Apple Just Invested $1 Billion In Uber's Chinese Rival
Forget building a car, Apple decided to jump into the ride-sharing wars.
On Friday morning in China, Didi Kuaidi announced a $1 billion investment from Apple as part of their ongoing massive funding round. Didi is the largest taxi-hailing and ride-sharing app in China, where it competes in a fierce billion-dollar battle with Uber for control of the most populous country in the world. Bringing Apple into the fray gives Didi a huge strategic American partner to continue that fight.
As for Apple, this investment is a sharp departure from the company’s history of minor acquisitions, with the exception of Beats in 2014. Unlike Google and Microsoft, the Cupertino computing giant has not generally invesedt in minority ownership stakes in private tech companies.
However, an investment in Didi could help Apple CEO Tim Cook put some of his massive cash reserves to better use, especially the money stashed overseas it has refused to repatriate. It also represents a new strategy of seeking growth just as Apple’s iPhone sales fell for the first time last quarter. Cook has begun to discuss Apple as a services company rather than just a hardware maker too–and ride-sharing could fall into that category.
That was a lot of llEs and l-Phones
http://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2016/05/12/apple-just-invested-1-billion-in-ubers-chinese-rival/#2f52175b4872
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