There is hardly a person in Birobidzhan who has not used the Maxim taxi service at least once. The service is convenient, especially if you use an app for smartphones.

Now it is largest IT company in the field of passenger transportation in Russia, its turnover is higher than Yandex.Taxi, Uber and Gett, and the company itself is estimated at $ 100 million.

In the team of our project, no one asked how Maxim was created. There were thoughts that most likely some large businessmen from Moscow simply decided to monopolize the taxi market and become a dominant in this area.

To our surprise, “Maxim” turned out to be a success story of one very simple and stubborn Russian guy from the provincial Shadrinsk near Kurgan, who is very similar to Birobidzhan in terms of his starting opportunities for young people.

Maxim Belonogov - the creator of the Maxim taxi - grew up in an openly poor family. The father died early. Mother stretched as best she could, was very sick. Already at school, Maxim sold newspapers on the street, and also collected signatures for the LDPR party for money.

In the 11th grade, he worked part-time in a local ambulance - they took the corpses of dead people from their homes and took them to the morgue. The ambulance workers drank mercilessly, and often there was no one to take over. I worked illegally by oral agreement with a doctor I knew. Maxim himself admits that he often took a tip for the removal of bodies.

After school he entered the institute. On the day he wrote the examination essay, his mother died. Maxim stayed with his older brother.

They bought a computer for the survivor's allowance, began to print abstracts from the Internet and sell them to students.

In the second year of university, he got married, a child was born in the family. I had to work harder: as a loader at night, I sold gas equipment and telephones. Later, my friend and I decided to organize a paging company in Shadrinsk. Things went well, but paging killed the cell phone.

The rest of the equipment was decided to be used to create a taxi. We found a room in one of the basements, put several operators in prison. They took a radio station from friends to communicate with the drivers.

Compared to competitors, paging equipment made it possible to organize multichannel dial-up - it was easier for customers to get to the operator, there were enough free lines, and it was possible to call a taxi faster. The clients liked it and the business started to develop.

A little later, the company moved to a larger office apartment, there were 20 operators, they worked in a small room in violation of all norms labor legislation... Then we went from Shadrinsk to Kurgan, where the service acquired its name “Maxim” and a logo with red and black checkers. By the way, they thought up it over a glass of beer with friends somewhere in the apartment.

Over time, we decided to digitize the process of accepting orders. I found an IT specialist from the local "Sberbank" and wrote a simple program for accounting calls, calculating travel time.

In 2007, they tried to develop an application for smartphones, but it did not work. We will return to the development of this product later. Then we realized that we needed to go beyond the borders of Kurgan, the next office was opened in Tyumen.

Then the crisis hit, many people lost their jobs and began to tax in order to pay for cars bought on credit. Then the service blossomed. As Belonogov himself says: "I had the impression that one half of the city was drinking, and the other half was carrying it, then they changed places."

Then we went to other cities and the capital. Success and money came. “Maxim” has become the way we know it, with a turnover of 10 million rubles a day.

As Maksim Belonogov notes, he bought his first good Toyota Camry from the showroom only 4 years after the launch of the project - all available funds were first invested in the business. Business first, then luxury.

On the way to success, a young man always worked somewhere, did something to get out of poverty, to step up a notch. The entrepreneur came to the conclusion that there is no dirty or bad job. Any work that is not related to crime and violence against people, in his opinion, is worthy to do it.

The businessman says that he was equally happy when he took out corpses in an ambulance for a small fee, and now, when Maxim plans to enter the markets of Iran, Iraq and Syria.

Belonogov advises young people not to be afraid of anything, but to rest with a horn and go to the end, then you can definitely come to your goal. Success does not come immediately. It took him 13 years.

The entrepreneur claims that he never contacted the state and relied only on himself. Then he recalls that he tried to become a deputy of the Kurgan City Duma in order to resolve the issue of acquiring premises for an office. But he failed. Since then, he prefers not to deal with either politics or the authorities.

