Your UBER is not on the way…

hubris: excessive pride or self-confidence; arrogance (dictionary.com)

Your UBER is not on the way–not in China anyway. From August 1, 2016 UBER in China is no more. DIDI is the emperor of ride sharing in the Middle Kingdom.

UBER, the scrappy American company led by its brash CEO Travis Kalanick, had an uphill fight from the start. Although it seemed to do “all the right things” in terms of localization, and even found powerful local backing, it was no match for the homegrown Didi Chuxing. At the end of its China run UBER had its business in 40 cities while DIDI had 400 cities. DIDI also had some big backers including Tencent, Alibaba and Apple. So the writing was pretty much on the Great Wall from the start, and on August 1, Mr. Kalanick decided to throw in the towel.

But it wasn’t all bad. While not a silver lining, there was a scrap of good news for UBER. They have an 18% share of the new company that has been formed to incorporate DIDI-UBER China. Some analysts say UBER may have even made money on its China venture with this sale. But before doing that, they might want to run the numbers on UBER’s costs over the course of the life of its China venture.

And finally, many pundits pointed to this situation as a prime example of where another western tech company was shut out of the Chinese market and where the playing field was nowhere near level. So UBER moves on: it has other fish to fry in Asia. And the moral of this story? Sometimes the good guys win, sometimes the bad guys win, and sometimes it is hard to tell who is who and which is which.

 

Photo: World Bank, Beijing Traffic via flickr