Uber’s top cities are no longer in the U.S.
Four out of the top 10 are now in China, according to an email sent by Uber CEO Travis Kalanick to investors and obtained by the Financial Times.
Guangzhou, Hangzhou, and Chengdu are now the three largest cities on a trips basis, overtaking New York, the email stated.
In the request for money from investors, Kalanick explained just 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 int he email.
To grow in China, the company is formally launching a fundraising round on June 22. The company has previously raised more than $5 billion in several funding rounds, including a $600 million investment from Chinese company Baidu.
As reported by Business Insider