It turns out rather the opposite, in various cities where "Maxim" came, officials, lobbying the interests of their friends from local taxi companies, raised a storm and demanded that the service be banned. The company was sued a lot.

Recently, Maxim has created a specialized fund to help clients who have suffered from road accidents. Belonogov dreams of the development of tourism in the Yamal tundra and even developed a special all-terrain vehicle "Burlak" for this.

The head office of the company is still located in Kurgan. This is extremely surprising for Moscow businessmen who come to the city for negotiations. They cannot understand why Belonogov continues to sit in a provincial, by Moscow standards, hole. He smiles and replies that everything suits him and that a small Kurgan has everything he needs for his business.

In just a few years mobile technologies revolutionized the taxi niche, escalating competition to the extreme. This made life much easier for passengers: the time of car delivery was reduced several times, trips became much cheaper.

Taxi market volume

The democratization of taxi prices led to the growth of the market, which by 2015 amounted to $ 9 billion (this is the November estimate of the analytical company Merku). Oksana Serebryakova, board member of the Association of Taxi Dispatch Services, disagrees with this figure. According to her calculations, the market volume is no more than $ 6 billion, or about 420 billion in rubles. Due to the crisis, the number of orders for different carriers fell by 40-50%, Serebryakova is convinced, and this year it will definitely not grow.

“The market size is very difficult to calculate,” admits the founder of Taxilet, Mikhail Vinogradov. - In our calculations, we are guided by 1 trip per day for 10 residents of cities with a population of one million. That is, in Moscow we can talk about a million movements per day. "

None of the players wants to share data on their volumes. The market for the most part consists of illegal and unrecorded traffic and participants. From our experience in the regions, we have derived a formula: usually the daily traffic volume is 10% of the city's population. The average check depends on the standard of living and the presence of a networker in the city (a large network of control rooms - ed.). In millionaires it is 100-150 rubles, in towns - 60-80 rubles. Therefore, we take 15 million trips around the country per day, multiply them by 100 rubles of the average check, and we get 1.5 billion rubles of turnover per day. About 20% of this amount is received by dispatchers, about 1% - by software providers for taxis. These are very rough numbers, but they can serve as a basis for understanding the market that cannot be accurately estimated.

The founder of the Gett taxi service Shahar Weiser predicted that in the next 3-4 years the Russian taxi market will grow to $ 15-20 billion, and this will happen due to online services. Another market participant is convinced that this figure does not reflect the current realities and was announced by Gett specifically for investors to show the potential and attract the next round.

And the head of Cat Taxi, Gennady Kotov, considers it incorrect to assess the Russian taxi market in dollars due to exchange rate fluctuations and the fact that the cost of transportation is absolutely not tied to currency. At the same time, he notes that for Gett and Uber, the fall of the ruble is extremely beneficial: external investments give them additional features for dumping price Russia |

Number of taxi drivers

In October 2015, more than 180 thousand taxi cars were officially operating in Russia (Rusbase's interlocutors suggest that this figure covers only legal drivers). In Moscow alone, according to the city department of transport, about 55 thousand taxi drivers are licensed. Moreover, many drivers cooperate with several services at once.

According to Mikhail Vinogradov, the founder of Taxilet, there are about 100 thousand more taxis operating in the capital without licenses, operating under charter contracts. this is when the aggregator for the money entrusts a private driver with the transportation of a passenger (moreover, the contract can be oral)- and that's not counting those who come from the region. “The number of illegal taxis, depending on the situation in the country, may tend to the number of all cars,” says Vitaly Makhinov, founder of the Russian Taxi Exchange.

Aggregators vs. classic taxis

There are two groups of players operating in the taxi market: taxi companies with their own fleet and aggregators of taxi services. The latter conclude contracts with taxi companies (Yandex.Taxi) or with private drivers registered as individual entrepreneurs (Uber, Gett, Maxim, Leader, Saturn). According to some estimates, taxi services account for more than half of all taxi services in Moscow.

