Line Taxi leapfrogs Uber, now in over 90 cities across Japan

Line Taxi premiered in January in Japan, giving users of the popular messaging app an easy way to book a cab. Like Uber’s Japanese debut, it was limited initially to Tokyo. Uber may have reached beyond Tokyo first when it started ride-sharing in Fukuoka, but Line Taxi is firing back with a major expansion of its own. From today, it will be available in over 90 additional cities across Japan.

The cities cover 20 prefectures as well as Osaka and Tokyo. Notable inclusions are Yokohama, Sendai, and Sapporo, while well-known prefectures like Hiroshima, Fukuoka, and Saitama now have cabbies connected to Line Taxi patrolling the streets.

The push to claim more territory comes as Line Taxi appears to be seeing positive traction in Tokyo. The company says 34 percent of first-time users come back for a second time. 15 percent use it three times or more. Concrete user numbers were not released.

An army of cabs

This news highlights why Line’s partnership with Nihon Kotsu and its 23,000 taxis – the nation’s largest group – is so critical. Line can literally throw manpower at this problem, something Uber’s understaffed fleet cannot. That said, Line Taxi’s national success is still far from certain.

The average Japanese taxi driver is 58.3 years old and 97.3 percent of them are male. That demographic is a major reason why shipments of feature phones rose at a higher pace than smartphones in Japan during 2014. While age is no limiting factor on technological adaptability, after interacting with numerous taxi drivers during my time in Japan I have to say that expecting Nihon Kotsu’s silver-haired army to instantly master the nuances of a smartphone-based service is ambitious.

Looking forward, neither Hailo nor Uber are unlikely to fold in the face of Line Taxi’s latest play. Uber offers UberTaxi and UberTaxiLux in Tokyo alongside its UberBlack service, showing that it, too, can increase its resources with local partnerships.

Even so, it clear that the Line is willing to pump a considerable amount of resources into its taxi service. It remains to be seen how much Uber is ready to open up its own wallet. UberTaxi and UberTaxiLux remain Tokyo-only services.

See: Wary of regulatory hurdles, Uber is registered as a travel agency in Japan