Brad Stone: belief

Transcript context

…And which was of course QQ before that on desktop. This was like, you know, sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good, right? I think that’s right and I think that the big moment for this industry, so Kuaidi and Didi start to emerge by virtue of the investment of Tencent and Alibaba. Baidu is still sitting on the sidelines. What happens at the end of 2013, beginning of 2014, and again, almost sort of lucky is that over the Chinese New Year, WeChat integrates Didi as a way and there’s a product called Red Envelope or Red Package and it’s basically a way for Chinese WeChat users to give each other small gifts. The idea of giving somebody a gift on Didi the gift of a ride kind of takes off. Both Tencent and Alibaba, the sponsors of these ridesharing companies realized that the next battlefield in this longstanding war between the internet giants in China is going to be mobile payments. And that the taxi companies, the ride-hailing companies are ways to spur payment value with mobile payments. So they start to kind of use these two ridesharing companies as proxies and funnel money right off their balance sheet into these companies as a way to drive payment volume. That is when Didi and Kuaidi started to just take off on steroids and not only growing very rapidly but burning tremendous amounts of money. Yeah. Because the siege is continuing and both Alibaba and Tencent are reporting tons of money in. But other investors are also venture firms and private equity firms also pouring in lots of money. I mean, it gets to be billions of dollars that these companies are burning just trying to subsidize rides to kind of get big fast and beat the other one, right?…

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