Didi Taxi, a popular taxi-hailing mobile app in China, is optimistic that trip quality will improve when demand and supply are more precisely matched, said its founder Chen Wei on Dec. 17, 2015 at a forum during the second World Internet Conference (WIC) held in Wuzhen, Zhejiang Province.
Chen said that Didi's goal is to make trip quality better. Better trips means less waiting time when getting a taxi as well as a smooth ride and a pleasant mood during the trip. Didi intends to ease big cities' traffic congestion by reducing people's desire to own a car in the emerging "shared economy" of collaborative consumption.
"We should use the interconnected resources of traffic conditions to guide drivers away from congestion using our 'smart traffic cloud,' and make the most of these resources; each disconnected driver does not know how to choose a route," said Chen.
"Didi Bus" transports passengers who take long-distance, scheduled trips, while Didi Taxi, Hitch and Express accommodate temporary and short-distance trips. According to Chen, as the demand-supply relationship continues to develop, the city's traffic efficiency will improve.
"City-level dispatches are the only way to solve traffic congestion," said Chen, who also noted that "data from different online map services did not show that traffic conditions in many cities worsened because of Didi," refuting such accusations.
Didi has visibly changed the way people use taxi services by matching passengers' requests with taxi drivers' willingness. Additionally, it helps taxi drivers improve their income by increasing the number of their rides and reducing their idle time.
Didi takes up more than 90 percent of the market share in terms of taxi-hailing Apps, after merging with Kuaidi in February of this year. The App is also seen to be in direct conflict with its foreign competitor Uber, which has already been banned in many cities both in China and abroad.
While the public claims that Didi is creating a monopoly, Chen insists that fierce competition is good for emerging industries. "We are competing with home and international rivals; it is also a learning process," he said.
"Interconnectivity does not mean eliminating competition blindly, only vicious ones. In competition we learn from each other and that promotes the entire industry's development," said Chen, alluding to how Didi's practices embody the WIC's theme of "building a community of shared future in cyberspace."
However, Chen did not comment on the widely spread controversy that his app in fact "legitimizes" unregulated taxies, or "gypsy cabs" as they are sometimes known, in that drivers can easily register themselves as Didi drivers and their vehicles on Didi's service platform.
In China, paid ride services used to be exclusive to licensed taxi drivers, who obtained their licenses through strict tests. Only those vehicles with operating qualifications could be used for taxi services. There are constant struggles between licensed taxi drivers and those using Didi's service. While the central government still retains an ambiguous "wait and see" attitude with regard to Didi, claiming the company is an innovator, roughly 10 cities in China have banned its services.
