shift. He worked illegally by verbal agreement with a doctor friend. Maxim himself admits that he often took tips for the removal of bodies.

After high school, he went to college. On the day he wrote the exam essay, his mother died. Maxim stayed with his older brother.

They bought a computer for the survivor's allowance, began to print abstracts from the Internet and sell them to students.

In the second year of high school, he married, a child was born in the family. I had to work harder: as a loader at night, he sold gas equipment and telephones. Later, my friend and I decided to organize a paging company in Shadrinsk. Things went well, but paging was killed by cellular communications.

The remaining equipment was decided to be used to create a taxi. We found a room in one of the basements, planted several operators. They took a radio station from friends to communicate with the drivers.

Compared to competitors, paging equipment made it possible to organize multi-channel dialing - it was easier for customers to get to the operator, there were enough free lines, and it was possible to call a taxi faster. The customers liked it and the business began to grow.

A little later, the company moved to a larger office apartment, there were 20 operators, they worked in a small room in violation of all labor laws. Then we went from Shadrinsk to Kurgan, it was there that the service acquired its name "Maxim" and a logo with red and black checkers. Invented, by the way, over a glass of beer with friends somewhere in the apartment.

Over time, we decided to digitize the process of accepting orders. I found an IT specialist from the local Sberbank and wrote a simple program for recording calls and calculating travel time.

In 2007, they tried to develop an application for smartphones, but it did not work. We will return to the development of this product later. Then we realized that we needed to go beyond the borders of Kurgan, the next office was opened in Tyumen.

Then the crisis hit, many people lost their jobs and began to taxi to pay for cars bought on credit. Then the service blossomed. As Belonogov himself says: “I got the impression that one half of the city was thumping, and the other half was carrying it, then they changed places.”

Then we went to other cities and to the capital. Success and money came. "Maxim" has become what we know it, with a turnover of 10 million rubles a day.

As Maxim Belonogov notes, he bought his first good car "Toyota Camry" from the salon only 4 years after the launch of the project - all available funds were first invested in the business. Business first, luxury later.

On the way to success, a young man always worked part-time somewhere, did something to break out of poverty, step up a step. The entrepreneur came to the conclusion that there is no dirty or bad work. Any work that is not related to crime and violence against people, in his opinion, is worthy to be performed.

The businessman says that he was equally happy when he took out the corpses in an ambulance for a small fee, and now, when Maxim plans to enter the markets of Iran, Iraq and Syria.

Belonogov advises young people not to be afraid of anything, but to push against the horn and go to the end, then you can definitely reach the goal. Success doesn't come right away. It took him 13 years to do it.

The businessman claims that he never contacted the state and relied only on himself. Then he recalls that he tried to become a deputy of the Kurgan City Duma in order to resolve the issue of acquiring premises for an office. But he didn't succeed. Since then, he prefers not to deal with politics or with the authorities.

It turns out rather the opposite, in the various cities where Maxim came, officials, lobbying the interests of their friends from local transport companies, raised a storm and demanded that the service be banned. The company has been sued a lot.

Recently "Maxim" has created a specialized fund to help clients injured in road accidents. Belonogov dreams of developing tourism in the Yamal tundra and even developed a special all-terrain vehicle "Burlak" for this.

The head office of the company is still located in Kurgan. This is extremely surprising for Moscow businessmen who come to the city for negotiations. They cannot understand why Belonogov continues to sit in a provincial, by Moscow standards, hole. He smiles and replies that everything suits him and that in a small Kurgan there is everything necessary for his business.

In just a few years, mobile technology has revolutionized the taxi niche, intensifying competition to the breaking point. This greatly facilitated the life of passengers: the time of car delivery was reduced several times, trips became much cheaper.

Taxi market size

The democratization of taxi prices led to the growth of the market, which by 2015 amounted to $ 9 billion (this is a November estimate of the analytical company Merku). Oksana Serebryakova, board member of the Taxi Dispatch Services Association, does not agree with this figure. According to her calculations, the market size is no more than $6 billion, or about 420 billion in rubles. Due to the crisis, the number of orders for different carriers has fallen by 40-50%, Serebryakova is convinced, and this year it will definitely not grow.

