We have decided to approach the topic of the value of the MaaS market from a new point of view: starting from the demand for mobility. And we are going to tell you what we have discovered.
A European Union study (available on the official website of EuroStat, the EU statistical department) shows that on average, in 2018, 13.2% of household expenses in the 28 EU countries were dedicated to transport. This is the second highest item, preceded only by household expenses (24%), which include rent / mortgage, water, electricity and gas.
Starting from this study, let’s do some quick calculations together.
The GDP of the European Union Countries amounts to approximately 16 trillion euros.
Based on OECD’s studies, the average household expenditure is generally equal to about 60% of GDP, so we can estimate that the family budget within EU has a total value of around 9.6 trillion euros.
This means that, again on average, the total value of expenses that all of us, in the European Union, devote to transport (remember that 13.2%?) is about 1,250 billion euros per year. These 1,250 billion euros, according to 2018 data, are divided as follows:
- About 350 billion euros: purchase of vehicles for private use
- About 650 billion euros: use and maintenance of private vehicles
- About 250 billion euros: trains, airplanes, buses and all other transport and mobility services.
What do these numbers tell us? A lot, a lot of things.
The first one. They help us give a quantitative dimension of the overall potential market for those players who offer goods and services for transport and mobility of people, based on a bottom-up approach that starts from the expenses already incurred by European families today.
The second one. The current market for mobility services, which include all those services that can be part of a MaaS offer in perspective (from trains, to planes, to ferries, to public transport, to sharing mobility, etc.), is now worth 250 billions of euros, but it is only 20% of the total.
The third one. The main item of household expenditure is, as we well know, still strongly linked to the ownership and use of private vehicles, in particular cars, for which 1,000 billion euros are currently spent.
But the fourth one is the most important to understand how big the MaaS pie is. Because if we just think of MaaS as a bus service plus a shared bike, we will never be able to grasp its real range and potential. MaaS will have to address not only those who today already travel by public transport or use shared mobility services, but also and especially those who today own and use exclusively or mainly their private cars. Offering a wide range of mobility solutions, characterized by a value comparable to the freedom of movement represented by the car. Being able to progressively change our mobility behaviours and shift an increasing number of trips towards more environmental-friendly travel solutions.
The earlier we understand where we shall direct our efforts to get MaaS off the ground, the bigger cake we can cook.
Because the main objective of MaaS should be shifting household spending from the purchase and operation of goods (cars in the first place) to the use of mobility services (in the MaaS community we say “from ownership to usership”), aiming to capture an ever greater number of those 1,000 billion euros mentioned above.
Because these numbers give us one clear message. Every percentage point of European transport spending that we will be able to shift from private cars to mobility services, will result only in the European Union in a potential increase of 12 billion euros per year for the MaaS market.
So… Is the MaaS cake big enough?