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China's Didi Raises Over $5.5B in Record Tech Funding
- nullnilvoid 9y agoThat is massive. That is even more than the 3.5B Uber raised in the last round.
- nodesocket 9y agoCan anybody in China comment on how popular Didi is? Is it as universal (young to old people) and popular as Uber (don't want to hear the political commentary). What about average ride price per KM (Renminbi or dollars)? Seems like Apple's $1 billion investment last year (May) in Didi might pay off huge.
- bhalperin 9y agoThis is going to vary massively city to city, just as it does for Uber/Lyft/Grab in other countries.
- nodesocket 9y agoSure but there are reports and research. Here is a site that aggregates this data. http://uberestimate.com/prices/San-Francisco/ http://uberestimate.com/prices/San-Francisco/
- Fricken 9y agoPrior to this new fundraising round Uber took a 17.7% stake in Didi in exchange for handing it's China assets over to Didi, which was worth something like $6 billion. So even though Uber lost in China, they actually kind of won, unless, I guess, they decide to start fighting again in some other market. https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-didi-cheng-wei/ https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-didi-cheng-wei/
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoDidi is pretty popular, you can get it in most cities, though it really depends on how the regulations are being enforced at the time (didi in Beijing and SH can go away for a few days when there are crackdowns on black cabs). As for rates, check out: https://ride.guru/estimate/Zhongguancun,%20Haidian,%20Beijing,%20China/Taiyanggong,%20Chaoyang%20Qu,%20China,%20100028 https://ride.guru/estimate/Zhongguancun,%20Haidian,%20Beijin... That is my standard trip from work to home when I lived in BJ. Didi was just 1.3X more than a taxi, though I usually just took a taxi because wepay wasn't friendly to foreigners at the time.
- dilemma 9y agoYes, Didi is universal across the country. You can order Didi through WeChat and actually what you get is a regular taxi car, not a Uber-type freelance driver.
- Markoff 9y agoyou can choose if you want regular taxi or black car, it's up to you, you can even choose shared car with other passengers
- Markoff 9y agoit doesn't have competition, they control more than 90% of their market, similar with Wechat having monopoly on IM, so it's not like you have choice no matter what's your age my personal experience with didi was very inconsistent, half rides were ok, half rides were horrible experiences, so next time i would just call straight taxi company to get regular taxi (yes i am aware you can order regular taxi through Didi, lived in China for years)
- tyingq 9y agoDoes this signal that Didi will likely enter an existing Uber market?
- hkmurakami 9y agoTheir pitch is probably "we will become the WeChat (transaction platform) for all transportation and freight related needs"? Would make sense considering their user base has already been trained to expect a one stop shop ecosystem from an app, as opposed to Western markets which expect siloed special purpose experiences.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Markoff 9y agoexcept Didi is already incorporated in Wechat plus they have monopoly in online car/taxi ordering, i don't think they can do anything about public transport, air or train tickets, only other realistic thing would be buying one of the bike sharing companies
- huangc10 9y ago> The round was said to have raised the four-year-old startup’s valuation to about $50 billion, up from a previous $34 billion after its acquisition of Uber’s China business. Uber's valuation is ~$70 billion while Lyft's valuation is less than $10 billion. Therefore it seems like the two main players in ride-sharing will be Uber and Didi for the next while. I can see Didi branching towards other markets (outside of China) and directly competing with Uber and Lyft. This will be interesting in the next while.
- nojvek 9y agoTo be honest this is just speculation of what investors believe future value to be. Basically whoever gets a self driving fleet in production will win it big. This could be a startup that may not even be born yet. But it's bizzare how people are throwing a lot of money at some companies. It feels like Uber has a fuck ton of money and because of that there is a ton of politics and pressure. So much that their engineers resort to suicide. I imagine a shit storm in didi too. Too much funding is a curse.
