A2B - A2B Australia

ROE said:

Those compared CAB to Newspaper is generalizing all disrupting technology will killed off incumbent and probably misunderstood CAB business.

I am of the view CAB will eventually beat them all like FLT with the internet, as you need more than just the Apps to kill CAB, you need much much more more and none of the new entrance has any of it

Click to expand...

So the story goes, the guys at Kodak, the guys that played a big part in developing digital saw the rise of digital as inevitable and were super conscious of the fact that Kodak had to under go massive change to survive...and they failed miserably.

FLT from memory didn't reinvent themselves, just carried on...i cannot see CAB surviving if they just carry on.

Kodak is best described as a case of "why CEO's are paid far more than they're worth".

Plenty of people at Kodak knew where the future lay. They were the technical types coming up with the ideas. Trouble is, they weren't the people running the company and the rest is history.

So far as taxis are concerned, I suspect that the future is going to be radically different to what we have today. My thoughts are along the lines of driverless cars, fares considerably lower than at present (due to the lack of a human driver) and a substantially increased usage of taxis in inner city areas.

Driverless cars - very much on the way. In the context of taxis, it just means a need for some system to input the required destination and pay the fare - not overly difficult given the existence of Google maps and credit / debit cards. Plus some means of monitoring that the vehicle isn't damaged - doable with an assortment of sensors and noting that the customer's ID etc is already known by virtue of the payment method. The odd one might get trashed and set on fire, but the lack of having to pay drivers, plus the greatly reduced mechanical wear due to non-human driving, would easily offset that I'd expect.

Electric - easy if you have the taxis return to a number of central points (eg an on-street taxi rank) and just use induction to charge them at that location whilst they're waiting for the next job.

Sometime in the future, I expect that "taxi" means a driverless electric vehicle. If you want one with a human driver, that's a "hire car" in the same context that they exist today.

As a business, I see this future as not much different to industries (past and present) such as VHS / DVD rental, electricity / gas retailing, fast food and many more.

There was never any fundamental reason to stop you or I setting up a single VHS (or Beta for those old enough to remember) rental store and many did that in the early days. Just like there's nothing to stop us having 1000 electricity retailers and there's nothing to stop me selling hamburgers complete with fries and a soft drink and doing so by means of an outlet with tables, take away and drive through options.

In reality however, a few big players came to dominate the Beta / VHS / DVD rental industry, electricity retailing has become concentrated heavily into the "big 3" and a handful of smaller players, and the burger business is largely in the hands of McDonald's and Hungry Jack's.

I see the future of taxis as much the same. Nothing fundamental to stop a one car operator but in reality a small number of big operators will absolutely dominate it. Whether or not CAB is one of them remains to be seen.

Sooner uber/lyft drive CAB into bankruptcy the better.

Smurf1976 said:

I see the future of taxis as much the same. Nothing fundamental to stop a one car operator but in reality a small number of big operators will absolutely dominate it. Whether or not CAB is one of them remains to be seen.

Click to expand...

History tells us it wil likely be CAB, they are the dominant player with a lot of competitive advantage. I think your vision of the driverless car is outside my lifetime, but CAB will see off the likes of uber in the medium term. They will lose some market share along the way, but traditional taxis arent going out of business any time soon.

galumay said:

I think your vision of the driverless car is outside my lifetime

Click to expand...

The driverless car has been around for a few years now, google has pretty much perfected it.
~
[video=youtube_share;bDOnn0-4Nq8]http://youtu.be/bDOnn0-4Nq8[/video]
~
[video=youtube_share;Orzgw4GPA10]http://youtu.be/Orzgw4GPA10[/video]

So_Cynical said:

The driverless car has been around for a few years now, google has pretty much perfected it.

Click to expand...

There are already driverless trucks on mine sites and associated private roads and now at least one Australian state (SA) is proposing the appropriate legislation to make them legal on public roads.

I suspect that many (most?) will still prefer to manually drive their own private vehicles, but for taxis I can see a definite move to driverless at some point given the financial incentive. I can see some arguments against it too, but most of those also apply to things like self serve checkouts and having electronics in aircraft. In reality, those things have happened so I do think I'll live to see driverless cars on the road in due course, taxis being an obvious application of them so far as passenger vehicles are concerned.

Smurf1976 said:

So far as taxis are concerned, I suspect that the future is going to be radically different to what we have today. My thoughts are along the lines of driverless cars, fares considerably lower than at present (due to the lack of a human driver) and a substantially increased usage of taxis in inner city areas.

Click to expand...

fully with you on that one: driverless car will be here surprisely quickly IMHO and that will change the game.
competition for the companies become global and that will annihilate CAB;
the same system doing the booking, routing dispatching and pay will drive the car too.I can bet you it will not be CAB.

what is CAb except a monopoly?
no technical advantage, no more way to bribe the driver operators thru pay back of some fees
anyway, make hay while the sun shine
Why should really care about what is in store in 10y time for a company when a fed decision or the next election can devastate the stockmarket overall;
as you can imagine, not a great fan of value investing, at least not on a high overpriced market

Smurf1976 said:

There are already driverless trucks on mine sites and associated private roads and now at least one Australian state (SA) is proposing the appropriate legislation to make them legal on public roads.

I suspect that many (most?) will still prefer to manually drive their own private vehicles, but for taxis I can see a definite move to driverless at some point given the financial incentive. I can see some arguments against it too, but most of those also apply to things like self serve checkouts and having electronics in aircraft. In reality, those things have happened so I do think I'll live to see driverless cars on the road in due course, taxis being an obvious application of them so far as passenger vehicles are concerned.

Click to expand...

