(Yicai) April 30 -- Transportation authorities in Shenzhen and Chongqing are the latest ones to have issued warnings about the saturation and fierce competition in the local ride-hailing industries since last year.

Shenzhen’s online ride-hailing service market is reaching the saturation point, the Transport Bureau of Shenzhen Municipality said on April 11, reminding enterprises and individuals who intend to start related businesses to assess the actual potential income and make prudent choices.

In the first quarter of the year, about 65,000 vehicles receive monthly ride-hailing orders in Chongqing, equal to 55 percent of the city’s total ride-hailing fleet, the Chongqing Municipal Transportation Bureau said in a risk alert issued on April 16. Given the order size, it is difficult for the total 118,000 ride-hailing cars to remain operative, as their number has far exceeded the demand, the transportation bureau added.

Other Chinese cities, such as Sanya, Zhuhai, and Jinan, also issued similar warnings last year.

Some 891 million online ride-hailing orders were placed in China in March, up 15 percent from February, according to data from the Online Ride-hailing Regulatory Information Interaction Platform. As of March 31, China had issued 6.8 million online ride-hailing driver licenses and 2.8 million online ride-hailing vehicle licenses, up 30 percent and 27 percent, respectively, from a year earlier.

Ride-hailing vehicles in Ningbo received an average of 16 orders a day last year, logging an average daily revenue of CNY361 (USD50), according to data from the Ningbo Highway and Transportation Management Center.

Many ride-hailing drivers told Yicai that their income has been declining. In the past, a driver could earn between CNY60 and CNY70 (USD8 and USD10) for a 30-kilometer ride, but now the price has dropped to about CNY50, a ride-hailing driver in Nanjing told Yicai.

The biggest issue in the past year is that working days increased by two to three hours, while the income declined 35 percent because of fewer orders, according to a ride-hailing driver in Guangdong province.

Editor: Futura Costaglione