Online car-hailing platform Didi Chuxing, China's largest such operator, said on Monday that it takes no money from the fares customers pay to taxi drivers on its platform and will temporarily close its proposed pricing algorithm function to avoid problems during the Spring Festival travel rush.
The app maintains the function that allows customers to give fares to taxi drivers, the company said in a statement sent to the Global Times Monday.
In recent weeks, complaints have piled up about the app, with many passengers claiming that they couldn't hail a taxi without paying higher fares.
As for the mountains of complaints, the company said the problem may be caused by an imbalance between supply and demand.
The problem indicates a lack of taxi drivers as many of them have returned home for the upcoming Spring Festival holidays, while demand for rides is picking up, Didi's senior product director Luo Wen wrote in a post on China's leading question-and-answer website Zhihu Saturday.
Didi said Wednesday that it is continuously monitoring the function of its algorithm-based dynamic pricing and it has a cap on the price multiples during dynamic pricing periods to protect users.
Didi's operation has been under pressure in recent months. On December 21, Beijing rolled out rules on online car-hailing services, requiring that only Beijing-registered residents could be drivers for ride-hailing services. Shanghai issued similar rules, effectively banning many existing drivers from the business.
Didi is gutting the number of drivers on its platform in Shanghai to comply with the city's new regulations, the Financial Times reported Sunday.
Over 17 million flexible work opportunities are provided in 2016 on Didi's platform, where more than 2.07 million drivers made an average of $23 a day.
