In just 9 days, WeChat brings in over 100,000 taxi rides for Chinese passengers looking for a lift

January 16, 2014 Leave a comment

In just 9 days, WeChat brings in over 100,000 taxi rides for Chinese passengers looking for a lift

January 13, 2014

by Josh Horwitz

It’s been about a week and a half since WeChat, the messaging app that’s dominating smartphones in China, added taxi booking and payments to its range of services. The maker of WeChat, Chinese web giant Tencent, added support for the Didi Dache service after investing nearly $100 million into it. Today the fine folks at 36kr say that the total number of completed transactions – meaning taxis hailed and paid for inside of WeChat – have surpassed 100,000.On the first day of Didi Dache’s appearance within WeChat – which was originally only in the iOS version, and only in Beijing – Chinese users made over 20,000 taxi bookings, over 6,000 of which were completed using WeChat payments.

The service rolled out to more cities and over onto Android by January 8. Didi Dache tells 36kr that from January 10 to January 12th, daily bookings and transactions on WeChat clocked in at 27,000, 36,000, and 38,000 respectively.

Driven to succeed

Didi Dache and its backers have long been subsidizing the costs of using the app for both drivers and consumers in an effort to squeeze out competition. These boosts have come in the form of reduced telephone fees, data fees, or in plain old money. Unsurprisingly, these tactics has continued following Didi Dache’s arrival on WeChat. Starting last Friday, Didi Dache and Tencent launched a promotion in which drivers who use WeChat payments to accept the fare receive a bonus of RMB 10 (about $1.65), capped at RMB 50 each day. Customers who pay for the ride through WeChat, meanwhile, get a RMB 10 discount on the fare, capped at RMB 30 for each day. Didi and Tencent will also provide 10,000 lucky passengers with free rides each day.

Chinese research firm iResearch estimates that Didi Dache occupies upwards of 50 percent of China’s taxi-hailing app market when measured both for registered users and daily bookings. Its primary competitor increasingly looks to be the Hangzhou-based Kuaide Dacche. Alibaba is an investor in Kuaide Dache and lets users pay drivers on the app through its Alipay payment platform.

Filed under TMT Trends

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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