“The size of the market is very difficult to calculate,” admits Mikhail Vinogradov, founder of Taxilet. - In our calculations, we are guided by 1 trip per day for 10 residents of million-plus cities. That is, in Moscow we can talk about a million movements per day.”

None of the players wants to share data about their volumes. The market for the most part consists of illegal and unrecorded traffic and participants. From our experience in the regions, we have derived a formula: usually the daily traffic volume is 10% of the city's population. The average check depends on the standard of living and the presence of a network operator in the city (a large network of dispatchers - ed.). In millionaires it is 100-150 rubles, in small towns - 60-80 rubles. Therefore, we take 15 million trips around the country per day, multiply them by 100 rubles of the average check and get 1.5 billion rubles of turnover per day. Approximately 20% of this amount is received by dispatchers, approximately 1% - by taxi software providers. These are very rough numbers, but they can serve as a basis for understanding a market that cannot be accurately estimated.

The founder of the Gett taxi service, Shahar Waiser, predicted that in the next 3-4 years the Russian taxi market will grow to $15-20 billion, and this will happen due to online services. Another market participant is convinced that this figure does not reflect the current realities and was announced by Gett specifically for investors to show the potential and attract the next round.

And the head of Cat Taxi, Gennady Kotov, considers it incorrect to evaluate the Russian taxi market in dollars due to exchange rate fluctuations and the fact that the cost of transportation is absolutely not tied to the currency. At the same time, he notes that the fall of the ruble is extremely beneficial for Gett and Uber: external investments give them additional opportunities for dumping in Russia.

Number of taxi drivers

In October 2015, more than 180,000 taxis were officially operating in Russia (Rusbase interlocutors suggest that this figure covers only legal drivers). In Moscow alone, according to the city's transport department, there are about 55,000 licensed taxi drivers. Moreover, many drivers cooperate with several services at once.

According to the founder of "Taxilet" Mikhail Vinogradov, about 100,000 more taxis operate in the capital without licenses, operating under charter agreements. this is when the aggregator instructs a private driver to transport a passenger for money (moreover, the contract can be oral)- and that's not counting those who come from the region. “The number of illegal taxis, depending on the situation in the country, may tend to the number of all cars,” says Vitaly Makhinov, founder of the Russian Taxi Exchange.

Aggregators vs. classic taxis

There are two groups of players in the taxi market: taxi companies with their own fleet and taxi service aggregators. The latter enter into agreements with taxi companies (Yandex.Taxi) or with private drivers registered as individual entrepreneurs (Uber, Gett, Maxim, Leader, Saturn). According to some estimates, taxi services account for more than half of taxi traffic in Moscow.

There are no more than a thousand full-fledged taxi companies with their own fleet and economic base per country. As for aggregators, they are divided into pure online (without an office and a dispatcher - Gett, Uber, Yandex Taxi, etc.) and traditional dispatchers that have their own mobile applications (Maxim and others).

Aggregators consider themselves IT companies that help the driver and passenger find each other. Formally, they do not fall under the law "On Taxi" - it simply does not contain the concepts of "dispatching taxi service" or "information service". Traditional carriers accuse them of unfair competition: aggregators are not responsible for traffic accidents, passenger safety, late arrivals at the airport, and technical serviceability of the car. In addition, having already entered the database of the information service, the driver can close the IP in order not to pay taxes.

Yaroslav Shcherbinin,

Chairman of the Interregional Trade Union "Taxi Driver"

Applications create conditions for illegal activities by attracting illegal carriers. This is one of the main components of their success. There is no accounting and deduction of taxes for working drivers, there are no requirements for ensuring safety, responsibility to the passenger in case of emergency. Consumers are attracted by the price at the level of the cost of the trip. Most drivers do not understand the unprofitability of this type of activity and are drawn into this pyramid. It is difficult for traditional players to compete in such conditions.

