- According to the CTO, the competition demands the best of both companies efforts to improve the services.
- After the battle for the Asian market, Uber and Didi are working in another challenge: Latin America.
If you ever played the War board game, where the players have to think strategically to conquer the most valuable countries for their missions, it will be easy for you to understand the Uber and Didi’s moves in order to lead the global ride-hailing market. Both companies are constantly challenging each other, but in the past few months, this story lived some of their most important chapters.
Uber’s exit from China, Russia, and Southeast Asia was the first move that kept the global market attention. At a first look, it seems like a failure, but after some months Uber shows that it was a strategic move capable of made billions for the company, according to Tech Crunch. “Even after we exited [China] we ran into them in other markets as well, our philosophy [is that] if they are doing something better in terms of features, we try harder to close the gap and surpass them. In the areas where our services are better, we try not to rest on our laurels because we see them trying to catch up all the time”, said Thuan Pham, the CTO from Uber in an interview at the Rise conference in Hong Kong
That’s was when Latin America won the spotlight. While Uber was turning on their attention for the region, Didi spent 1 billion dollars to buy 99, the Uber’s main competitor in the Brazilian market. And after all the movement on the Asian market, there we go again! In Latin America, the competition between the companies is stronger than ever, but for Pham, who wins with all of these by the end of the day are the consumers.
“If you don’t have competition then you can become complacent because there’s no competition to challenge. This competition is definitely a very healthy thing, it’s very very necessary”, added Pham.
According to him, the competition between the two giants is far from a final battle and can still during years, what demand all the efforts from both companies to improve their features and can also affect other ride services. “The best few companies will ultimately get to stay around and the lesser companies will get absorbed“, declared Pham.
