Entrepreneurs, start your engines: the Moroccan taxi app race is ready to begin

The news was all over the Moroccan web: Uber is looking for a community manager for Casablanca. Is the famous taxi service really about to launch in Morocco? No one is sure – yet. We do know at least one thing: Uber is not the only company eyeing the Moroccan taxi market. Two similar services, iTaxi and Taxiii, have also launched recently.

A matter of timing

For a few years now, Taxiii’s Yassir El Ismaili El Idrissi, and iTaxi’s Ali Echihabi Nadifi and Tayeb Sbihi, have been wanting to launch a company in Morocco but none of the projects they were working on felt promising enough. But when taxi apps became all the rage in Africa and the Middle East, they knew they’d found the service they were waiting for.

According to iTaxi’s Echihabi Nadifi, who was working at the time as an engineer in Canada, they had to catch the opportunity and “jump on the taxi apps bandwagon before everybody [in Morocco] got to it.” He says he expects taxi apps to go the same route as daily deals in Morocco: a rush to this sector, impressive user growth, and then only a few survivors.

It’s this same feeling of urgency that drove Yassir El Ismaili El Idrissi, a human resources manager who worked in a few Moroccan corporations, as well as a French consulting agency, to launch Taxiii. “Timing is on our side: in Morocco’s cities, now 60% of people have a smartphone,” he says (smartphones are a fundamental component of the neo-taxi app model).

Taxiii saw the light of day in Rabat in June 2014, then launched shortly thereafter in Casablanca; iTaxi launched in Casablanca in May 2014, bringing a much-need African perspective to this global sector.

Original article by Aline Mayard

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Entrepreneurs, start your engines: the Moroccan taxi app race is ready to begin