- Markoff 9y agoChinese companies can't success abroad, because they win Chinese market with help of government protecting them from competition name one Chinese service/software company which would be major player outside China only partly successful companies are hardware companies like Huawei, Lenovo, xiaomi or DJI thanks to their prices with some of them growing to different segments over time
- ziszis 9y agoIt is not a coincidence that Uber's competitors are all raising money at this point in time. It was hard a year ago. Uber's struggles have not only boosted the metrics for competitors [1], but there is increasingly a plausible story about how Uber could fail. 1: http://www.thedrive.com/tech/9739/lyft-bookings-ridership-soar-as-uber-deals-with-controversy http://www.thedrive.com/tech/9739/lyft-bookings-ridership-so...
- forgotpwtomain 9y agoThe increasingly plausible story of Uber failing is Google or other big players beating them by a large margin to self-driving cars (including for the kind of taxi-service Uber provides). None of these smaller players (aside from Didi which appears to be quite large and backed by internal Chinese interests) give the semblance of having even a minutia of a chance vs. Google.
- Danihan 9y agoEven with $5B in capital? I know building a self-driving car is hard, I don't think it's that hard though.
- pizza 9y agoWell.. it's been a long-sought dream https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_autonomous_cars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_autonomous_cars
- argonaut 9y agoSelf-driving is not going to be solved by throwing money at it. If it was, Google would have "solved" it already and Apple wouldn't have abandoned their effort. The obvious shortage is engineering talent. This is more debatable (many people, like Elon Musk, don't believe this to be the case), but the field also needs one or more research breakthroughs, especially in the realm of planning and reasoning. Most of the machine learning in self-driving cars goes towards perception / detection / mapping. The actual decision-making is still heuristics and hard-coded rules.
- simplehuman 9y agoWow, the CEO is only 33.
- LiweiZ 9y agoYou can google who her father is. It's a capital and guanxi/connection game, less about technology. Leveraging the direct/indirect capital resources they own and copycatting SV unicorn tech fashion in a walled huge market make them feel good. And they are really rich. It's their age now. edit: added guanxi/connection
- fallmonkey 9y agoMy failed attempt to find ANY information about his father somewhat proves your theory, or google doesn't wanna tell me?
- praneshp 9y agoThe President's father is Lenovo's founder. I don't know if the CEOs father is a big shot.
- LiweiZ 9y agoI have to say it's a typical pattern for rich and connected kids in China to gain success. Top local college => top us college => join GS or whatever similar => trendy founder/CXO/etc. => Now it's their turn to have someone write articles to let ordinary people know they are not just rich, pretty/handsome, well-connected, but also they are super hard working, smart/intelligent, wise to earn their crowns all by themselves. We all know for well-connected in China, there are way more gates open to them. And the stake-holders in the western world can help them open other gates. As I said there is a long history of them doing all this kind of thing. Most people in China with enough experience in that society know that. It's just a capital-intensive pretend play. They are the players and you have to watch them show off how good they played through mass media and your news feed. If there was an earthquake in that circle, new batch of players would show up.
- codeisawesome 9y agoI just wondered for the first time: do these sorts of raises vacuum money away into one large basket, instead of bets on many smaller startups? Could it be zero-sum in a way?
- Denzel 9y agoThe VC market expands and contracts like any other following the principles of economics. Therefore, the fact that the production possibilities frontier (is there a better term for a money market?) can move outward shows it is not zero-sum. In simple terms, as time goes forward, more and more resources can be created and injected into the market unlike a truly scare resource.
- chrischen 9y agoHe said "zero-sum in a way" and that is true. At any given point in time it is zero sum, and for practical purposes you can approximate it as zero sum. To say that if i robbed all of silicon valley investors of their money and claim it won't affect the funding prospects of new startups would be a lie.
- Denzel 9y agoEverything is zero-sum at an instant of time... I figured that was obvious enough that I didn't have to say it. If you want to approximate it as zero-sum, be my guest. It's a functionally useless approximation.
- andromeda__ 9y agoWTF! Who raises $5.5B at one go?
- matt_wulfeck 9y agoI'm seeing something right now. It's really, really difficult to figure out what kind of crazy valuations people will put on companies. It's reinforced my desire to own indexes all the more. I'll let buy a little of everything and let the money managers battle it out.