Brad Stone: evaluation

Transcript context

…You loyal taste taster. It’s like the Middle Ages here. Right. There’s a lot of maneuverings here behind the scenes. But I think that to their credit, the Didi executives and at this point, Jean Luo, an executive from Goldman Sachs, she’s either advising Didi at this time or has joined really as Cheng Wei’s partner. And I think there’s a belief that as with so many other markets in China, the local player will be able to prevail. There’s a lot of sort of kind of fierce pride I think in the Chinese internet market that they can hold their own. And it’s funny because I contrast that with the attitude in Europe where we really don’t see that. So as a result, Travis and his bid to acquire Didi very early on was rejected and they resolved that they’re going to fight it out in the marketplace. So a question on that. Google doesn’t operate in China and many other large internet giants have been sort of kicked out of China and not allowed with the great firewall to operate on the internet there. Why was it that Uber was able to get to 30% market penetration and didn’t Didi have on its side the ability to just say “Hey, we’re going to make a couple of calls and you really need to leave our country”?…

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