There are no more than a thousand full-fledged taxi companies with their own fleet and economic base per country. As for the aggregators, they are divided into pure online (without an office and a dispatching office - Gett, Uber, Yandex Taxi, etc.) and traditional dispatching offices that have their own mobile applications (Maxim and others).

Aggregators see themselves as IT companies that help the driver and passenger find each other. Formally, they do not fall under the law "On Taxi" - it simply does not include the concepts of "taxi dispatch service" or "information service". Traditional carriers accuse them of unfair competition: aggregators are not responsible for accidents, passenger safety, late arrival at the airport and technical serviceability of the car. In addition, having already entered the database of the information service, the driver can close the IP so as not to pay taxes.

Yaroslav Shcherbinin,

Chairman of the Interregional Trade Union "Taxi Driver"

Apps create conditions for illegal activity by attracting illegal carriers. This is one of the main ingredients for their success. There is no accounting and deduction of taxes for working drivers, there are no requirements for ensuring safety, liability to the passenger in the event of an emergency. Consumers are attracted by the price of the trip. Most drivers do not understand the unprofitability of this type of activity and are drawn into this pyramid. It is difficult for traditional players to compete in such an environment.

Mikhail Vinogradov,

founder of Taxilet

Of course, the old taxi owners are offended. For decades they plowed, took risks, beat them, burned their cars, waited at the entrance, extorted money, strangled them with taxes. They survived, endured it all, became leaders. And now their guys in sneakers are tight. But no matter how much the archers go on strike, they cannot oppose anything to the submachine gunners.

Secretive leaders

The media field is dominated by well-known metropolitan aggregators - Yandex.Taxi, Gett and Uber. But on a national scale, the three federal dispatch centers - Rutaxi, Saturn and Maxim - are confidently leading. They prefer to stay in the background, do not disclose indicators and practically do not communicate with journalists.

“These are the real leaders of the market, probably even the world one,” says Mikhail Vinogradov. "In fact, these are Russian Uber, moreover efficient and living without outside investments." The true owners of the market are still gray cardinals in the regions, the head of Cat Taxi Gennady Kotov agrees. According to him, there is an abyss between the federal troika and the rest of the market participants. According to rough estimates, Rutaxi, Saturn and Maxim altogether make about 4 million traffic per day. Their shares in this volume are 40%, 35% and 25%, respectively.

So they are not at all afraid of competition with well-known metropolitan services. Yandex.Taxi, Gett and Uber occupy an absolutely microscopic share of the Russian market, - a representative of one federal network shares on condition of anonymity. "Each of us individually makes more shipments than all of them put together."

Applications do not rule

According to experts, in Moscow, the share of ordering a taxi through applications reaches 65-70% (including small players), in St. Petersburg - no more than 30%, in cities with a population of one million - no more than 8%, and in the outback - no more than 3%. The fact is that in the regions the population has much fewer smartphones than it seems from Moscow.

In addition, in the regions, navigation is bad: Mobile Internet limps in settlements with a population of less than 200 thousand. This greatly complicates the operation of applications - the driver simply cannot find the passenger. Taxi drivers in small towns work the old fashioned way, with radios. And Maxim, Rutaxi and Saturn thrive thanks to their well-developed dispatching and telephony integration.

To create a full-fledged online service in the regions, you need to invest heavily in local cartography in order to clarify maps of rural areas and improve navigation capabilities, says Oksana Serebryakova, a board member of the Association of Taxi Dispatch Services. Now taxi services from the hinterland rely on local drivers who are well versed in their native lands. According to the head of Cat Taxi, Gennady Kotov, online does not come to the hinterland, not because of cartography, but because local taxis are in no hurry to make applications until a strong competitor (networker) arrives.

Player portraits

Now is the time to tell a little about the leaders of the online taxi market. If you think that we have undeservedly forgotten someone, add to the list in the comments.

