DiDi : One-touch control to solve the urban traffic problems

Company Profile
Founded in June, 2012, DiDi is the world’s largest mobile transportation service platform, offering a broad range of mobile technology-based transportation options across over 400 major Chinese cities, including taxi hailing, private car hailing, Hitch (social ride-sharing), Chauffeur, DiDi Bus, DiDi Test Drive, and DiDi Enterprise Solutions. The company adheres to the philosophy of “Mobile Internet makes travel more convenient",and is committed to using the most innovative mobile Internet technology to provide efficient, convenient and advanced services and solutions for people's intelligent green travel.
As the leader in China’s sharing economy initiative, DiDi completed a total of 1.43 billion rides on its platform in 2015, while applying its big-data capabilities to solving the country’s transportation and environmental challenges. Now it has nearly 300 million registered users with more than 10 million orders per day.
Challenges
In the last 30 years, the urban traffic pavement in our country has increased 4.7 times, while the number of vehicles in cities has increased 71.2 times, and the private cars have increased 35 times. By the end of 2014, there have been 120 million private cars in cities. The urban traffic pavement and demand cannot be satisfied. Meanwhile, the number of taxis witnesses no increase in the past decade, which is far from enough to meet the demand. The satisfaction rate of taxi demand is around 60% everyday, that is to say, nearly 40% of the demand for taxis is not met. Apart from this, the taxi demand in rush hours is 3 times of that in usual time, and among the above mentioned 40% users who cannot get a taxi, most of them are in rush hours. In cities of China, there are about 748 million people using public transport and 736 million people taking private cars to travel every day. The excessive increase of private cars is the main reason for urban traffic congestion. It has become a vicious cycle that more congestions push people to buy more private cars, which in turn causes more traffic jams.
To solve the urban traffic problems is not only an opportunity for DiDi business, but also the mission of DiDi, that is, to create more efficient, accessible and comfortable mobility experience.
Solutions
DiDi Chuxing starts from the concept of “sharing economy” and guides to establish a travel ecology in “Internet Plus" environment. it gathers more idle vehicles in the society and forms the products like private car hailing, Express car hailing, Hitch (social ride-sharing), DiDi Bus, which provides diversified choice for people and avoids private cars on the road.
At the same time, DiDi Chuxing also introduces a “carpooling” system. the system, as the underlying framework of DiDi Chuxing, currently is used for the express car hailing service. Through this system, each seat of a vehicle will become an independent available resource and when passengers input the number of passengers and order, the system will automatically find the carpooling friends. Passengers enjoy dynamic bus fee discount and also greatly reduce the use demand of road traffic.
DiDi Chuxing transforms originally independent vehicles into sharing public resources, serves more traffic travel demand and breaks the barriers between private and public resources ,which makes private resources be" public" gradually, and maximize the use of idle social resources, realizing the shared interests.
Didi Chuxing also optimizes the vehicle scheduling through cloud computing. By improving the match between passenger transport demand and supply information of vehicles, Didi improves the information capacity and the fit between the supply and demand, decrease the rate of empty vehicle, reduce waste of resources, and realize the maximization of the efficiency of limited resources.
Achievement
Social benefit
At present, the platform of DiDi Chuxing owns nearly 300 million registered users and 15 million registered drivers. Now, you can get taxis anywhere and anytime, express cars at a low price and in a convenient way, more elegant and comfortable private cars, hitches for public welfare and mutual assistance, and even order a bus seat, through the DiDi Chuxing app. DiDi Chuxing improves the success rate of getting a car effectively from raising one’s head to hail a car to bending one’s head to touch the button. Data issued by Iresearch show that private car service not only improves the mobility success rate and experience, but also reduces the number of self-driving cars on the road and the demand of buying private cars significantly, thus making a contribution to relieving congestions in cities. It is shown that, by the end of October last year, the number of people traveling with private cars has been reduced by 14.7%, after the appearance of DiDi private cars. DiDi Chuxing has also reduced the taxi drivers’ empty driving rate by 20%, improved 94.7% of taxi drivers’ income by 10% to 30%, and reduced an empty driving distance of 40 to 50 kilometers for millions of taxis in China, thus saving oil consumption by 4 to 5 liters.
One hundred days after DiDi hitch service was put into the market, it quickly covered more than 300 cities in China with shared rides of 868 million kilometers, which is equal to circling the equator 21700 times. Especially, in the 2016 spring festival travel season, DiDi provided the cross-city ridesharing service for the first time. In only 40 days, it has helped 1.9 million people travel between their hometowns and work places, equal to increase 2658 motor train with 8 units and an airline with a medium transport force.
By the end of April 2016, the average success rate of ridesharing for DiDi private cars is 65%. The drivers’ TPH has increased by 20% and their average income has increased by 30% to 40%. The possibility of getting an order in rush hours has increased by 5%.
By the end of April 2016, the platform of DiDi Chuxing has offered 13.3 million drivers including many females, laid-off workers, ex-servicemen and hardworking entrepreneurs, with more equal, freer and more flexible job opportunities. Those men born after the 1970s and 1980s and possessing family and children are the backbone forces of the society and family and they have also become the main driver group on the platform of DiDi. Data indicate that these people work as registered drivers on DiDi platform to increase income and improve life. By helping special groups get jobs and creating an employment reservoir, DiDi Chuxing has become a social stabilizer and damper.
Economic benefit
By the end of September 2015, DiDi Chuxing has taken up 99% of China’s car-hailing app market and formed a scale operation, which in turn extends its brand value. Besides, according to a research report on China’s mobile travel service market in 2016 written by Iresearch, data for the year of 2015 show that the annual order of DiDi private cars (express cars) accounts for 84.1% of China’s mobile travel service industry. Recently, in DiDi’s latest round of financing, Apple Inc. invested USD 1 billion to DiDi, which is the largest single investment in DiDi’s history.
Prospect
DiDi Chuxing has been stocked to facilitating the travel. By taking advantage of mobile Internet and sharing economic model, it aims to solve the difficulties on hailing a taxi, taking a bus, and finding the way ,and let everyone have a comfortable travel. In the future, DiDi will be driven by user experience, data, and brand to build itself into a large data-decided rather than experience-decided Internet company. For the next three years, DiDi will serve more than 30 million users and 10 million car owners around the world every day, and let the user can hail a taxi anywhere in three minutes.