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Beleaguered Didi Is Said to Lose $585M in Just Six Months
- CameronBanga 8y agoThey'll be a unicorn like Uber in no time at this pace!
- cosmon0t 8y agowhat's the name for a company that can spend and lose a billion dollars before they see a dime in returns?
- zhoujianfu 8y agoA narwhal?
- newfie_bullet 8y agoI think Narwhal's are what they call Canadian Billion+ valuation companies (Unicorns of the north. haha)
- godzillabrennus 8y agoJack o lanterns
- bonestamp2 8y agoA Panda. By all laws of nature they should no longer exist, but due to human intervention, they do.
- CydeWeys 8y agoHuh? Pandas were doing just fine until humans came along and destroyed most of their natural environment. You've got it backwards. See: https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/2rmf6h/til_that_part_of_the_reason_it_is_so_hard_to_get/cnhjokr/ https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/2rmf6h/til_t...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- s_dev 8y agoA public company.
- kwillets 8y agoHewlett-Packard
- wise_young_man 8y agoAmazon?
- em500 8y agoBack in December/January they already had similar valuations (around 50bln) in their most recent financing rounds.
- oblio 8y agoI get the impression that ride-hailing is the new file storage or image upload business of our days: tempting but inherently not a valid business model.
- user5994461 8y agoNot at all. Free storage and free image upload don't have a business model, it has no revenues stream while it has high infrastructure/bandwidth to cover. Taxis apps are a very solid business model. 2 digits commission for every ride. There is hardly any costs or work involved to match a guy with a nearby taxi.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ghaff 8y ago>Taxis apps are a very solid business model. Subject to certain assumptions of how much customers are willing to pay, price/volume sensitivity, the geographic areas where the company can operate economically, customer acquisition costs, how much drivers need to make to work for you, fixed vs. variable costs, etc. I suspect that to survive the "ride sharing" app companies will end up significantly increasing prices when it becomes clear there's no magic bullet on the horizon. ADDED: Which means of course volume will go down and, almost certainly, valuations. But there is almost certainly a business model for some scale at some highish price in sufficiently dense areas.
- user5994461 8y agoTaxi rides is a 9 figures industry. Customers are willing to pay and they need an app to book their taxi. There is no question about that. That leaves 8 figures (over $10B) to be distributed between taxi apps (at least 10% fees). It's a simple business that is very profitable. There will undeniably be multiple competitors and they will vary per region, but that doesn't affect the viability of the market.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- fifnir 8y agoand that's how you learn new words ! :) (I spent a few seconds considering if Beleaguered is a first name...)
- anoncoward111 8y agoEnglish is a strange and colorful language with over 800,000 words!
- macintux 8y agoApple spent about 15 years being regularly referred to as "beleaguered" so it's somehow apropos that the ride sharing service they invested in has inherited the mantle.
- galuggus 8y agoThere's a lot of vc money floating around China(lots of nouveau riche people + limited ways to invest). This means a lot of competition. Unlike Uber Didi has a lot of competition. Consumers will use whichever service discounts rides the most. Recently didi has seen a few new, well funded competitors and coincidentally a rash of negative PR.
- decacorn 8y ago"unlike uber didi has a lot of competition" uh, no... there are these things called bikes.
- naveen99 8y agowasn't this part of their plan ?
- usaar333 8y agoAs an aside, I just got back from China and found Didi, at least as a tourist, to have really improved in the past couple years. Accepts foreign CCs, very good English translation in app, and text based translation to communicate with drivers. And quite inexpensive; Shanghai at least charges similar distance costs as Lyft and one third the time cost.
- seanmcdirmid 8y agoHow does it work when the didi driver calls you to ask where you are (given the poor state of urban mapping)? This was extremely common in Beijing a couple of years ago, and I only got by because my Chinese was st the taxi level (able to tel them where I am and give simple directions). A foreigner using didi without any Chinese skills would be completely helpless in that context.
- natmaka 8y agoExpatriate in Shanghai since 201708, I don't speak Chinese and cannot use Didi for this reason. About half of the ~50 Didi rides I had (always accompanied by Chinese-speaking people) implied such a conversation with the driver, and nearly any of them speaks English. BTW this problem also arises with all apps I tried, as most are not available in English, and among the rest some are poorly translated and all display from time to time a slab of text and set of buttons in Chinese, leaving the ignorant me completely stuck.
