BlaBlaCar buys ride-sharing competitors to lock in European lead

BlaBlaCar is buying its strongest competitor in Europe as the online ride-sharing company looks to consolidate its position on its home turf while continuing to expand worldwide.

The French company announced deals to buy the German group Carpooling.com, its main European rival, as well as Hungary-based AutoHop.

The combined entity will make BlaBlaCar the leading ride-sharing service in Europe, where it will control more than a 90 per cent share of large markets such as Germany, Spain and Italy. It will also create one of the world's biggest ride-sharing services with 20m users across 18 markets.

BlaBlaCar operates as an online marketplace, pairing motorists with passengers needing a lift between cities. It is one of the companies at the vanguard of the "sharing economy", which encourage individuals to offer services to others.

Nicolas Brusson, BlaBlaCar's co-founder, said the deals represent "the last step of consolidation in Europe", giving it a strong base from which it can turn its attention to lucrative emerging markets in Asia and South America.

"What matters is that we now can shift the paradigm away from competing with lookalike companies and now become part of the transport landscape," he said.

"We need to think about how we become relevant against trains and buses in places like France, Italy and Spain. To me, that's pretty exciting."

BlaBlaCar is one of Europe's best-backed technology start-ups. It raised $100m in July 2014, from venture capital groups including Index Ventures. Based on other tech investments, that capital raising would value the company at about $1bn or more.

Unlike Silicon Valley groups, such as Uber, which have faced a strong regulatory backlash when expanding into Europe, BlaBlaCar's model has allowed it to gain the blessing of regulators all over the world. The start-up says this is primarily because BlaBlaCar's drivers do not make a profit, with prices capped so passengers pay just enough to cover the price of fuel and other running costs.

The terms of the deals were not disclosed but people familiar with the matter said Carpooling was valued at tens of millions of dollars.

The purchases will allow BlaBlaCar significantly to increase its user numbers in Germany, the continent's biggest market. The AutoHop deal gives BlaBlaCar entry into four new countries: Hungary, Romania, Serbia and Croatia.

BlaBlaCar has launched in Russia, Turkey and India in recent months.

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