Didi begins opening its ride-hailing platform to rivals, starting with a pilot project in Chengdu, allowing users to hail cars dispatched by competitor Miaozou
Sarah Dai / South China Morning Post :
Context & Ripple Effects
Didi spent the mid-2010s buying its dominant position outright, raising a $2 billion war chest at the height of the Uber rivalry while out-hailing Uber China three-to-one on private car rides per day. The playbook was exclusivity: lock up drivers and riders inside one app.
Opening the platform to Miaozou inverts that logic. It follows the same pilot-first expansion habit Didi used when it launched a pilot food delivery service in 2018 — test one city, then scale — but this time the thing being opened is Didi's core demand pool to a direct competitor.
First-order effects
- Miaozou gets access to Didi's rider base in Chengdu without spending on user acquisition, while Didi's users see more cars without Didi adding fleet of its own.
- Didi's role shifts from sole supplier to dispatcher: it now earns on rides it does not fulfill, provided it keeps the customer relationship.
Second-order effects
- Rivals with their own apps face a fork — join Didi's platform for demand or stay independent and fight for riders alone; Geely-backed Cao Cao Mobility, which raised ~$588M from Chinese state-owned funds to build its own base, is the clearest test case.
- If aggregating pays better than owning supply, smaller fleets will chase placement on Didi's app, concentrating bargaining power over commission terms with whoever controls the interface.
Third-order effects
- The endgame is ride-hailing structured like an access-layer market: many competing fleets bidding for visibility inside one or two dominant apps, with competition moving from driver supply to ranking and pricing control.
- That structure invites regulatory attention on whether the gatekeeper fairly treats rival fleets inside its own app — the same contestable-gatekeeping questions now playing out across platform industries.
The trend: Chinese ride-hailing is shifting from closed, capital-fought exclusivity toward aggregator platforms where the dominant app rents its demand to rival fleets.