Rhea Liu
UCAR and eDaijia will start strategic partnership，the two company said in a press conference in Beijing on Thursday.
Instead of a merger, UCAR will make a strategic investment in eDaijia. The two company will share their user data base, and open their application programming interface (API) to each other. More details on the investment will be confirmed later.
The two companies share the same investor in Warburg Pincus, who participated in UCAR’s USD 250 million B-series funding as well as leading eDaijia’s USD 100 million D-series.
UCAR claims to see over 300,000 daily transactions, with ten million users spread throughout 60 cities, and monthly growth of 62%. It closed its B-series funding in early October with a valuation of USD 3.55 billion.
As of June, UCAR’s nationwide ride-hailing market share only accounted for 0.8% according to a report released by CNIT-Research. However, UCAR faces the least pressure from recently announced regulations concerning the ride-hailing business because UCAR’s fleet of rental cars are all owned by parent company CAR Inc. and other third party car rental companies.
Established in 2011, eDaijia covers over 200 cities with 150,000 designated drivers. It used to have about 70%-90% of the personal driver market, NetEase Tech reports, but now eDaijia faces a head-on challenge from ride-hailing business leader Didi Kuaidi.
China’s car-hailing market leader, Didi Kuaidi, claims to have captured over 80% of China’s car-hailing service market and over 90% of China’s taxi-hailing service market.
Didi Kuaidi launched its personal driver service in July and claims, as of August 28th, to already cover 161 cities with 1.5 million registered car drivers. It is rumored that Didi Kuaidi will soon acquire personal driver service provider Aidaijia, or Love of Designated Driving.
（Top photo:posters released on the two companies’ Weibo)
