Didi Kuaidi completed more rides in 2015 than Uber has since launch

Yesterday Didi Kuaidi, Uber’s largest competitor in China, announced that it booked 1.43 billion rides in total last year. Bear in mind a report we ran last month, when Uber announced on its blog that it had just achieved its billionth ride ever. Therefore, Didi was really announcing that they booked more rides last year than Uber ever has in its history. However, always one to fight back, Uber’s CEO, Travis Kalanick, on the same day criticised Didi for spending $80m weekly on “subsidies,” or discounts to its rides, in order to dominate the Chinese market. That equates to $4bn in annual spending, just to be the cheaper offering in the market. "We're clearly spending less than Didi in subsidies," he said "We're spending less per trip, and we have a larger balance sheet." In response, Didi has called Kalanick’s claims “wildly creative.”

Uber wants you to believe it’s emerged as the global leader in the world of on-demand rides. To be sure, some signs do already point to that: it’s raised more than $10 billion in venture funding, and the company's worth a reported $62.5 billion. Still, it would be shortsighted to assume Uber has the edge in every aspect of the fight, especially in one of the biggest battlegrounds for ride-hailing thus far: China.

Last December, Uber announced a metric seemingly designed to let everyone know that it was absolutely killing it: it had hit 1 billion rides worldwide since the company launched in 2009. Not to be outdone, today Didi Kuaidi—Uber’s biggest rival in China—announced that it booked 1.43 billion rides—in 2015 alone.

That figure, first reported by tech news blog Re/code, is certainly enormous. Didi Kuaidi further claims that it completed 200 million rides in December, and added that Uber’s billion rides came only after six years of maturation and an aggressive global expansion—while Didi Kuaidi operated only in China in 2015.

On the other hand, though, Didi Kuaidi admits it tallied its rides from seven different services it offers, including private cars, taxis, carpooling, buses, and corporate services, among others. So it’s not quite fair to compare those reported numbers directly with Uber’s tally.

But the announcement speaks to the overarching message Didi Kuaidi badly wants to project: that it’s far ahead of everyone else in China. Period. According to research from the China Internet Network Information Center, Didi Kuaidi holds 87.2 percent of the private car-hailing market in the world's most populated country. Its user base in the country exceeds 250 million people. And it holds this majority in spite of the fact that five of Uber’s top 10 cities by ride volume are in China. Uber, for its part, has long made it clear that it considers the country to be a central piece of its strategy for growing its ride-hailing business globally. Just today The Wall Street Journal reported that the company poured fresh new funds into its China unit that would value it at $7 billion.

Didi Kuaidi isn’t retreating from its ambitions to capture a meaningful share of the worldwide ride-hailing market, either. Last fall, the company announced a partnership with Lyft that would link the companies’ apps and let Didi users traveling to the US to hail rides on Lyft’s platform, and vice versa. In December, Didi Kuaidi and Lyft's alliance expanded to include the ride-hailing leaders in India and Southeast Asia, Ola and GrabTaxi. Together, that global coalition will reach nearly 50 percent of the world’s population, according to the companies. Joint partner projects are scheduled to start rolling out in the first quarter of 2016.

So yes, it’s true that Didi Kuaidi's 1.43 billion rides is yet another boastful metric and an incremental development among many others as ride-hailing companies fight to come out on top all over the world. But with the winds of favor constantly shifting for these companies, one thing’s for sure: no one player can—or should—take its dominance in the market for granted.