Mikhail Vinogradov,

founder of taxi

Of course, the old taxi owners are offended. For decades they plowed, took risks, beat them, burned their cars, waited at the entrance, extorted money, choked them with taxes. They survived, endured it all, became leaders. And now their guys in sneakers are squeezing. But no matter how much the archers strike, they cannot oppose the submachine gunners.

Hidden Leaders

The media field is dominated by well-known metropolitan aggregators - Yandex.Taxi, Gett and Uber. But on a national scale, the top three federal control rooms are confidently leading - Rutaxi, Saturn and Maxim. They prefer to stay in the background, do not disclose indicators and practically do not communicate with journalists.

“These are the real market leaders, probably even the world ones,” says Mikhail Vinogradov. “In fact, these are Russian Ubers, moreover, they are efficient and live without third-party investments.” The real masters of the market so far remain the gray cardinals in the regions, agrees the head of Cat Taxi Gennady Kotov. According to him, there is an abyss between the federal troika and the rest of the market participants. According to rough estimates, in total Rutaxi, Saturn and Maxim make about 4 million transportations per day. Their shares in this volume are 40%, 35% and 25% respectively.

So they are not at all afraid of competition with well-known metropolitan services. Yandex.Taxi, Gett and Uber occupy an absolutely microscopic share of the Russian market, - a representative of one federal network shares on condition of anonymity. “Each of us makes more trips individually than all of us put together.”

Apps don't rule

According to experts, in Moscow the share of ordering a taxi through applications reaches 65-70% (including small players), in St. Petersburg - no more than 30%, in million-plus cities - no more than 8%, and in the outback - no more than 3%. The fact is that in the regions the population has much fewer smartphones than it seems from Moscow.

In addition, navigation is poor in the regions: the mobile Internet is lame in settlements with a population of less than 200 thousand. This greatly complicates the work of applications - the driver simply cannot find the passenger. Taxi drivers in small towns work the old fashioned way, with walkie-talkies. And Maxim, Rutaxi and Saturn thrive thanks to well-developed dispatching and integration with telephony.

To create a full-fledged online service in the regions, it is necessary to invest heavily in local cartography in order to clarify maps of rural areas and improve navigation capabilities, Oksana Serebryakova, member of the board of the Association of Taxi Dispatch Services, believes. Now taxi services from the outback rely on local drivers who are well versed in their native lands. According to the head of Cat Taxi Gennady Kotov, online does not come to the outback not because of cartography, but because local taxis are in no hurry to make applications until a strong competitor (networker) comes along.

Player Portraits

And now it's time to talk a little about the leaders of the online taxi market. If you think that we have undeservedly forgotten someone, add to the list in the comments.

All-Russian leaders

Rutaxi- mobile app and a system for ordering a taxi service "Lucky" and "Leader". This federal network of dispatching offices operates in 90 cities of Russia and 3 cities of Kazakhstan (Almaty, Astana, Karaganda). According to experts, Rutaxi accounts for about 1.6 million transportations per day - this is the largest player in the Russian market. The network cooperates with both private taxi drivers and taxi companies, relieving them of the need to maintain their own dispatchers. The application for ordering a taxi from a Rutaxi smartphone, according to them, was launched in 2011. The percentage of the commission and the number of cars "Rutaxi" does not advertise.

In each city, the “Leader” has separate legal entities registered, their type of activity is formulated as “data processing”. According to the Unified State Register of Legal Entities, the founder of almost all divisions of the network (including Lider LLC and Vezet LLC) is Ufa businessman Vitaly Bezrukov (in some places together with partners). Apparently, it was he who founded the Leader taxi service in 2003. Bezrukov has not yet appeared in the field of view of the media. In 2012, he participated in the II All-Russian Congress of Taxi Drivers. His photo can be seen on the website of the Ufa Aviation Club:

"Saturn"

Entrepreneur Evgeny Lvov launched the Saturn taxi service in the city of Timashevsk (Krasnodar Territory) in 1998. Today the company has grown into a federal taxi network that operates in 43 cities across the country. Interlocutors of Rusbase calculated that it makes about 1.4 million shipments per day. Like its competitors, Saturn has a legal entity registered in every city, and Evgeny Lvov himself owns almost all of them. In 2012, the network launched the TapTaxi mobile application for ordering a car without the participation of a dispatcher.

