For all the PR fiascos it’s faced, Uber is still king of the ride-hailing services in the West.
On the other side of the globe, however, the process of requesting a car from your phone is dominated by another giant: Didi Chuxing. As this chart from Statista shows, while Didi is a relative unknown in the West, its fundamentals are nearly on par with the world’s most valuable private company.
Didi acquired Uber’s China operations in a mega-merger last year, outlasting its fellow giant after a fierce price war. The company has the backing of titans like Apple, SoftBank, and China’s own Alibaba and Tencent, two truly massive rivals that merged their respective ride services to create Didi Chuxing and share the spoils.
It’s not hard to see why all these major players are bullish on Didi: It now owns a virtual monopoly on ride-hailing, a growing business, in China, a country with a population of 1.3 billion and a high percentage of citizens who do not own cars. Uber now has a stake in Didi’s business, so it’s not being left in the dark there. But as Uber continues to deal with Lyft at home, Didi may wind up the king of ride-hailing worldwide.
