Uber acquires rival Fly Taxi in Hong Kong, Sing Tao reports

Uber has acquired the main remaining alternative taxi-hailing app in the city. Acquired five months before Hong Kong’s new ride-hailing licences are expected to come into force, the move locks in Uber’s consolidated position before competitors Didi, Tada and Amap can use the licensing transition as an opening.

Uber is acquiring Hong Kong’s Fly Taxi, the city’s main remaining alternative taxi-hailing app, according to a Sing Tao Daily report cited by Bloomberg on May 1.

The transaction has not yet been independently confirmed by Uber, by Fly Taxi, or by other Western wires, and the financial terms have not been disclosed in the available reporting.

If the deal closes as Sing Tao describes, it consolidates Uber’s position in Hong Kong’s taxi-hailing market five months before the city’s new ride-hailing licensing regime is expected to come into force.

Fly Taxi, locally branded ‘Fly Taxi 的士’, is the metered-taxi booking app that became the de facto alternative to Uber after Uber’s 2021 acquisition of HKTaxi. HKTaxi, the most popular cab-hailing app in the city with more than 70,000 registered drivers at the time of the deal, was fully integrated into Uber and shut down in February 2025, with users redirected to Uber and offered cash-equivalent migration incentives.

Fly Taxi inherited a meaningful share of those users, commuters who specifically did not want to switch to Uber and travel guides have continued to recommend it as the principal alternative.

The strategic logic of the deal is inseparable from Hong Kong’s pending regulatory transition. The Road Traffic Amendment Bill, passed by Hong Kong’s Legislative Council on October 15, 2025, established the city’s first formal licensing framework for ride-hailing platforms.

Under the new rules, platform operators will need to obtain a licence; drivers will need both a personal permit and a vehicle permit; vehicles must be no more than 12 years old; drivers must be at least 21, hold a driving licence for at least one year, have no serious traffic convictions in the past five years, and pass a designated test.

Operating an unlicensed ride-hailing platform once the law takes effect will be punishable by a maximum HK$1 million fine and up to one year behind bars.

Uber’s 2021 HKTaxi deal was structured as a market consolidation in the metered-taxi-booking layer, not in the broader ride-hailing market. Hong Kong’s taxi-hailing market is meaningfully separate from its private-vehicle ride-hailing market, both legally and culturally: the city has approximately 18,000 metered red taxis, 70,000-plus registered taxi drivers, and a long tradition of street-hail and dispatch booking that ride-hailing apps have layered on top of, rather than replaced.

The Fly Taxi deal fits a wider Uber pattern of locking in market position around regulatory inflection points. In February 2026, Uber announced its first cross-border ride-hailing service between Hong Kong and Macao, and relaunched in-app taxi hailing in Macao nine years after withdrawing from the city under regulatory pressure.

The same week, Uber announced robotaxi expansion into Hong Kong, Madrid, Houston and Zurich, with Hong Kong becoming Uber’s first robotaxi market in Asia. The cross-border service, the Macao return and the robotaxi expansion all assume a regulatory environment that is meaningfully different from the one Uber has operated in since 2014.

Globally, the same logic has driven Uber’s recent transactions. In Turkey, Uber agreed in early 2026 to acquire Getir’s delivery portfolio, consolidating its position alongside Trendyol Go in a market where it had previously coexisted with multiple competitors.

Uber’s $1.25 billion Rivian robotaxi deal, $300 million Wayve commitment, and Tokyo robotaxi pilot with Wayve and Nissan all reflect a strategy of buying or partnering into market position ahead of the autonomous transition rather than waiting for it to arrive. The Hong Kong Fly Taxi deal applies the same logic to a regulatory rather than technological transition.

Yet, neither Uber nor Fly Taxi has issued a public statement confirming the transaction. The financial terms, the integration timeline, and whether Fly Taxi will continue to operate as an independently branded app or be folded into Uber on the HKTaxi precedent have not been reported.

If the deal closes as Sing Tao reports, the Hong Kong taxi-hailing market in October 2026, when the new licensing regime takes effect, will look meaningfully different from the one analysts had been pricing in.