In 2015, Evgeny Lvov, together with partners, launched the Fasten taxi app in the United States, which will compete with Uber itself. In September, the project was launched in Boston, and this year it will appear in Russia. Knowledgeable people say that the founders of the project have very big plans that will significantly affect the taxi market.

The history of the company began in 2003 with a small taxi service in the city of Shadrinsk (Kurgan region). The service was launched by entrepreneur Maxim Belonogov.

Maxim Belonogov

Now the company operates in 114 cities of Russia and 11 more cities in Ukraine (Mariupol, Kharkov), Kazakhstan (Aktobe, Astana, Petropavlovsk, Uralsk), Georgia (Batumi, Tbilisi, Kutaisi, Rustavi) and Bulgaria (Sofia). Infoservice LLC (legal entity Maxim) makes about one million shipments per day. Judging by the data of the Unified State Register of Legal Entities, in each city, Maxim has registered entity. The founders of the regional divisions are Maxim Belonogov and Oleg Shlepanov.

"Maxim" works with private drivers, from whom it takes a commission of 10%. They work with a proprietary application and a dispatch service (90% of orders are received by phone). The average check for a trip in the network is 100 rubles. The company earns 10 million rubles a day, Sekret Firmy calculated in April. In 2011, an additional direction stood out from the company - a service for dispatching taxi companies Taxsee.

"Maxim" is the leader in the number of cities, but in many of them it is present only nominally, clarifies a critical Rusbase source.

Capital Leaders

Taxi service from Yandex entered the market in 2011. It was the initiative of the son of the founder of the corporation, Lev Volozh. The service works only with taxi companies - now Yandex.Taxi has 450 partners, which unite 30 thousand cars. In April 2015, they were processing 60,000 orders per day. Current estimates range from 100,000 to 200,000 trips per day. Today the service is available in 14 cities - Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Krasnodar, Sochi, Vladikavkaz, Novosibirsk, Omsk, Perm, Samara, Tula and Voronezh. Since 2016, Yandex.Taxi has been a separate company within the holding. CEO Tigran Khudaverdyan became Yandex.Taxi, who has been in charge of the service since 2014, and before that he was in charge of Yandex's mobile products.

Tigran Khudaverdyan

You can pay for the trip in cash or bank card. The commission for taxi companies is 11% + VAT, the average check for a trip in Moscow is 533 rubles. The aggregator also offers the market a professional software package for taxi services "Yandex. Taximeter", which includes a program for taxi companies and a mobile application for drivers. As stated on the product website, 1,000 companies and 200,000 cars across the country are connected to it. In January 2015, Yandex bought the Ros.Taxi service, which allows taxi companies to take orders, coordinate the work of drivers and keep records.

Israeli entrepreneur Shahar Waiser came to Russia with his GetTaxi service in 2012. Now Gett taxi (updated name) can be ordered in 10 cities of Russia - Moscow, St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Nizhny Novgorod, Sochi, Yekaterinburg, Krasnoyarsk, Samara, Rostov-on-Don and Krasnodar. In Moscow, the average check is 400-500 rubles, the Gett commission is 15%. This is more than Yandex, but Gett's functionality is wider - in addition to aggregation and user support, the company is engaged in hiring and training taxi drivers.

The service works with taxi companies and private drivers who have a license for passenger transportation. In total, about 20 thousand machines are available in the Gett system. The Russian division of the company is headed by Vitaly Krylov.

The famous American startup entered the Russian market at the end of 2013. He works with private drivers whose cars do not have taxi identification marks. A license is required to connect to the Uber system. As a matter of principle, Uber does not disclose data on the number of drivers and the commission charged from them.

The service was launched in 7 cities - in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Kazan, Novosibirsk, Rostov-on-Don and Sochi. The Russian office of the scandalous unicorn is run by Dmitry Izmailov. “We are interested in all cities with a population of more than 100 thousand people,” he said in an interview with Rusbase.

