Billionaire Arkadiy Pekarevskiy together with his partners launched an aggregator for renting ships
Billionaire Arkadiy Pekarevskiy together with his business partners launched an aggregator for renting ships and buying tickets for sea travel. This market’s capacity in Russia is estimated at 80 billion rubles a year. The businessman plans to bring the aggregator to the international market.
Arkadiy Pekarevskiy, former co-owner of Sela retail chain, current owner and developer of Aztec confectionery factory, became a co-owner of Anyships, a global aggregator that helps travellers rent a sea or river vessel in Russia and Europe or buy tickets for sea trips anywhere in the world.
Experts estimate the water passenger transportation market in Russia, which the St. Petersburg startup has recently entered, at 80 billion rubles a year. But they warn that very few such aggregators success, as business margin is low, and risks are high.
Portal for ships and passengers
The Anyships company was registered in St. Petersburg in the summer of 2017. According to SPARK (an analytical system for checking companies), Arkadiy Pekarevskiy (No. 239 in Delovoy Petersburg business magazine billionaires rating with a fortune of 2 billion rubles) owns 50% of this business. Another 45% belongs to Georgy Kozhukhovsky, the owner of the Numidal company, which operates eight light ships, with two of them owned by Georgy himself. Another 5% belongs to Dmitry Borodin, co-owner of Topface.com, an international dating service, one of the most popular websites on the Runet.
As Georgy Kozhukhovsky told the Delovoy Petersburg, the aggregator Anyships.ru will start operating in Russia in mid-April, offering tickets for excursion boats, St. Petersburg high-speed river boats ‘Meteors’, (and from June, for sea ferries), and it will also be possible to rent ships in Russia and Europe (only in Spain, Italy, France, Turkey and Israel so far).
“We are working on a global service that would sell tickets for all types of water transport. In autumn we’ll launch an app offering tickets for any ship anywhere in the world or rent the whole ship online. For the ship owners this resource will become not just a platform for sales, but also a business management system”, Georgy Kozhukhovsky said.
Arkadiy Pekarevskiy explains his participation in the project: “First, I love innovations. Second, initial investments are relatively low, while the demand for the service is obvious. We plan to reach self-sufficiency this year. Third, there is an opportunity to make the project international. So, the ambition to create a kind of Uber for water transport is not that utopian,” Arkadiy commented and emphasized that in the near future the company will start opening representative offices in other maritime cities of the world. According to Pekarevskiy, the investments in the project will be up to about 10 million rubles.
Artem Barshay, general director of Soyuzkhimtrans-Auto LLC (a transport company that develops and implements an app for road freight transport), estimates product development alone to require some 10-15 million rubles. “Add spendings on promotion, which can reach 75 million rubles, since mass advertising is needed to attract a large number of users,” he says.
According to some estimates, the creation of the Uber platform cost about $350 thousand (about 20 million rubles).
Success with nuances
Experts estimate passenger water transportation market capacity in Russia, Anyships company has recently joined, at 80 billion rubles a year. In 2017, 24 million people were transported across the seas and rivers of the country. St. Petersburg accounts for about 1.3 billion rubles a year (2017 data).
“The emergence of such a platform is likely to seriously undermine the private seasonal business of river transportation in St. Petersburg. Its players used to work on a spontaneous customer attraction scheme and cooperating with travel companies that fill pleasure crafts with tourists. They will either have to connect to the aggregator or reduce prices,” said Ilya Zharsky, managing partner of the Veta Expert Group. He says, the aggregator needs a lot of boats to operate successfully. “And in St. Petersburg almost all the boats are divided between private companies, which used to work the old way. It will be difficult to negotiate with them, because with the new scheme of work, the shipowners can lose money. Massive resistance of the ship owners can put an end to the aggregator’s future,” Ilya Zharsky says.
There are also other threats to new businesses. First, the use of an aggregator raises the issue of responsibility in case of an accident. “Since aggregators joined the taxi industry, injured passengers cannot always defend their rights in court and find the ultimate culprit, as the aggregator only connects the client and the carrier company. Here the risks are the same,” one of the experts says. Second, there is a high probability that the aggregator’s work will be limited by the navigation season (since it’ll start its development from St. Petersburg), and navigation in the city lasts 3-4 months. “It is possible that the aggregator will start working at the beginning of the tourist season and will disappear when it’s over”, one of the market participants suggests.
By water, by land and by air
The Russian online travel market is estimated at 700 billion rubles. This is 2.1% of the global market, according to Data Insight. Thus, in case aggregator goes international, it’ll have more opportunities to grow, but bigger risks as well.
More and more travelers around the globe plan their routes themselves. And they use aggregators such as OneTwoTrip, Aviasales, Momondo, etc. a lot.
“There is, for example, Airbnb.com, which among other services offers to rent a yacht. Or Aferry.ru, which successfully sells ferry tickets all over the world. But there is no platform that would combine all the segment’s services in one,” one of the experts told Delovoy Peterburg.
“There are some successful examples of water aggregators on the global market, but I don’t know an international network that would spread around the world like Booking.com,” Sergey Pirozhnikov, the founder of the Kupibilet.ru service adds.
Experts warn that there are not many successful aggregators in the world.
“Uber is under strong public pressure in many countries. The software it uses is easy to copy, and that’s exactly what its competitors do if they fail to negotiate on prices. And shipping business margins are low. The commission on each ticket sold will be low, and that’s also a risk’, the developer of IT-applications (including “Uber for tourists”) Alexander Pinchuk says.
Source the Delovoy Petersburg https://www.dp.ru/a/2018/03/28/Pojmali_volnu