Bad news on two fronts sees China’s Didi Kuaidi losing out to Uber

China’s taxi/ridesharing leader Didi Kuaidi is having a rough week. In fact, that might be putting it lightly.

Investors jumping ship?

First and perhaps most concerning for Didi is news reported by the Wall Street Journal that China’s Hillhouse Capital Group will be leading a US$1 billion round in Uber.

Hillhouse is already an investor in Didi (it bought in prior to the merger), so this new investment in Uber will help Hillhouse hedge its bets in China’s unpredictable ridesharing app market. But for the Chinese app, it’s certainly not a good sign that one of its major backers is now helping to pour US$1 billion into its chief competitor.

The deal hasn’t been finalized (or even officially announced), and Hillhouse’s investment would be in Uber’s global parent company, not in its China business specifically. Still, one imagines that is only of small comfort to Didi Kuaidi given that Uber’s global management has already identified China as a major market it wants to focus on developing.

Quality control questions

As if losing investors wasn’t enough, Didi could also be losing some public trust to Uber thanks to a new report in China’s Consumer Reports. The report, which tracks customer data leaks from taxi apps between January of 2014 and May of 2015, found that when it comes to Didi Kuaidi versus Uber, one company definitely did better than the other.

Of course, in the overall scheme of things both companies were well above average – the chart above only shows the apps with a “low” number of security leaks. Still, it’s clear that if this report is accurate, Uber’s app is more secure than Didi Dache or Kuaidi Dache. And since the report is front-page news on tech sites in China, that’s probably not good for Didi Kuaidi’s brand.