Didi gears upanti-Uber alliance with Ola investment

SHANGHAI — China’s most popular ride-hailing app, Didi Kuaidi — in which Temasek Holdings is an investor — said yesterday it has invested in Indian peer Ola, in a further sign of a growing global alliance within a network of companies challenging American rival Uber Technologies.

The investment comes as part of Ola’s latest fundraising round, which people familiar with the situation said was expected to give the Bangalore-based group a valuation of US$5 billion (S$7 billion), as well as extra funds to counter Uber’s expansion into India, the Financial Times reported.

Didi joins existing investors including SoftBank, Falcon Edge, Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC and Tiger Global Management. A spokesman for Didi declined to specify the size of the investment.

SoftBank is the common investor backing most of the firms that are taking on the US$50 billion-valued Uber across Asia and in the United States. The Japanese telecoms conglomerate already has stakes in Didi, Ola and South-east Asian firm GrabTaxi.

Didi has also invested in Uber’s US rival Lyft, which shares common investors with the other companies, including Chinese e-commerce titan Alibaba Group Holding.

The latest deal comes less than two weeks after Didi and US ride-sharing service Lyft also agreed to a cross-border partnership that will allow each to serve the other’s passengers in their respective countries.

Ola controls 80 per cent of India’s taxi-hailing business, and completes more than 750,000 rides a day, according to yesterday’s statement.

Last month, Uber said it plans to average more than 1 million rides a day in India over the next six to nine months as it steps up investments to take on Ola.

In August, GrabTaxi said it had also raised money from Didi, which recently conducted a US$3 billion fundraising round.

Uber and its biggest rival Didi are locked in a subsidy-intensive fight for market share in China, which is costing them each hundreds of millions of dollars. Agencies