Uber‘s top cities are not in the US anymore. Four out of the top ten are in China, that’s according to an email sent by the company’s CEO Travis Kalanick to investors, and obtained by the Financial Times.
Guangzhou, Hangzhou, and Chengdu are currently the three largest cities in terms of trips taken, overtaking New York, the email said.
China overtakes US for Uber growth
The request for investment money that Kalanick sent explained how fast the company is growing:
- Passengers in China are taking 1 million trips per day.
- Uber is in 11 cities in China, but plans to launch in 50 more cities that have a population of more than five million this year. These are all cities comparable to the size of Miami, Kalanick said in the email.
- Four out of Uber’s 10 largest cities are in China.
- After nine months in Chengdu, the city is seeing 479 times the number of trips that New York did at the same mark. Hangzhou is 422 times larger than New York at the same nine-month mark and it is adding 200,000 residents a week.
- The company is planning on investing more than $1 billion into UberChina, which goes by YouBu or “an excellent step forward”, locally.
- It is now the largest market outside of the U.S., and “at the current growth trajectory, will most likely surpass the US before year-end,” Kalanick said in the email.
In order to promote growth in China, Uber is formally looking to raise a new fundraising round on June 22nd. The company has already raised more than $5 billion in several fundraising rounds, including a $600 million investment from Chinese Internet company Baidu.
SOURCE: Business Insider.
Larry Banks is a keen follower of technology and finance. He has worked for a variety of online publications, writing about a diverse range of topics including mobile networks, patents, and Internet video delivery technologies.
