Han Ximin

ximhan@126.com

DIDI Mobility Japan, a joint venture between Didi Chuxing and SoftBank Corp., on Friday announced the official launch of its taxi-hailing service in Hokkaido, including its capital city of Sapporo.

This follows DiDi Japan’s entry into Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka and Hyōgo, with additional plans to launch its service in more areas by the end of this year.

In Hokkaido, DiDi Japan is collaborating with leading taxi companies to provide service in the areas of Sapporo, Hakodate and Furano.

Hokkaido is one of the most popular destinations for Chinese visitors in Japan and is estimated to attract 1.5 million Chinese travelers by 2020.

Existing Didi users from China are now able to hail a taxi in Japan’s top tourism and business destinations directly from their Didi China app. DiDi Japan provides service with in-app real-time Chinese-Japanese text message translation, commonly used online payment services including Alipay, WeChat Pay and international credit cards, and 24/7 Chinese customer support.

In another development, DiDi signed a strategic partnership agreement with Mila, a leading global deep learning research institute, on the artificial intelligence (AI) for Social Good initiative and to research intelligent driving at a seminar in Los Angeles last week.

Under the agreement, the two sides will initiate research initiatives, talent fostering programs and academic exchanges in deep and reinforcement learning, intelligent driving technology, and AI projects with broader positive social impact.