All-Russian leaders

Rutaxi - mobile app and the system of ordering a taxi of the services "Lucky" and "Leader". This federal network of dispatching offices operates in 90 cities of Russia and 3 cities of Kazakhstan (Almaty, Astana, Karaganda). According to experts, Rutaxi accounts for about 1.6 million traffic per day - this is largest player the Russian market. The network cooperates with both private taxi drivers and taxi companies, eliminating the need to maintain their own dispatchers. The application for ordering a taxi from a smartphone "Rutaxi", according to them, was launched in 2011. Rutaxi does not advertise the percentage of the commission and the number of cars.

In each city, the "Leader" has registered separate legal entities, their type of activity is formulated as "data processing". According to the Unified State Register of Legal Entities, the founder of almost all divisions of the network (including LLC Leader and LLC Vezet) is the Ufa businessman Vitaly Bezrukov (in some places together with partners). Apparently, it was he who founded the taxi service "Leader" in 2003. Bezrukov has not yet appeared in the field of view of the media. In 2012, he took part in the II All-Russian Congress of Taxi Drivers. His photo can be seen on the website of the Ufa Aviation Club:

"Saturn"

Entrepreneur Yevgeny Lvov launched the Saturn taxi service in Timashevsk (Krasnodar Territory) in 1998. Today the company has grown in federal network taxi, which operates in 43 cities of the country. The interlocutors of Rusbase calculated that it makes about 1.4 million shipments per day. Like its competitors, Saturn has a registered legal entity in every city, almost all of them are owned by Yevgeny Lvov himself. In 2012, the network launched the TapTaxi mobile application for ordering a car without the participation of a dispatcher.

In 2015, Evgeny Lvov, together with partners, launched the Fasten taxi call app in the United States, which will compete with Uber itself. The project was launched in Boston in September and will appear in Russia this year. Knowledgeable people they say that the founders of the project have very big plans that will significantly affect the taxi market.

The history of the company began in 2003 with a small taxi service in the city of Shadrinsk (Kurgan region). The service was launched by entrepreneur Maxim Belonogov.

Maxim Belonogov

Now the company operates in 114 cities of Russia and 11 more cities in Ukraine (Mariupol, Kharkov), Kazakhstan (Aktobe, Astana, Petropavlovsk, Uralsk), Georgia (Batumi, Tbilisi, Kutaisi, Rustavi) and Bulgaria (Sofia). LLC "Infoservice" (legal entity "Maxim") makes about a million shipments per day. According to the Unified State Register of Legal Entities, in each city Maxim has registered entity... The founders of the regional divisions are Maxim Belonogov and Oleg Shlepanov.

"Maxim" works with private drivers, from whom it takes a commission of 10%. They work with a proprietary application and dispatch service (90% of orders are received by phone). The average ticket for a trip on the network is 100 rubles. The company earns 10 million rubles per day, according to Sekret Firmy in April. In 2011, an additional direction was spun off from the company - the dispatch service for taxi companies Taxsee.

"Maxim" is the leader in the number of cities, but in many of them he is present only nominally, says a critical source Rusbase.

Capital leaders

Taxi service from Yandex entered the market in 2011. It was the initiative of the son of the founder of the corporation, Lev Volozh. The service works only with taxi companies - now Yandex.Taxi has 450 partners who unite 30 thousand cars. In April 2015, they processed 60 thousand orders per day. Current estimates range from 100,000 to 200,000 trips per day. Today the service is available in 14 cities - Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Krasnodar, Sochi, Vladikavkaz, Novosibirsk, Omsk, Perm, Samara, Tula and Voronezh. Since 2016, Yandex.Taxi has been a separate company within the holding. The Director General Yandex.Taxi became Tigran Khudaverdyan, who has been running the service since 2014, and before that was the head of Yandex's mobile products.

Tigran Khudaverdyan

You can pay for the trip in cash or by credit card... The commission for taxi companies is 11% + VAT, the average ticket for a trip in Moscow is 533 rubles. The aggregator also offers the market a professional software package for taxi services "Yandex.Taxometer", which includes a program for taxi companies and a mobile application for drivers. As indicated on the product's website, 1,000 companies and 200,000 cars across the country are connected to it. In January 2015, Yandex bought the Ros.Taxi service, which allows taxi companies to take orders, coordinate the work of drivers and keep records.

