The BMW Group and Daimler AG are joining forces to offer customers a single source for sustainable urban mobility services. The two companies today signed an agreement to merge their mobility services business units. Subject to examination and approval by the responsible competition authorities, the BMW Group and Daimler AG plan to combine and strategically expand their existing on-demand mobility offering in the areas of CarSharing, Ride-Hailing, Parking, Charging and Multimodality. Each company will hold a 50-percent stake in a joint-venture model comprising both companies’ mobility services. The two companies will remain competitors in their respective core businesses.
They claim that the alliance will:
- Shape sustainable urban mobility of the future.
- Create unique customer offering: seamless, multimodal, fast and readily available.
- Creates an ecosystem for on-demand mobility: single source for CarSharing, Ride-Hailing, Parking, Charging and Multimodality.
- Makes sustainable solutions for challenges of urban mobility and better quality of life in big cities.
- Ensure expansion of digital business models at both companies.
The merger raises the stakes for the competition. As a combined company, car2go and DriveNow would now become one the largest operators in the space, accounting for a global market share of over 30%, allowing them to go head-to-head with market leaders such as Zipcar.
The equally-owned joint venture model is designed to combine services in the following five areas:
- Multimodal and on-demand mobility with moovel and ReachNow: Intelligent and seamless connectivity between different mobility offerings – including booking and payment – will create significant added value for users. It will also offer possible solutions for the challenges of urban private transport.
- CarSharing with Car2Go and DriveNow:
Car2Go and DriveNow operate a total of 20,000 vehicles in 31 major international cities. CarSharing enables better utilisation of vehicles and thus helps reduce the total number of vehicles in cities. More than four million customers already use these CarSharing services. - Ride-Hailing with mytaxi, Chauffeur Privé, Clever Taxi and Beat:
With Europe’s largest taxi app, simply order a taxi or use a licensed driver in France for a ride in the French metropolises. In total, 13 million customers and some 140,000 drivers are already using the modern, practical and fast way of Ride-Hailing with mytaxi, Clever Taxi and Beat or private hire vehicle service Chauffeur Privé. Innovative offers such as mytaximatch, in which people not known to each other share a taxi at a fingertip, make an important contribution to reducing inner-city traffic by eliminating numerous individual trips in the urban space. - Parking with ParkNow and Parkmobile Group/Parkmobile LLC:
Ticketless, cashless on-street parking or help finding, reserving and paying for off-street parking in a garage. Innovative digital parking services reduce the time and the amount of driving involved in finding a parking space. This will reduce traffic significantly, as cars searching for parking spaces currently account for around 30% of road traffic. - Charging with ChargeNow and Digital Charging Solutions:
Easy access (incl. location, charging and payment) to the world’s largest network of public charging stations with more than 143,000 charging points worldwide. Combined with parking privileges in cities, this will support the expansion of electromobility, by helping people get to know this drive technology and integrate it easily into their mobility needs.
The formation of the joint venture will produce a significant valuation and earnings effect at Daimler Financial Services. If the approval of the competition authorities is received this year, following adjustments will be made to the group outlook for Daimler AG: The company expects EBIT for Daimler Financial Services to be significantly higher than the previous year; for the Group as a whole, this means EBIT is likely to be slightly higher than the previous year.
If approved by the relevant authorities in the course of this year, the formation of the joint venture will trigger a one-time valuation and earnings effect in the BMW AG’s group financial statement and thus lead to an adjustment of the company’s guidance: Under these c