Blablacar Case Study

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The start-up of the company began in France when the founder of the car-sharing company, Frederic Mazzela, and Nicolas Brusson created covoiturage.fr (the initial car pooling company) together. They renamed the company BlablaCar in 2006. The BlaBlaCar, already serve many European markets. The company has expanded in Western European countries as well as in the Eastern Europe. The global expansion into the Eastern Europe markets occurred via mergers and acquisitions whereas that was not true for the Western Europe. The company already operates in particular countries such as France, Spain, Italy, the UK, Belgium, Luxembourg, Portugal, Poland, Ukraine and Russia.
The company was already present in France and Spain for several years when they started to internationalize the company. There are a lot of competing companies like BBC that operates in the car-sharing market worldwide. The most aggressive competitor is carpooling.com, German company founded in 2001. The German company is already operating in 40 countries (most of them in Europe), and is planning to expand in the U.S. Besides, there are also car sharing companies that only operate nationally. Global and national companies should be considered before taking the decisions to go globally. Furthermore, the car pooling market is a substitute for all kind of public transport (train, bus, cabs, plane,etc). The chairman of SNCF, the French national rail operator views BlablaCar as one of the greatest new threats to his company.
BBC expanded in the United Kingdom in 2011. ??
The expansion pattern in Italy occurred in 2012 January when Blablacar acquired PostoinAuto for 12,5million, the largest car sharing company in Italy at that moment. Blablacar hired the founder of PostoinAuto...

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...Italy, Spain, Ukraine, Poland) and expanded successfully. In addition, there is a potential company namely yolyola.com (YY ) which can be acquired by establishing the acquisition. By acquiring the yolyola.com, this would give the BBC complete control as the competition would be eliminated. Moreover, the incumbent company YY knows the local market which would help to coordinate global actions. However, it may follow that company would face the post-acquisition integration problems, political problems and risks (explained in the section “Foreign market: Turkey) and high development costs. The decision model of expanding to Turkey market was explained applying real issues that country has to deal with. Apparently, there are drawbacks by entering the market. However, the BBC has market experienced and that would make the company be able to solve the arising problems.

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