Israeli entrepreneur Shahar Weiser came to Russia with his GetTaxi service in 2012. Now Gett taxi (updated name) can be ordered in 10 cities of Russia - Moscow, St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Nizhny Novgorod, Sochi, Yekaterinburg, Krasnoyarsk, Samara, Rostov-on-Don and Krasnodar. In Moscow, the average check is 400–500 rubles, Gett commission is 15%. This is more than Yandex, but Gett's functionality is wider - in addition to aggregation and user support, the company is engaged in hiring and training taxi drivers.

The service works with taxi companies and private drivers who have a license for Passenger Transportation... In total, about 20 thousand cars are available in the Gett system. The Russian division of the company is headed by Vitaly Krylov.

The famous American startup entered the Russian market at the end of 2013. He works with private drivers who do not have taxicabs on their cars. A license is required to connect to the Uber system. Uber fundamentally does not disclose data on the number of drivers and the commission charged from them.

The service was launched in 7 cities - Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Kazan, Novosibirsk, Rostov-on-Don and Sochi. The Russian office of the scandalous unicorn is headed by Dmitry Izmailov. “We are interested in all cities with a population of more than 100 thousand people,” he said in an interview with Rusbase.

LLC "City-Mobil" is one of the largest carriers in the capital, which works with private drivers. Entrepreneur Aram Arakelyan, together with partners, created the company in 2007. The Citymobil service was one of the first to introduce software for the automated distribution of orders between the nearest cars, reducing the waiting time to 10 minutes. Now more than 20 thousand taxi drivers work with it, who pay 15% of the commission to the service. Citymobil is a Yandex.Taxi partner, so the service's drivers accept orders from both systems. In 2014, Citymobil received 10% of Moscow's orders. The service also operates in Krasnodar, Rostov-on-Don and Kazan, and in the future plans to conquer the CIS countries.

"Russian Taxi Exchange"

In 2008, partners Vitaly Makhinov and Vladimir Chirkov launched Russia's first b2b aggregator of taxi orders for taxi fleets and dispatch services - the Russian Taxi Exchange (RBT). The story began with 15 partners who were offered to exchange "inconvenient" orders among themselves. At the moment, more than a thousand taxi fleets and dispatch services, as well as more than 50 thousand drivers, are connected to the RBT system. More than 10 thousand orders a day pass through RBT every day. The general director of RBT is Ruslan Kalinov.

What will happen next?

Where is the Russian taxi market going? The market participants we surveyed agree that cooperation based on innovation is replacing tough competition. Moreover, these changes are based on cost reduction. New players bring fresh ideas to the industry and pull passengers not from other taxis, but from public transport (helping to unload it). They transfer taxis to those who could not afford it before.

Outsourcing and separation of roles optimize the costs of companies. Taxi fleets will be responsible for cars and drivers, agile tech companies for marketing, sales and logistics. In the regions, this will be implemented when there are enough smartphones. Technologies and ideas come to taxis from related markets: cargo transportation, navigation and monitoring road traffic... Technological cooperation will help overcome the crisis in the taxi industry, experts say.

One of the largest Russian online services for ordering a taxi "Maxim" began operating in Indonesia. In the new market, the company relies on motorcycle taxis: motorcycles account for 75% of all traffic in the country. Indonesia is a convenient market for expansion, experts say, there are many Russian tourists already familiar with the brand.

The taxi service "Maxim" began working in the capital of Indonesia, Jakarta, a company representative told Kommersant. Residents of the city can order taxis and motorcycles from service partners - taxi companies and individual carriers - in the application and on the website. A distinctive feature of the service in Indonesia was the introduction of the "Motorcycle" tariff. In the country, motorcycles account for 75% of transportation, this is the easiest and quick way go from point A to point B, especially in megacities, they say in the company. According to the director of regional development Alexey Markin's Maxim, among the ten countries where the service operates, is the first such experience.

