Uber to Sell China Business to Rival Didi After Losing Billions

If the partnership remains in place, then this is likely a good thing for Lyft. Recall that, unlike Uber, Lyft wasn't trying to storm China and establish itself as a direct player there. Rather, they established a collaboration with Did whereby each company's customers could benefit from the other company's services in their respective countries. As such, assuming the partnership remains alive, this would mean Lyft has an even stronger partner now in China.

Scooters? Everyone hates them.

Personal experience: my hometown is a medium city (with a population of ~3 million in urban area), the taxi system there is so broken. Because of the medallion system, to maximize the profit/cost ratio, taxi drivers usually operate their cars 24 hours a day with two shifts. Day shifts are usually taken by locals, and they will try their best not to serve you if the trip goes through traffic-jammed area or remote places. I understand their economic reasoning though. The worst part is every afternoon from 4pm to 6pm, when shift change happens, every taxi driver will refuse your ride request unless you happen to be ride sharing with them to their shift change stops(pretty ironic I think). So as a rider you basically beg for a ride.

That's how Uber/Didi win. You don't beg, you don't worry, you don't get pissed off. You uses an app then you get on a car with better fare (thanks to those steep discounts)

Remember, this is just one city with population of 3MM, there are more than 100 of such cities (with population of 1~3 million) in China. But Uber is not operating in my hometown, let alone many others.

Uber is slow to adopt Alipay or Wechat pay. Uber is slow in expansion.

only, in this bubblicious market can something like this go unpunished. same as mayer from yahoo.

failure in china for uber's execs should have been forseeable. for all it's 'market policy' , any big western technology company cannot succeed in china without the blessing and connections in the chinese government.

uber's travis either mistakenly thought he had this blessing , or he got suckered into it. OR, quite possibly he was ignorant and conceited enough to jump into the shark pool not knowing he needed the consent of the sharks not to get eaten right away.

either way, this was a huge lapse of judgment and is a CANARY IN THE COAL MINE for other major business judgement failures that will likely soon be unmasked once the tide of market madness turns to market panic.

if i had a million dollars, i'd be betting uber will be one of the biggest financial disasters like enron, but for the startup world.. if only there was place to buy put options of pre-ipo uber stock...........

I would conjecture the opposite as Uber investors were pitched on the China growth story

> Four out of the top 10 are now in China, according to an email sent by Uber CEO Travis Kalanick to investors and obtained by the Financial Times.

> In the request for money from investors, Kalanick explained just how fast the company is growing:

> Passengers in China are taking 1 million trips per day. Uber is in 11 cities in China, but plans to launch in 50 more cities that have a population of more than five million this year. These are all cities comparable to the size of Miami, Kalanick said in the email.

> Four out of Uber's 10 largest cities are in China.

> After nine months in Chengdu, the city is seeing 479 times the number of trips that New York did at the same mark. Hangzhou is 422 times larger than New York at the same nine-month mark and it is adding 200,000 residents a week.

> The company is planning on investing more than $1 billion into UberChina, which goes by YouBu or "an excellent step forward", locally.

> It is now the largest market outside of the U.S., and "at the current growth trajectory, will most likely surpass the US before year-end," Kalanick said int he email.

http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-china-growth-2015-6