Uber gets nearly 1M rides per day in China, set to surpass US this year

Uber is now getting close to one million rides per day across China, according to a leaked internal letter from Uber CEO Travis Kalanick obtained today by the Financial Times (paywall) (hat-tip to the New York Times‘ Paul Mozur for spotting this on Twitter).

In the letter (full PDF embedded below), Kalanick states that three Chinese cities are now larger than New York in terms of the number of rides – Guangzhou, Hangzhou and Chengdu. New York is Uber’s largest city outside of China. Those Chinese cities achieved this “in just 9 months,” he wrote, compared to the four years that Uber has been active in New York. Uber’s drivers in China are now “completing almost 1 million trips per day and the business has doubled in the last month.”

Kalanick included this graph in his letter showing how Uber’s 11 mainland China cities are far outpacing the rest of the world in terms of the growth in rides:

Uber first launched in beta in China in August 2013, but Kalanick counts the official launch in February 2014 as the company’s actual start in the country.

Wild, wild East

Other highlights from the Uber leak:

• Kalanick accuses tech giant Tencent of shutting down Uber public accounts in its WeChat messaging app.
• He alleges taxi drivers “have been paid to stage protests” against Uber, but Kalanick doesn’t say where the money comes from.
• Uber is planning to invest over US$1 billion in China in 2015.
• Uber plans to launch in 50 Chinese cities next year.
• China likely to surpass the US as Uber’s biggest market by end of year.
• Uber has a claimed 50 percent of the non-taxi app market in China.
• Uber cites independent data showing that the Didi Dache and Kuaidi Dache apps are seeing slowing growth, while Uber’s daily active users are seeing accelerating growth. However, Kalanick acknowledges that those apps are much larger and still have a higher rate of growth in absolute terms.
• Starting on June 22, Uber will start fundraising among institutional investors for the UberChina business.

The CEO’s letter doesn’t address recent controversies, such as Uber drivers circumventing the firm’s background checks or using fake passenger accounts to get driver bonuses, as detailed earlier this week by Mozur and Mike Isaac in the NYT.

Here’s the letter in full (PDF).