Indonesia is one of the largest countries in the world in terms of population: more than 9 million people live in Jakarta alone, and more than 260 million people live in the entire country. “The Internet and mobile services are developed here, people actively use applications, including ordering transport. This is a huge market, - explain in "Maxim" the logic of expansion. - The climate allows residents not to spend money on cars, but to move around on motorcycles and mopeds, public transport poorly developed. Plus, motorcycles solve the problem of traffic jams and are especially relevant in megacities. "

Service "Maxim" was founded in 2003 by Maxim Belonogov. According to its own data, the company belongs to Mr. Belonogov and his partner Oleg Shlepanov (both have 50% each). The service is present in 275 cities of Russia and in more than 340 cities of the world, the annual turnover in 2016 is 6 billion rubles. In addition to the home market, Maxim operates in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Italy, and Kyrgyzstan. Preparations are also underway for launching in Chile, the company said. In addition, the service plans to expand to other markets in Europe, Asia, the Middle and Far East, and South America.

The amount of investments in the Indonesian market, where a number of taxi aggregators are already operating, is not disclosed at Maxim. “The experience of working in Jakarta will help to better understand the needs of the Indonesian market and to optimally customize the service. Soon it is planned to start working in other cities of the country, ”says a service representative. At the launch stage, "Maxim" will not charge a commission from partners, but "as the position in the market strengthens," the conditions will be revised, the company said. Now the average size of the service commission is 10%, in different cities its size is different. It is Alexander Merzlikin, the founder of the Guru.Taxi marketplace, discusses the resort popular among Russians who have heard the brand. “Perhaps, after a successful“ pilot ”we will see“ Maxim ”on motorcycles in the cities of Russia,” he admits.

Other Russian online taxi services are also actively entering foreign markets. Thus, Yandex.Taxi is already operating in neighboring countries - Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Moldova, Uzbekistan, Estonia, as well as in Serbia, and the Siberian aggregator inDriver, which has just recently entered the Moscow market, in In May 2018, as Kommersant reported, he began international expansion from Mexico.

Roman Rozhkov

Yandex.Taxi and Uber switched to a single IT platform

Conjuncture

The combined company Yandex.Taxi and Uber has completed the transfer of drivers in all cities of Russia to a single platform for working with orders, the company told Kommersant. The last cities were Moscow and St. Petersburg. Thanks to this, drivers will be able to receive orders from users of both Uber and Yandex.Taxi. “There will be more cars available for calling, and they will arrive at customers faster, and drivers will have less idle mileage. This will increase the reliability and quality of service in general, ”the company expects. The unified platform is based on the Taximeter driver application developed by Yandex. It includes a navigator, maps and a directory of organizations.

https: //www.site/2017-02-21/sozdatel_taksi_maxim_startoval_na_samodelnom_vezdehode_k_ledovitomu_okeanu

“We are not suicides! We are building a car that will work "

The creator of the taxi "Maxim" started on a homemade all-terrain vehicle to the Arctic Ocean

Born at the very beginning of the 2000s in Kurgan, the Maxim taxi ordering service is now one of the largest companies in this market in Russia. But its founder, Maxim Belonogov, who started his business with the sale of abstracts, is now keen on a new ambitious project. For the second year, he, with the help of the Yekaterinburg builder of all-terrain vehicles Alexei Makarov, has been stubbornly building on the outskirts of Uralmash a car capable of reaching the North Pole. The name of this all-terrain vehicle is "Burlak". In March 2016, the Ural designers tested the first prototype, driving it from Ivdel along the Ural ridge to the Kara Sea. Today they loaded Burlak-2 onto a trailer, intending to repeat the route. If everything goes well and the modified machine shows itself in the right way, then by next year Belonogov and his comrades will build another Burlak and set off in two cars at once to the North Pole ..

