Han Ximin

    ximhan@126.com

    DIDI CHUXING (Didi), the world’s leading mobile transportation platform, announced Friday important progress in its latest fundraising round.

    Among a group of prestigious Chinese and international institutions, Apple has invested US$1 billion in Didi, the largest investment the company has ever received.

    Through this investment, Apple becomes a strategic investor of Didi, and joins Tencent, Alibaba and other key supporters to help further Didi’s mission of building a data-driven ridesharing platform to serve hundreds of millions of Chinese drivers and passengers.

    Cheng Wei, founder and CEO of Didi, said the endorsement from Apple is an inspiration for the company which will work hard with drivers, riders and global partners, to make available to every citizen flexible and reliable mobility choices, and help cities solve transportation, environmental and employment challenges.

    “Didi exemplifies the innovation taking place in the iOS developer community in China,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “We are extremely impressed by the business they’ve built and their excellent leadership team, and we look forward to supporting them as they grow.”

    Building on its data mining and analysis capabilities, Didi now completes over 11 million rides a day on its platform, serving close to 300 million users across over 400 Chinese cities with a diverse range of mobile technology-based transportation options. Didi works with over 14 million Chinese car-owners and drivers, holding over 87 percent market share in private car-hailing and over 99 percent market share in taxi-hailing.