Improving ComfortDelGro’s flagging taxi business

• Main Authors: SRIKANTH, Kannan, CHAN, Chi Wei
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2018
• Subjects: Innovation; Strategy; Business Model; Disruptive Technology; Competitive Advantage; Business administration; management; and operations; Strategic management policy; Transportation; taxi; Strategic Management Policy
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cases_coll_all/204; https://cmp.smu.edu.sg/case/3461
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Sandy Sim is a senior consultant at Future Solutions, a strategy consulting firm. She was tasked by Comfort Del Gro (CDG), a multinational land transport company, to help revive their taxi business in Singapore. Companies like Grab, a regional third-party taxi-booking app, and Uber, a global transportation app, made use of technology to improve the booking of taxis and introduced private cars to meet the demand for taxis, especially at peak hours. Many customers found their services better and more convenient to use. Some taxi drivers prefer to use the Grab app for client bookings or drive private cars instead. What should Sim recommend for CDG to turn around its flagging fortunes in the taxi segment? The case can be used in undergraduate and postgraduate programmes to teach concepts related to business models, fixed and variable costs, and influence of economies of scale in making a business model attractive. This case can also be used an example to illustrate disruptive innovations, especially those that arise from new technologies. It is ideally used as the very first case in a strategy course to introduce some of the basic concepts such as business models, how business models facilitate competitive advantage, and competition based on business models.