- What is your goal now?

- It's an expedition, dash test car. Last year we built the first Burlak, took it to the Kara Sea, to the Baydaratskaya Bay and tested it. Let's just say that I liked the car in some ways, but in some I did not like it.

- As far as I remember, there were some comments to her.

- There were comments. We sold it entirely and built a fundamentally new car. Not by appearance new - changed, let's say, the layout. In the first "Burlak" the engine was in the back, now in front ...

- Why did you take such a step?

- We changed the weight distribution and redid all the solutions for the transmission. We made the car much lighter, this one is lighter by about a ton of the first version. Redesigned final drives.

- What was wrong with the first Burlak?

- First of all, it was necessary to change the weight distribution of the car and load its face. The first option was walking heavily in deep snow and uphill. We then calculated that the weight of the engine would be compensated by the crew, which would be in front. But if you continue to make the car, so to speak, for National economy, all the same, the main load and, accordingly, the weight will be behind. Now we will test whether it has become worse or better.

- I see you also made another propeller for moving on water.

- This screw goes up. On the last car there was a bit of a screw. Especially when the car fell through the ice. We then removed it and repaired it. Now the bevels are made of metal, and there will be no such problems.

- The first Burlak was powered by a Toyota Surf engine, but now?

- Now also from Toyota Surf, only from new car... Just then there was a 1KZ engine, diesel, 145 horses. Now 1KD, also diesel. The block [of cylinders] is the same there, but this one is more modern and produces 170 "horses". The torque is also higher here, the fuel efficiency is better. Yes, 1KD is more difficult to maintain, but our task is to make the engine go to the North plus - 4-5 thousand km - and return the car back. Therefore, we believe that it is quite suitable.

Ural enterprise will produce tires for all-terrain vehicles at the expense of the state fund

- How much did the construction of the modernized Burlak cost you?

- Slightly cheaper than the first one. The first, together with the costs of the test run, came out to be about 12 million rubles. Now it is cheaper, because there were no longer some of the costs that we incurred when building the first Burlak. For example, then 4 million rubles were spent on molds for casting wheels. Now they are already there. Accordingly, the costs go only to the manufacture of the wheel itself.

- Is the wheel expensive?

- About 50 thousand rubles apiece.

- Who casts them?

- We agreed in China. If we then make 100 machines of this kind, then the manufacture of the mold will probably pay off.

- What does the second "Burlak" have from the domestic, so to speak?

- Almost everything. Racks at the Yekaterinburg Aggregate Plant were made to order. Reducers from armored personnel carriers, but the cases for them also made themselves. The axles have the gears from Toyota, but the housings are hand-made. The body of the car was made by hand. In Kurgan, they made a transfer case for taking off power to the propeller. There is a micro-factory there, they make gears and a gearbox for the military. The previous "Burlak" made gears in Togliatti. As they say, they collected from all over the forest. They just bought a ready-made shovel (laughs and points to the Fiskars bayonet shovel attached to the back). They even made peshnyi themselves from high-quality rolled products to chop ice.

Alexey Makarov in "Burlak"

- The secret to whom the first Burlak was sold?

- Bought by guys from Latvia. We met them during the first test run in 2016 on the road from Inta to Vorkuta (Komi Republic). They are professional travelers, they have quite strong sponsors: Garmin, Norfin (the first is a manufacturer of navigation equipment, the second is clothing for extreme conditions - ed.). The children’s travel geography is constantly expanding and has now expanded to our North. They thought they were driving prepared jeeps and would calmly reach the Baydaratskaya Bay. But it turned out that everything is a little different. We met them when they stood on the winter road in the ferry and waited for the tractors to clear the way for them. We drove past them, and then they called and asked to give our all-terrain vehicle.

- How much did you pay?

- It didn't pay for itself. We gave it at the cost of components - about 7 million rubles. For their tasks, that machine was sufficient, and we explained all the subtleties to them. This allowed us to build a second car of a fundamentally different design. Before the sale, by the way, in the first Burlak we also reworked something: racks, cooling radiators, pipes.

