Didi Kuaidi did more rides last year than Uber ever has

Uber has booked 1B rides in its lifetime; its primary competitor in China did 1.43 billion in 2015

Didi Kuaidi, Uber’s biggest competitor in China, today announced that it booked 1.43 billion rides in 2015.

At the end of 2015, Uber announced on its blog that a couple London passengers taking an uberX ride on Christmas Eve netted the company its one billionth ride. That means, since Uber launched in San Francisco over five years ago, the company has provided just over a billion rides across the world.

In other words, Didi Kuaidi wants you to know that it booked more rides last year than Uber has in its entire lifetime. To be fair, Didi Kuaidi’s figures include bookings for private cars, taxis, car pooling, designated drivers, buses, and enterprise services, so the scope is a bit larger.

Earlier this week, the head of Uber criticized Didi Kuaidi for spending $80 million weekly on “subsidies,” or discounts to its rides, in order to dominate the Chinese market. That comes out to $4 billion in yearly spending, just to be the cheaper offering in the market.

"We're clearly spending less than Didi in subsidies," said Uber founder and CEO Travis Kalanick. "We're spending less per trip, and we have a larger balance sheet."

Because both companies are still private, it’s difficult to verify Kalanick’s claim, though it’s well-known that the most well-funded ridesharing companies across the busiest markets (as with Lyft and Uber in the U.S.), there is a significant amount of discounting fares in order to stay competitive.

In response, Didi has called Kalanick’s claims “wildly creative.”

Asia—and China specifically—is a huge growth market for ridesharing companies thanks to massive and still-growing population centers. Uber faces fierce competition from Didi Kuaidi in China, as it does from local players in other markets (GrabTaxi in Singapore, OlaCabs in India, etc.). At least one major player, Easy Taxi, has exited the Asian market to focus on Latin America and South America, where it currently edges out Uber.

It will be interesting to see if Easy Taxi becomes the newest partner in the anti-Uber alliance, formed initially last year between Didi Kuaidi in China and Lyft in the U.S. to make it more convenient for passengers to book rides when traveling from one country to the next. Since then, GrabTaxi and OlaCabs have joined the alliance. The addition of Easy Taxi would broaden the partnership’s borders from Asia and the U.S. to most of North America.

Didi Kuaidi has raised billions of dollars from Matrix Partners, Tiger Global Management, Softbank, and many others, and is today valued at $15 billion, making it one of the top 10 most valuable private companies in the world. Uber tops that list with an official $51 billion valuation and a new one reported to be as high as $62.5 billion.