Field Agent recently completed an interesting mini-survey on e-hailers in South Africa.
We collected responses from all over the country, targeting any interested agents over a limited time frame, with no quota or demographic restriction. We asked a few basic questions: “Do you have E-hailer services in your city?”, “Do you use E-hailer services?”, “Would you be interested in using e-hailer services?”, and “How often would you use the service?”
In all, there were 1683 responses, and the results were pretty interesting, let’s find out more about it!
78% of all respondents reported e-hailer services in their city. Using the 80:20 rule, we isolated the top 64 locations with at least 75% confidence of access to e-hailer services and represented these in the map below.
It was also interesting to understand which regions do not have e-hailer services. Again, we looked at our top agent locations to isolate 29 towns that reported, with a high degree of confidence, that did they do not have access to e-hailer services. The top 8 towns were as follows: East London, Umtata, Thohoyandou, Mokopane, Rusloo, Bethlehem, Nelspruit; and Rustenburg.
Out of the agents that did have access to e-hailer services, a whopping 91% reported that they use the services. For those agents that reported no access, 84% reported that they would be interested in accessing the services.
We asked all agents how often they would use e-hailer services. It was interesting to note that 30% of agents that did use the service reported that they did this more than once a week. See below graph:
For agents that did not use the service, it was interesting to see that more than 48% of respondents said that they would use the service at least more than once a month if it were available.
The survey was useful in that it highlighted areas in South Africa, currently being used as well as highlighting potential opportunities for future expansion. There definitely appears to be a strong interest in obtaining e-hailer services, and current usage appears to be high. As these services become more mainstream, the ground appears to be fertile for growth in the industry. It would be interesting to compare these results against a future survey in about a year or two.
Focus on the future: Ready to unlock the full potential of 2024?:
Regards,
The Field Agent Team.