- usaar333 8y agoIt's changed a lot since I used it (and Uber China - https://medium.com/@usaar33/using-uber-in-china-a-case-study-of-missing-product-details-bb0e2afeeb3 https://medium.com/@usaar33/using-uber-in-china-a-case-study...) two years ago. They now have a txt message system that should be relied on: 1. It has translation built in. 2. It has pre-canned responses In practice, with #2, the most common pre-canned response you give is "follow navigation" and my drivers tended to just respond with the pre-canned "ok". Drivers don't call me -- their app even tells them I'm not using a Chinese language app. Never had any trouble.
- 8y ago
- larrysalibra 8y agoDidi significantly reduced subsidies after Uber left the market - in Shenzhen at least this means prices aren't any better than taxis. It's usually faster to get a taxi in most places and times of the day than waiting the 3-5 minutes for your Didi to arrive. Back when it was a lot cheaper to Didi, people would wait a couple minutes to save 50%, but if the price is the same, they take what's faster. On top of this there's additional competition from the huge numbers of people using bike sharing like Mobike or Ofo - which not only taking a bike much cheaper, but it's often faster because you avoid traffic jams. Amazing how much the market has changed in such a short time.
- vm 8y agoThanks for sharing. Important context regarding Uber’s pivot into all forms of transit (bike, scooter, public transit). They must see the same writing on the wall.
- trimbo 8y ago> Important context regarding Uber’s pivot into all forms of transit And self-driving cars, flying cars, delivering food, freight, a credit card. Probably more I can't think of.
- baby 8y agoTbf in the US it's like every single company has a credit card they want to sell you.
- stephengillie 8y agoToyota has committed $500B to a partnership with Uber on self driving cars. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17853248 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17853248
- trimbo 8y agoI think you mean $500M
- ceohockey60 8y agoSome additional context to the #deleteDidi online campaign and the death of 2 passengers, which was missing in the article but important in understanding Didi struggle, not just financially, but with its product and culture: the victims were using the low-cost product inside Didi (akin to UberX) that somehow allows drivers to see would-be passengers' photos and in order to "increase engagement." The driver who murdered the most recent victim has been reported by other passengers for suspicious/inappropriate behaviors before, but was not taken off the platform. This victim just happens to be an attractive flight attendant. This is all to say the product culture within Didi is not just cut-throat and competitive, but borderline amoral--driving growth and engagement at all cost, literally at the expense of their customers.
- shawn 8y agoI don’t understand this argument. Murderers will find ways to murder people. If that’s their goal, then that’s their goal. So why is Didi related at all to the bad behavior of a few outliers? You’re far more likely to die on the highway or being robbed.
- nemothekid 8y ago>the most recent victim has been reported by other passengers for suspicious/inappropriate behaviors before, but was not taken off the platform
- jjeaff 8y agoYa, it's kind of like the worry people have about Amazon sending "regular" people to make deliveries. Gasp! They'll know where you live! Which is just nonsensical. They don't know who you are and don't need a delivery job to find a house to rob.
- ZeroBugBounce 8y agoThe argument is that Didi made it easier for this alleged killer to get his victim into a vulnerable position (as a presumably backseat passenger in his car). Didi allegedly did not respond to multiple negative comments about this guy's behavior, nor did they expose these comments to future passengers, which might have flagged him as a threat. If not for Didi, or if they had been more safety-minded as a company, then this guy would not have had the opportunity to rape and murder this woman, allegedly. That's the argument.
- moron4hire 8y agoThese companies should hire me as their CEO. I'll lose them only 1/10th of the money over 10 times the amount of time. That's 100 times better performance.
- bogomipz 8y ago>“We have to ask some hard questions: does Didi have core values, are we only a company that focuses on interests and ignores safety and social responsibilities,” I wish this tired "asking hard questions" trope would stop. I think this maybe started with Zuckerberg. It's nothing more than a rhetorical device. It allows CEOs to acknowledge a PR problem without having to provide any meaningful or prescriptive guidance to the culture that created that PR problem in the first place. You will never read a blog post by a CEO titled "The Answers To Those Hard Questions." >"Cheng said in an email, according to people who’ve seen the memo and verified its authenticity. “The problem is within ourselves. Our desire for success caused us to forget our mission." Ugh. When success and your mission can have such orthogonality, it could be argued that your "mission statement" was disingenuous to begin with.