Spain caps private-hire vehicle licences at one for every thirty taxi drivers. The government fixed that ratio in 2015, and with a single rule it turned a bureaucratic footnote into one of the more profitable asset plays in recent Spanish business history.
That mechanism is worth sitting with. Supply of the permits was sealed at the exact moment demand was starting to build. Alejandro Betancourt López understood what that meant before most investors did. Read the rule once and the trade looks obvious; almost nobody read it that way at the time.
A Ceiling Set at the Wrong Time for Everyone Else
A capped asset facing rising demand has only one way to move. That’s the whole trade. Once the number of VTC permits was frozen, every new wave of ride-hailing users pressed against a fixed supply, and the value of each permit climbed.
Most capital stayed away. Licensing friction scared off outside investors, and that friction was precisely what kept the entry price low. Outside money saw red tape and stayed home, which is exactly why the permits could be gathered so cheaply. Betancourt López treated the discomfort as the opportunity, not the warning.
Being Early, Then Patient
No technology breakthrough drove this, and no clever distribution trick. The business simply held government permits in a country whose rules made those permits worth more as the ride-hailing market grew.
Being early was half of it. Staying patient while the market caught up was the other half. When Uber and Cabify finally needed to scale in Spain, they met a market where supply was fixed and Alejandro Betancourt López held a large slice of it. A bid from the two companies valued his operator at roughly €200 million in November 2022, and the worth of a once-ignored permit was settled in public.