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New York-based investment firm, BlackRock has now put a stake in Uber's Chinese rival Didi Chuxing in it's recent $7.2b round. This comes to a surprise after BlackRock invested in Uber back in 2014. As Didi does not plan on expanding internationally, investors such as BlackRock are expecting the on-demand transportation company to take the Asian market by storm. Both Uber and Didi Chuxing are in essence a payments company, not just a transportation startup, so it's not very surprising that financial institutions like BlackRock and Tiger Global are double dipping into this industry.
Didi doesn’t have international expansion plans, so investors are very much betting that it can lead the ride-sharing market in China, the land of more than a billion people. Li Zijian, senior director for international strategy at Didi, recently pegged the on-demand transportation industry in China to be worth $200 billion over the next five years. He added that Didi, which claims to be profitable in over 200 of its 400-plus cities in China, is taking just 1.1 percent of the whole market right now. That’s the growth opportunity that investors are bullish on.
