Frost Radar™: Car Sharing in Southeast Asia, 2022

Frost Radar™: Car Sharing in Southeast Asia, 2022

In Southeast Asia (SEA), consumer preference for vehicle ownership is gradually declining, particularly in countries where parking and congestion fees strain people’s budgets. In contrast, car sharing provides a hassle-free mobility solution that can significantly reduce consumers’ living costs. Car sharing platforms are available in various business models, such as round-trip, free-floating, and peer-to-peer (P2P).

The round-trip car sharing business model will experience significant growth in SEA. With this model, users pick up and drop off the vehicle at the same location. This approach helps car sharing operators reduce fleet operational costs, such as fuel and personnel, and provide a competitive price to their customers.

The free-floating business model is seeing rapid growth in competitive landscapes such as Singapore and Malaysia. The business model offers great flexibility by enabling users to pick up and drop the vehicle at any location within set boundaries. For free-floating service providers, Frost & Sullivan's research indicates that adopting an Internet of Things (IoT) fleet management system can empower them to reduce overall operating costs and provide competitive prices in the market.

The P2P business model allows vehicle owners to make extra income by renting out their vehicle on a trusted platform. The innovative shared economy model has helped alleviate financial stress for vehicle owners and is gaining traction in the SEA car sharing market. However, the trust issue is the primary challenge for P2P players. P2P operators are encouraged to enhance trust-building technology features, such as adding driving behavior statistics to users' profiles.

Car sharing solutions gained traction during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic as people preferred private travel bubbles to avoid exposure to the virus on public transportation. Today, many use shared vehicles to run errands while working from home and to drive to regional attractions in response to border closures that have disrupted travel.

To maintain a competitive edge in the car sharing space, market participants need to forge strategic partnerships with other stakeholders (e.g., OEMs, technology companies, insurance companies) and explore new business opportunities in various aspects of the industry value chain. For example, Goldbell Group acquired BlueSG and will spend $50 million to enrich its fleet portfolio and invest in new mobility technologies and algorithms; TribeCar acquired CarClub to strengthen its end-to-end transactional capabilities and improve customer support; Haupcar collaborated with Banpu and BMW Thailand to enrich its new energy vehicle (NEV) product roadmap.

Car sharing providers should leverage advanced technologies such as IoT, big data, and machine learning to improve platform fault tolerance, data storage security, and identity authentication.

The car sharing market in SEA is highly fragmented by country. Singapore’s car sharing market is the most mature, followed by Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam. Frost & Sullivan independently plotted the top 10 companies from the overall region in this Frost Radar™ analysis.

This Radar features BlueSG, TribeCar, Popular Rent A Car (WhizzCar), Getgo Technologies (GetGo), Haupcar Company Limited (Haupcar), TC Euro Cars (GoCar), Future Mobility Solutions (TREVO), Mioto Vietnam Joint Stock Company (Mioto), Chungxe Joint Stock Company (Chungxe), and PT Astra Digital Internasional (Movic). While more than a dozen companies either are exploring the market or have recently entered it,
Frost & Sullivan has identified these 10 as the market powerhouses.

The Frost Radar reveals the market positioning of companies in an industry using their Growth and Innovation scores as highlighted in the Frost Radar methodology. The document presents competitive profiles of each company based on its strengths, opportunities, and a small discussion on its positioning. Frost & Sullivan analyzes hundreds of companies in the industry and benchmarks them across the 10 criteria, where the leading companies are then positioned on the Radar. Industry leaders on both the Growth and Innovation indices are recognized as best practice recipients.