Didi Kuaidi, which came into being after the merger of two ride-hailing applications, yesterday said its chauffeur service is expected to cover 100 cities by the end of this year.
The company is moving into new businesses after raising $2 billion from venture capital firms earlier this month. The chauffeur service is now available in 10 cities with about 160,000 drivers serving them. The rates vary at different hours of the day. It's biggest rival, eDaijia, has about 80,000 designated drivers and operates in 150 cities.
The drivers are hired through existing chauffeur service companies, said Fu Qiang, head of Didi Kuaidi's chauffeur service, adding that they've evaluated the drivers based on their previous employment history.
Didi Kuaidi is ambitiously moving into new areas such as limousines, car pooling and chauffeur service after Tencent-backed Didi and Alibaba-backed Kuaidi merged in February to eliminate price wars.
Didi Kuaidi is aiming to serve more than 30 million passengers and 10 million drivers on an average day within three years. Currently it has 200 million users.
