Tencent’s IM tool WeChat integrated Didi Dache into its services just after the parent company injected $100 million in Series C funding of the taxi-hailing app (via Tencent Tech). Tencent has previously invested $15 million of financing in Didi Dache in April last year.
After finding Didi Dache in WeChat’s My Bankcard interface, users can book taxi by inputting their destinations and pay the taxi fees via WeChat Payment. In addition to Didi Dache, My Bankcard already features several local life services of film tickets, lotteries, phone bills, etc.
Screenshot of Didi Dache in WeChat
In order to encourage customers to use Didi Dache via WeChat, the company came up with a policy to subsidize both users and taxi drivers with 10 yuan for each transaction. The upper limits of this subsidy policy are 30 yuan for users and 50 yuan for drivers per day.
Didi Dache claimed to have obtained more than 60% of market share and provide services in 32 cities including first-tier cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen, with more than 20 million registered users and over 350 thousand taxi drivers.
Kuaidi Dache, Didi Dache’s major competitor who is venture backed by Alibaba, also supports payments with Alipay, the digital payment service of Alibaba Group.
After one year of booming development in 2013, the market scene of taxi app industry becomes clearer. Didi Dache and Kuaidi Dache, two companies backed by deep-pocketed investors, stood out from rest of the rivals.
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