Apple invests in Chinese ride-sharing company

Apple has invested US$1 billion in Chinese ride-hailing service DiDi Chuxing, a move that Apple chief executive Tim Cook said would help the company better understand the critical Chinese market. According to Reuters, the move aligns Apple with Uber Technologies’ chief rival in China, as automakers and technology companies forge new alliances and make cross investments. General Motors, for example, recently bought autonomous driving technology company Cruise Automation and has also taken a stake in US ri
May 17, 2016 Read time: 2 mins
493 Apple has invested US$1 billion in Chinese ride-hailing service DiDi Chuxing, a move that Apple chief executive Tim Cook said would help the company better understand the critical Chinese market.

According to Reuters, the move aligns Apple with 8336 Uber Technologies’ chief rival in China, as automakers and technology companies forge new alliances and make cross investments. 948 General Motors, for example, recently bought autonomous driving technology company Cruise Automation and has also taken a stake in US ride-sharing company Lyft.

“We are making the investment for a number of strategic reasons, including a chance to learn more about certain segments of the China market,” Cook said in an interview with Reuters. “Of course, we believe it will deliver a strong return for our invested capital over time as well.”

The investment makes Apple a strategic investor in DiDi and gives it a stake in two growing technologies, the sharing economy and car technology.

For more information on companies in this article

Related Content

  • Mobile payment technologies for Australia
    October 11, 2016
    Contactless technology, the ability to tap your bank issued card or enabled mobile device to make a payment, has brought speed and simplicity to the in-store shopping experience. Doug Howe explains how innovations, like Contactless, in the mobile and banking industries have the potential to transform public transportation. Q Why is public transportation ripe for transformation? A Today, more than half the world’s population lives in cities; that’s a figure set to increase to 70% by 2050. International
    Read More
  • Need for harmonisation in ITS standards
    February 1, 2012
    As the calendar rolls over, and we hop from continent to continent and World Congress to World Congress, where Memoranda of Understanding and cooperation agreements are the headline news, it is easy for those not intimately involved to forget that standards definition is a well-nigh continual process. Significant progress has been made in recent months towards achieving the critical mass and economies of scale which are going to drive development and deployment in, amongst other things, cooperative infrastr
    Read More
  • Battery bottleneck: EV roll-out at risk
    June 17, 2019
    In order for the take-up of electric vehicles – a key part of the future mobility mix - to grow, we need batteries. And that might prove tricky, reports Graham Anderson Industry and commodities experts fear that the growth in electric vehicles (EVs) could be much slower than predicted due to bottlenecks in global battery market supply chains. “People seem to think that the switch from the internal combustion engine to electric vehicles just means you plug your car in rather than fill it with petrol,” a
    Read More
  • 3i buys SRL Traffic Systems
    December 7, 2021
    London-listed investment company 3i has a 92% controlling stake in SRL, based in England.
    Read More

Highlighted Content