Chinese ride-hailing giant Didi Chuxing (滴滴出行) yesterday said it bought Brazil’s 99 Taxis, opening another front in the Beijing-based company’s global battle with Uber Technologies Inc.
Didi, which claims to be the world’s leading mobile transportation platform with more than 450 million users, became a strategic investor in 99 Taxis in January last year.
It is now to acquire the company outright, along with its 14 million registered users in Brazil, as it pushes into the growing Latin American car-share market.
“Globalization is a top strategic priority for Didi,” founder and CEO Cheng Wei (程維) said in a statement announcing the purchase, adding that the company would continue to seek “diversified international operations and partnerships.”
Didi has now entered into partnerships with seven “major international players” serving more than 1,000 cities worldwide, including Southeast Asia’s Grab, India’s Ola, US-based Lyft Inc and Europe’s Taxify, it said.
Didi and Uber have been waging a global turf war since Didi bought the US-based company’s China operations last year.
Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro are Uber’s top two busiest cities in the world as ranked by the number of trips that take place there, Bloomberg News reported.
Didi last year became Asia’s most valuable start-up company.
An additional US$4 billion was raised in a new funding round, Didi announced two weeks ago, adding that investors included Japanese telecom giant Softbank Group Corp and Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala Capital, sources close to the matter told reporters at the time, adding that the latest round raises Didi’s valuation to US$56 billion.
The investment is to be used to fuel Didi’s global expansion and support new developments in artificial intelligence and new-energy vehicles, the company said.
Didi claims to handle up to 25 million rides per day.
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