Watching businesses adapt and battle it out in a highly competitive market, is something I enjoy.

Today I wanted to analyze the rideshare industry and make my own analysis on what I think the future will hold for two specific companies, Didi and Uber.

History of Didi

Think the Chinese based version of Uber.

Cheng Wei, after working for Alibaba for eight years, founded Didi Dache. Created as a solution to a problem he personally faced, not being able to catch cabs, particularly during rush hour, which resulted in several missed flights.

Didi launched as an app for consumers to request taxis for immediate pickup. Later, the app allowed consumers to reserve taxis for trips the next day, and now has many ride features similar to Uber.

Didi continues to grow into international markets and is seen as the biggest competitor to Uber. The two companies engaged in a fierce price war in 2015 over the China market. Both lost billions of dollars and on August 1st of 2016, Didi acquired Uber’s China unit.

This gave Didi a leg up in the China market, but they are still competing with Uber in other international markets.

Jean Liu is the current president of Didi Chuxing. Prior to DiDi, Jean worked for Goldman Sachs Asia for 12 years and strikes me as a savvy businesswoman.

Leadership is important to note as it dramatically influences the company and how the public sees the brand. As far as leadership goes I believe Didi is stronger.

History of Uber

Uber was founded as “UberCab” by Garrett Camp, and Travis Kalanick in 2009.

On New Year’s Eve, Camp spent $800 hiring a private driver with friends and had been mulling over ways to decrease the cost of black car services ever since. He realized that sharing the cost with people could make it affordable, and his idea morphed into Uber.

Following a beta launch in May 2010, the app officially launched in 2011. Originally, the application only allowed users to hail a black luxury car and the price was 1.5 times that of a taxi.

In February 2010, Ryan Graves became the first Uber employee, getting the job by responding to a tweet from Kalanick announcing the job opening, and receiving 5–10% of the company. I wanted to included that note because I love that Ryan just put himself out there and created the opportunity for himself.

The announcement to buy 24,000 Volvo cars designed to accept autonomous technology between 2019 and 2021 is a big leap. Clear intent to lead build a self-driving system in the SUV vehicles.

As far as leadership goes I’m not as keen on Uber. I think their recent scandals have a lot of problems and have hurt their brand. I’m hopeful about the new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi but am skeptical.

Overview

Launching a ride-sharing business will only get it so far. I believe long term DiDi and Uber are both ultimately aiming for a completely autonomous taxi service.

At the moment it appears that Uber is more set up for long-term autonomous taxi service.

It’s possible that autonomous taxis will also establish an international winner on the international stage easier to identify as well