China-headquartered ride provider Didi Chuxing now owns a majority stake in its Brazil-based portfolio company 99, after having paid $600m for it during the first week of the new year. According to sources, cited by the New York Times, Didi Chuxing had previously owned 30% of 99. Didi had led a $100m round raised by 99 exactly a year ago. This move is, undoubtedly, part of its aggressive international expansion in competition with its US-based counterpart Uber. Didi Chuxing now holds minority stakes in various businesses in the ride hailing space across the wold: Lyft, Grab, Ola, Taxify and Careem and even a small stake in Uber itself.
Founded as 99taxi in 2012, 99 runs an on-demand ride service with 14 million users across some 500 Brazilian cities and towns as of May 2017. While its user base is approximately comparable to Uber’s customer pool in Brazil, its services cover more areas within the country.
The vibrancy of the ride hailing space has been under the spotlight and in the news over the past few years. In fact, it has been one of the major drivers of the growth of investment in transport sector, along with connected and autonomous vehicle tech, as the GCV Analytics bar chart illustrates. It seems 2018 will be yet another interesting year for this space.
