THE POWER LIST

The year of the consolidator

This industry has been through a lot in the last few years. COVID and the ongoing effort to get drivers back into the profession has made this a challenging time for fleet owners. This has created a golden opportunity for consolidators such as Take Me, DG and Veezu who are leading the market in purchasing fleets and merging them under one umbrella, which in turn has provided a lucrative exit to fleet owners that may have been struggling with the turbulence of the market. Alongside this consolidation we’re also seeing plenty of acquisitions all over the industry. We’ve previously seen Uber buying Autocab which has seen their ‘Local Cab’ service launched with over 120 operators. More recently, Gab Guru has acquired Cordic and CabFusion is the holding company for Cab Guru and Cordic. Cab Guru and Cordic each retain their business identity’s, under the operator lead, CabFusion investors. A couple of examples of the Cab Fusion investors would be Phil Bailey of Abba Cars in Warrington and Joe Polley of Parker Car Service in London. 

Despite the undeniable impact COVID had, it’s clear to see that the industry is bouncing back and regaining its strength. There also seems to be an aura of togetherness as we see more collaboration across the sector than ever before which is supported by conception of The Taxi Alliance, a collaboration and partnership based business spun out of iCabbi that enables fleets to partner with their dispatch provider, which now has over 500 fleets as members consisting of over 40,000 vehicles. iCabbi are now under the new leadership of Michael Tope. 

We’ve also seen the emergence of another dispatch provider in Cab9. It’s been some time since a new dispatch provider entered the market. Cab9, Led by Tarpit Grover, have recently been successful in onboarding Star Cars Birmingham and Blueline Newcastle to their dispatch software. 

It would be remiss of us not to mention the company which holds the number one spot on the list, Veezu, with 12,500 vehicles which all have the ‘powered by Veezu’ branding beneath the name of the individual fleet brand. In second place, we have Addison Lee, who added the iconic black cab to their range of transportation services when acquiring Comcab London in 2021. Addison Lee are the largest independent fleet in the U.K and have all their vehicles solely branded with Addison Lee logo. We’d also like to highlight a real success story of the industry, that is the story of Drive, Hull. As we know, many taxi companies have been passed down from generation to generation, starting as far back as the 1950’s, Not Drive. Drive only entered the market in 2017 and with aggressive expansion plans through acquisition and organic growth, this seemingly ‘young’ business has grown to a fleet of over 1000 vehicles and is now competing in size with the stalwarts of the industry. 

In this list we break down the largest fleets in the U.K. with additional information such as the dispatch provider, the company leadership and a bio on the business. This information has been collated by Dotted and validated by independent research. 

This is the first of many lists that will be created by our team and we plan to continue this year on year in order to analyse and track the growth of individual fleets and the industry as a whole.