The Fair Trade Commission imposed a penalty surcharge on Kakao Mobility's Daegu-Gyeongbuk franchise headquarters for unfairly collecting 20% of all fares as a franchise fee, despite not using the KakaoT application to pick up passengers.
The Fair Trade Commission noted on the 15th that it has imposed a correction order and a penalty surcharge of 228 million won on Digit Mobility (Digit), the franchise headquarters of KakaoT Blue taxis in the Daegu-Gyeongbuk area, for establishing unfair contractual terms.
KakaoT Blue is a franchise taxi service launched by Kakao in September 2019, which recruits corporate taxi companies or individual taxi drivers, charges a franchise fee, and provides passenger calling and dispatch services through the KakaoT app while using the Kakao taxi brand to operate.
Drivers at this location operate taxis not only by picking up passengers called to specific locations using the KakaoT app but also by utilizing other taxi calling apps or picking up waiting passersby on the street.
However, Digit stated that it signed a contract starting from November 9, 2019, requiring the overall fare of franchise taxi drivers to be uniformly collected at 20% as a franchise fee, including fees for driver calling platform usage, royalties, promotional and marketing costs, vehicle management program usage fees, and exclusive device maintenance.
This means that they collected fees for fares generated through means other than KakaoT. From January 2020 to September 2023, the total number of trips was about 71.18 million, with 28.5% or 20.30 million of those trips being conducted without using the KakaoT app. This implies that if the total franchise fee received by Digit, approximately 98.8 billion won, is calculated simply based on this rate, about 28.2 billion won was unfairly collected.
Park Jin-seok, head of the Fair Trade Commission's franchise transaction investigation team, said, "This regulation is intended to prohibit charging platform usage fees for roaming businesses that do not use the Kakao platform," adding that it is expected to help reduce the burden on franchise owners by ensuring that franchise fees are not collected during future franchise contract negotiations for non-franchise operations.
Meanwhile, Kakao Mobility stated, "If a lower commission is only applied to roaming businesses, it is likely to create an environment where selective picking becomes easier, which could undermine the original purpose of the franchise service as 'taxis that can be hailed quickly without refusal,'" adding that it intends to clarify through administrative litigation that there were no violations of the law.
In response, Park noted, "Kakao taxis are widely spread in the market, and passengers frequently use them, so the likelihood that drivers would selectively pick passengers to the extent that the service's purpose would be undermined is minimal."