It is not a coincidence that Uber's competitors are all raising money at this point in time. It was hard a year ago. Uber's struggles have not only boosted the metrics for competitors [1], but there is increasingly a plausible story about how Uber could fail.<p>1: <a href="http://www.thedrive.com/tech/9739/lyft-bookings-ridership-soar-as-uber-deals-with-controversy" rel="nofollow">http://www.thedrive.com/tech/9739/lyft-bookings-ridership-so...</a>
Their pitch is probably "we will become the WeChat (transaction platform) for all transportation and freight related needs"?<p>Would make sense considering their user base has already been trained to expect a one stop shop ecosystem from an app, as opposed to Western markets which expect siloed special purpose experiences.
> The round was said to have raised the four-year-old startup’s valuation to about $50 billion, up from a previous $34 billion after its acquisition of Uber’s China business.<p>Uber's valuation is ~$70 billion while Lyft's valuation is less than $10 billion. Therefore it seems like the two main players in ride-sharing will be Uber and Didi for the next while.<p>I can see Didi branching towards other markets (outside of China) and directly competing with Uber and Lyft. This will be interesting in the next while.
I'm seeing something right now. It's really, really difficult to figure out what kind of crazy valuations people will put on companies. It's reinforced my desire to own indexes all the more. I'll let buy a little of everything and let the money managers battle it out.
Can anybody in China comment on how popular Didi is? Is it as universal (young to old people) and popular as Uber (don't want to hear the political commentary). What about average ride price per KM (Renminbi or dollars)?<p>Seems like Apple's $1 billion investment last year (May) in Didi might pay off huge.
I just wondered for the first time: do these sorts of raises vacuum money away into one large basket, instead of bets on many smaller startups? Could it be zero-sum in a way?