City-Mobil LLC is one of the largest metropolitan carriers that works with private drivers. Entrepreneur Aram Arakelyan, together with partners, created the company in 2007. The Citymobil service was one of the first to introduce software for automated distribution of orders between the nearest cars, reducing the waiting time to 10 minutes. Now more than 20 thousand taxi drivers work with it, who pay a 15% commission to the service. Citymobil is a Yandex.Taxi partner, so service drivers accept orders from both systems. In 2014, Citymobil received 10% of Moscow's orders. The service also operates in Krasnodar, Rostov-on-Don and Kazan, and plans to conquer the CIS countries in the future.

"Russian Taxi Exchange"

In 2008, partners Vitaly Makhinov and Vladimir Chirkov launched Russia's first b2b taxi order aggregator for taxi companies and dispatch services - the Russian Taxi Exchange (RBT). The story began with 15 partners who were offered to exchange "uncomfortable" orders among themselves. At the moment, more than a thousand taxi fleets and dispatch services, as well as more than 50 thousand drivers, are connected to the RBT system. More than 10,000 orders a day go through RBT every day. RBT General Director - Ruslan Kalinov.

What will happen next?

Where is the Russian taxi market going? The market participants we interviewed agree that fierce competition is being replaced by cooperation based on innovation. Moreover, these changes are based on cost reduction. New players bring fresh ideas to the industry and pull passengers not from other taxis, but from public transport (helping to unload it). They transfer to taxis those who could not afford it before.

Outsourcing and separation of roles optimize the costs of companies. Taxi fleets will be responsible for cars and drivers, flexible technology companies - for marketing, sales and logistics. In the regions, this will be implemented when there are enough smartphones. Taxi technologies and ideas come from related markets: cargo transportation, navigation and traffic monitoring. Technological cooperation will help overcome the crisis in the taxi industry, experts emphasize.

The agreement is aimed at uniting the efforts of the service and regional authorities for the further legalization of the taxi market. The service intends to maintain the high quality, availability and safety of the taxi service, participate in the discussion of draft industry regulations, and propose measures to encourage carriers to comply with the legislation on taxi transportation. The Department, for its part, declared its readiness to take into account the expert opinion of the largest market participant, to create conditions so that it would be profitable for carriers to obtain permission to operate a taxi and work legally.

The parties began preparing the agreement after a working meeting between the Deputy Director of the Department, Evgeny Dmitriev, and the heads of the largest taxi services, which took place in March 2016.

Maxim Shusharin, director of the MAXIM taxi service:

We are interested in cooperation only with legal carriers and do everything within our powers to increase their number. Residents of the city see how many cars with checkers and branding of our service are on the streets. But the efforts of one company are not enough. Much depends on the legal framework, conditions for entrepreneurship. Therefore, we need joint actions with the authorities, effective decisions that can only be made in the dialogue between government and business. I note that over the past 2 years, all our proposals and joint discussions with the authorities have resulted in specific solutions. The order and mechanism of what is written in the regulatory framework has been reworked into quite comfortable conditions. In the Kurgan region, the cost of obtaining a permit is affordable, there are certain preferences for persons who have received permits, and most importantly, this is the opportunity to conduct a constructive dialogue with the authorities. The region managed to avoid ill-conceived decisions to establish a single color scheme for taxis, raids on taxi drivers and other negative things. We will soon be signing similar agreements in Moscow and Khabarovsk.

Alexander Konstantinov, Director of the Department of Industry, Transport, Communications and Energy of the Kurgan Region:

The interaction between the executive authority and the largest market operator will contribute to the creation of conditions for the legalization, improvement of the quality and safety of transportation. By signing the agreement, we would like to put things in order. First of all, this is the issuance of orders only to those carriers who have permission to operate a taxi. Those who carry passengers should root for their business and consider it their profession, and not a part-time job for half an hour. We are now faced with an additional task - to organize a network of stops for legal taxis in order to "block the road" to illegal immigrants. Specially created working groups have already outlined the first points - these are the airport and the railway station. All structures, including city ones, understand the need for this step. Taxi is the face of the city. We expect that other taxi services, following the example of the MAXIM service, will also begin to legalize transportation.