It is becoming increasingly difficult to hail a cab in China’s first cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, etc. This statement brought developers to think of a new way of hitching a ride: why not create an app enabling riders to find a taxi nearby willing to take him to his destination, and drivers to avoid aimlessly wandering the streets during off-peak time ? From this idea result the creation of Didi Da Che.
The success of Didi Da Che in China
DiDi Da Che is not even a little startup anymore, it is backed by Tencent, the tech giant behind messaging apps like WeChat and QQ : with the newly launched WeChat integration, DiDiDache doubled their registered user number in one year, from 20M to 40M.
Taxi-booking apps in China
Many other taxi-booking apps exist and are battling to win over taxi drivers and riders : with added bonuses given to the app users, ranging from 30 to 50 RMB a day, the mobile services are looking to become the top cab-hailing app in China. DiDi Dache, with Tencent, and KuaiDi Da Che, backed by Alibaba, have the biggest market shares, and they’re constantly adding new functionalities to their app in order to gain more users. In the course of this battle, taxi drivers have pushed aside « regular customers » that are waiting along the streets for a cab to drive them, and are focused on upping their DiDi Da Che profile in order to win gift rewards, such as laptops, electric fans, laundry detergents… It is becoming a concern: people without smartphones are dished aside, and the whole concept of calling a cab is changing with the boom of the cab-hailing market.
Faced with regulations from the government and the city-governors, the taxi-app market might experiment shrinkage as the cities are trying to centralize taxi data, but is unification possible in the middle between the two leading apps?
More about brands in China _ Stephane Grand
