COLDSKY.CN – Ride-hailing firm Didi Chuxing is recruiting truck drivers in Hangzhou and Chengdu cities from May 18 to June 18 as it prepares to compete in the cargo transportation market, Pencil News reported in Chinese.
A truck driver needs to pay 800 yuan as the deposit and 50 yuan for supplies in order to register for the service that matches demand with supply, managed by two subsidiaries of the start-up.
Valued at $56bn in a 2017 funding round, Didi Chuxing is leveraging its massive transportation database generated by hundreds of millions of users to tap into markets for food delivery and errand running service earlier, said the report.
In March, FT reported the coronavirus disruption became a new obstacle on the long road to profitability of Didi Chuxing, which is one of SoftBank’s biggest bets.
One month later, the company announced a 3-year strategy to serve 100 million orders each day all around the world, with an 8 percent domestic penetration rate in the travel market and global monthly active users exceeding 800 million.
Earlier this month, president Jean Liu Qing told CNBC that Didi’s ride volume in China has reached 60 to 70 per cent of pre-coronavirus levels and is five times its February low.
Cheng Wei, CEO of Didi Chuxing, once said that he is “tired of fighting with everyone else in a dark forest” and hopes the company to capture more global markets as Uber and Google have done.
Estimates from the Ministry of Transport in January say that annual cargo volume totalled about 53.4 billion tons and road cargo freight expanded 5.1 percent year-on-year, with goods transported via waterways and highways up 6.3 percent and 6.8 percent.
In the freight service sector, Manbang Group, a merger of two rival companies Yunmanman and Huochebang, and For U Trucking (福佑卡车) focus more on medium and long-distance logistics distribution, while Lalamove(货拉拉) and GoGoVan(快狗打车) are essentially in-city courier and delivery services.
Manbang covers the majority of the country’s goods transport, with 7 million truck drivers and 2.25 million logistics firms registered on its platform, according to a Xinhua report.
This story is based on following reports in Chinese and English:
https://www.didiglobal.com/news/newsDetail?id=893&type=news
https://www.ft.com/content/83a065e2-5ed5-11ea-8033-fa40a0d65a98
https://www.pencilnews.cn/p/37171.html?from=hot_article
http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2019-11/08/c_138539610.htm
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