Didi Kuaidi, Uber’s Rival in China, Has Raised $2B in Fresh Funding | Hacker News Reader

Didi Kuaidi, Uber’s Rival in China, Has Raised $2B in Fresh Funding

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35 pointsgwallens16 comments

I'm in China and my Chinese wife uses several of these apps but they are battling pretty hard and she changes her app preference fairly regularly. Currently she's alternating between "Yihao zhuan che" (http://www.vvipone.com/) and "Didi da che" (http://www.xiaojukeji.com/). Yihao has several different upgrades like "fast car" and "dedicated car" which can pay more for quality. While Didi is more taxi grade and does car pooling with lower cost options and delivery driver services. Didi is also doing a lot of promotions like "free Mondays" which free is fairly bloodbath pricing.

Yihao Zhuan Che is actually owned by Didi And Kuaidi, but all three are standalone apps. It's interesting how much internal cannibilization there is.

Didi is absolutely dominant in Kunming. Overnight (and I've been there 15 years) it became impossible to hail a cab, because all the cabs were servicing Didi customers. Way to market your service ... if you aint on it, you aint getting to where you need to be! I would say market penetration on a per-ride basis was pushing 80%, and that was a year ago. Uber has no hope.

uber would have no hope in the first place being a foreign, non-chinese company that relies on internet access to hosts not wholly controlled and hosted in china

Using Uber here in Suzhou, I'm pretty sure their China servers are completely within China. There is no "bump" from transversing the GFW and starting such a service in China without having the servers inside would be crazy. There is no reason they couldn't just completely partition their service.

Not sure about you but I've personally started and run a foreign, non-chinese company that relies on internet access to hosts not wholly controlled and hosted in china without insurmountable problem.

Has China blocked Uber and started fining, arresting or disappearing their drivers yet?

Because that's what's going to happen, unless Uber has some well-positioned backers from China

> Has China blocked Uber and started fining, arresting or disappearing their drivers yet?

Fine? Yes. Didi and Kuaidi drivers got fined too.

> Because that's what's going to happen, unless Uber has some well-positioned backers from China

Baidu invested Uber in the end of 2014. see http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-12-17/baidu-to-b...

Well...

China likes to make things easy on their own startups. Everyone should know that by now. If Uber has not made arrangements and structured the administration and ownership of their China business in a fashion consistent with that reality... I have to question the suitability of the leadership team at Uber.

This is all basic stuff at this point. China is not a mystery anymore. You shouldn't be getting the basic stuff wrong.

Even if Uber had greased the right palms before, they're still a foreign owned country and at an inherent disadvantage in China. I expect them to be pushed out the same way they were pushed out of Paris in the near future.

That's a bogus analogy.

I can think of very few business ideas that need $2 billion+ worth of runway before they are self-financing. It certainly seems it should be possible to build a ride brokering service with a fraction of that.

But I assume they got it because they could and not because they needed it.

According to the article they wanted $1.5b, but decided to leave it open for another few hundred million because they could. As you do :)

It's also about a lot more than ride sharing. These companies are hoping to turn their LaaS (labor) into self-driving car fleets as soon as possible. A lot of that money is going to be poured into research.

Uber has received >5BN in funding. It's a big play.

Not that this is constructive in any way, but I like the URL for this page :)

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