Apple has just played a big hit in China. The company announced an investment of $ 1 billion in Didi, application taxi booking number and VTC in China, and main rival Uber. Apple boss Tim Cook told the official news agency Xinhua that he “anticipated many opportunities for further cooperation” between the two groups.
STORIES & gt; & gt; These Chinese giants as strong as Facebook, Google or Amazon
China, the second largest market for Apple
This is the ” biggest investment “so far received by Didi, making the California group one of its investors” strategic “, said Friday the Chinese firm. “The Apple support is a great encouragement”, welcomed Cheng Wei, founder and director of Didi, in a statement.
Mainland China, Macao, Hong Kong and Taiwan together account for the second largest market for Apple after the United States. But its market share crumble face the Chinese smartphone manufacturers, including Huawei and Xiaomi. By introducing a capital of Didi, the US approximates the two juggernauts of the Chinese internet, already investors: Tencent, operator of WeChat messaging, and Alibaba, a local number of online commerce. It is associated in addition to an extremely popular application, with over 300 million registered users to more than 11 million registered races each day. 14 million drivers work for her.
“This is definitely a great deal for Apple to be associated with an application that has a very broad base of users and the purposes of a very frequent payments,” said the financial website Chinese Huxiu. In fact, Apple launched in February in China’s own payment service, Apple Pay, but only to balance out the payment platforms established by Alibaba ( “Alipay”) and Tencent.
“This investment reflects a number of strategic reasons, including the opportunity to learn about some segments of the Chinese market,” commented Tim Cook just Friday. “Didi is an example of innovation in action in the iOS developer community in China,” he added.
The race in fundraising against Uber
Didi, support Apple is timely in its fierce battle against Uber. Didi dominate ensures 99% of the Chinese market for online taxi bookings and 87% of reservations chauffeured cars. But in this niche, it is faced with the runaway success of the US app: arrived in China early 2014 and has received the support of Baidu (other giant Chinese web), Uber has claimed nearly 15% of shares market suddenly colossal investments needed to subsidize trips and loyalty of its user base.
A costly strategy: the boss of Uber Travis Kalanick had acknowledged in February that his company lost “over a billion dollars” per year in China.
He too generous grants, Didi has himself raised several billion dollars last year. According to sources close to the respondents by Bloomberg, Apple’s investment is part of a recent fundraising have now reached $ 3 billion, valuing the Chinese company at about 26 billion dollars.
Didi, born last year from the merger of two competing applications, also intends to strengthen its alliances and break through internationally. It thus took in 2015 investments in the main Indian taxi booking app (Ola), but also in the US Lyft, Uber rival the United States: a way to challenge it on its own ground.
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