And taxi is one area where I would much prefer deal wioth a machine that the human we usually have as drivers.
But i do prefer manned checkout at woolies....

qldfrog said:

Why should really care about what is in store in 10y time for a company when a fed decision or the next election can devastate the stockmarket overall;

Click to expand...

If you look at the past 30 years, a key defining theme economically is that what were once monopoly or at least very dominant utility-like businesses have been deregulated and opened up to competition. That's happened in everything from banking to airlines to actual utilities such as gas and electricity.

CAB / taxis is one of the very few businesses of that nature still around which hasn't been deregulated and opened up to competition. And yet it's one of the easiest to do - there's no physical gas pipes or power lines to worry about, no major safety concerns and high barriers to entry like with aviation, no worries about collapsing the entire economy as with banks. But government has deregulated all the rest, so the risk that taxis are deregulated at some point seems extremely high to me, partly because it's one of the very few things left that hasn't already been deregulated.

Smurf1976 said:

CAB / taxis is one of the very few businesses of that nature still around which hasn't been deregulated and opened up to competition.

Click to expand...

Not sure about that, I think the Taxi industry is already deregulated in the manner that you are speaking about. There will always be a level of regulation to protect consumers, just like banking and airlines, health insuarance etc.

BTW I am not dogmatic in my overall view, CAB do have legislative and competitive threats, but I do think the impact of changes in the industry may have been over stated by those who seem to have some sort of emotional dislike of CAB. They are still a healthy business and they are not expensive by any metric I use.

I may well be entirely wrong about the driverless taxi too, but I will honestly be surprised to see them within 20 years, and of course a company like CAB might find a way to gain enterprise value from such a breakthrough anyway.

galumay said:

I think your vision of the driverless car is outside my lifetime, but CAB will see off the likes of uber in the medium term.

Click to expand...

The US has passed legislation in some states to allow this experiment. The annoyance these high caution programmed vehicles will cause human drivers is foreseeable. The anxiety a passenger would feel is foreseeable. This automation does work in a controlled environment such as a work site but the road space where free wills operate it is never going to work.

galumay said:

Not sure about that, I think the Taxi industry is already deregulated in the manner that you are speaking about. There will always be a level of regulation to protect consumers, just like banking and airlines, health insuarance etc.

Click to expand...

It might be deregulated somewhere in Australia (?), but it isn't in Vic and Tas at least.

You need a "taxi plate" to legally operate as a taxi, and government has gone as far as to actually limit the number of such licenses issued to a fixed quantity, to the extent that the license itself holds considerable value. In Victoria, they even regulate what colour the taxi vehicle is.

If taxis were deregulated, then anyone who meets the criteria and pays a modest fee (no more than $1000) could obtain a taxi license with no limit on the number issued. And there certainly wouldn't be any law about the colour of vehicles unless that law was some general traffic law applying to all vehicles on the road, not just taxis.

If I want to run a bright blue Camry as a taxi then it should be straightforward to get a "taxi plate" and that shouldn't involve needing to buy it from another operator. In a free market, governments don't regulate supply.

The current model is essentially economic regulation to ensure that taxis are profitable for those who operate them, achieved by means of artificially restricting supply. That approach has long since been done away with in other industries from airlines (the old two airline policy) to supermarkets to petrol retailing (anyone remember petrol rostering?).

Regulations have recently changed in Vic, the price is around$22k a year for a taxi license and I don't think there is any limit.

galumay said:

I may well be entirely wrong about the driverless taxi too, but I will honestly be surprised to see them within 20 years.

Click to expand...

can I do a bet with you Galumay: by december 2020, some will be driving in Australia;
the only risk is Australia is often 20 y behind but I believe it will not be the case for the taxi
a picture of me wearing a silly hat posted on that thread if I loose...and if I win that CAB thread might not be that active anymore!!!!so up to you to choose your own cost
Wait and see

There is a more profitable way than betting

If you think CAB is doom short the sucker and if you think it will do well long it.

and if you just hate CAB for some reason or another then just bag it out, the market
is a weighting machine, short term it will reacts to all sort of good news, bad news, rumour,

prediction, doom day scenario but all will gravitate toward the weighting machine years down the road and
the only thing that matter is cash flow and profit, and Mr market will weight it according to its cash flow
and profit.

Business heavy with those 2 artefacts will be weight on the upper scale and those light in those 2 will weight down lower scale everything else will be place under the weighting table and get throw out

ROE said:

prediction, doom day scenario but all will gravitate toward the weighting machine years down the road and
the only thing that matter is cash flow and profit, and Mr market will weight it according to its cash flow
and profit.

Click to expand...

True, as I wrote before, it is not because I believe that company will be pulverised within 10 years that you can not make money tomorrow
but please do not use any "value" argument on that bet

qldfrog said:

can I do a bet with you Galumay: by december 2020, some will be driving in Australia;
the only risk is Australia is often 20 y behind but I believe it will not be the case for the taxi
a picture of me wearing a silly hat posted on that thread if I loose...and if I win that CAB thread might not be that active anymore!!!!so up to you to choose your own cost
Wait and see

Click to expand...

I can do a silly hat!

galumay said:

I can do a silly hat!

Click to expand...

Done deal, remind me if you win and I forget
Cheers

So_Cynical said:

This industry is in transition, 100% no doubt about it....the new guys are queuing up to kill the incumbents.

https://www.lyft.com/

Click to expand...

And theres another one.

http://www.ztrip.com/

The CAB result wasn't so bad. I think that the regulators sparing the radio network has worked to CAB's advantage in a big way. It's been pretty well worked over in the last few months. It's still too pricey for me to buy, but it's around fair value, or my judgement of it anyway.

I don't really know why they still persist with the bus thing. Surely that cash is better in the hands of shareholders.