Last month, Uber declared that it had booked over one billion rides worldwide through its app since its creation in 2009.
Take That, Uber! Didi Kuaidi Says It Booked Over a Billion Rides Just in 2015.
The two ride-hailing services are locked in a pissing contest in China.
Lam Yik Fei / Getty Images
That’s a massive number. And a rare glimpse into the size of the private ride-hailing juggernaut.
But on Monday, Didi Kuaidi — Uber’s chief competitor in China, its chief growth market — put out figures meant to dwarf that. Didi Kuaidi says it has booked 1.43 billion rides only in 2015. It completed 200 million rides last month alone. In its press release, the company helpfully pointed out that Uber’s billion-ride threshold came over six years and all over the globe.
However, a caveat: Those Didi Kuaidi numbers come from seven different transit services Didi Kuaidi runs across China, including bus and enterprise services. So a direct comparison on these numbers with Uber is a bit unfair.
Still, the well-funded Chinese company — the result of a merger last February of two ride-sharing apps backed by tech giants Tencent and Alibaba — remains a significant threat to Uber’s aim of world domination. Figures on the ride-sharing market in China are hard to nail down. Yet Didi Kuaidi touts recent research from the China Internet Network Information Center that claims it commands 87.2 percent of the car-hailing market there.
Didi Kuaidi also has a strategic partnership with — and financial stake in — Uber’s U.S. rival Lyft.
Over the summer, Didi Kuaidi President Jean Liu told Re/code that the company’s diverse transit services are a critical asset and that Uber’s approach of heavily subsidizing drivers and passengers in China is “a short-term strategy.”
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