- How many cars will be tested this year?

“Burlak and Makar were running last year - these are the previous designs of Andrey Makarov. This year there are Burlak-2 and Emelya. The machines of the latter type have already been to the North Pole twice. Specifically, the one that comes with us was once. She reached from us on her own through the North Pole to Canada and in a circle through Alaska returned to her homeland. It was done by Vasily Elagin, co-organizer of the Marine Polar Expedition.

- Is this the Elagin whose experience, in fact, inspired Makarov to make his own Arctic all-terrain vehicle?

- I don't know if they inspired each other or not. Elagin was the first, and when he was building his car, Alexey had not planned to do this yet. But they have known each other for a long time and communicated closely.

- Good. Which route will you have this time?

- Now we are finishing loading the equipment onto the trailer and going to Ivdel. I think we'll be there by evening. From there, on their own along the old route. Through the Dyatlov pass, we will go near Narodnaya and further to the Baydaratskaya Bay. We did not change the route, because we remember how the first Burlak behaved last year, and now it is important for us to understand how the new one behaves. The track is well-trodden, it is important to understand what has changed in the behavior of the car. Plus, compare with how Emelya drives. If "Burlak" turns out to be worse, we will generally make a decision whether it is worth going to the North Pole with this car or whether it should be refined again. The Burlak and Emelya, by the way, have a fundamentally different form factor: different crew habitats, different wheels. "Emelya" is a highly specialized vehicle designed for passage to the North Pole. "Burlak", as we plan, can be remade for the needs of the national economy.

- In 2016, you announced your plans to go to the North Pole this year.

- We changed the design. I, of course, understand that it smacks of endless modernization. On the other hand, we are not suicides. Our task is to build a car that will get there, not a car that will have to be thrown in the ice. The plans remain the same, it's just that everything is shifted one more year ahead. Provided that new variant will show itself well.

- Why do you need all this at all?

- It doesn't matter how many days are in our life, it is important how much life is in our days.

05:08 First money and work as a corpse carrier

08:00 Paging and the foundation of the future business

11:33 The place where it all began

17:00 Access to other cities

20:17 Creating your own unique car

25:42 Offers from competitors

Video: RBC

Orphan Maxim Belonogov crashed with the paging business, but created a taxi aggregator. The turnover of his company "Maxim" exceeds 5 billion rubles. More than 500 thousand taxi drivers all over Russia, Iran and Italy cooperate with it.

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“I have never worked for anyone, I have always undertaken,” says Maxim Belonogov, co-founder of the Maxim taxi aggregator. As a high school student, he reselling newspapers and moonlighting on a "corpse wagon" in a special team at an ambulance hospital, which collected the bodies of the dead. Employees periodically went into binge, and the student replaced them.

At the age of 16, Maxim's mother died, and he became an orphan. With the survivor's benefit, he bought a Pentium computer and printer. Together with fellow student and future partner Oleg Shlepanov, he downloaded abstracts from Fidonet, printed and sold them to students. Then he sold telephones and gas equipment for cars, moonlighted as a loader. At the age of 22, the entrepreneur got married, his daughter was born, and he had to feed his family.

Maxim Belonogov created his first serious business in Shadrinsk, a small town 140 km from Kurgan. But not from the first, but from the second attempt, he says in an interview with RBC. At first, the entrepreneur, together with Oleg Shlepanov, rented an office, installed a transmitter, acquired a Mobil Telecom franchise and began to engage in paging. This business died quickly and unexpectedly when operators entered the mobile market cellular communication... At that time, Belonogov had eight operators, and he decided to organize a taxi service. I took a radio station, an antenna from a taxi driver friend, installed the equipment and tried to find taxi drivers. Entrepreneurs rented a multichannel phone number - during rush hour they could be reached, but not always competitors. “The drivers began to pull themselves up, because they knew that they would have a job,” recalls Belonogov.