1M rides a day? Questions about Uber’s growth claims in China

Last week, a leaked – or perhaps “leaked” – letter from Uber CEO Travis Kalanick revealed a number of Uber’s accomplishments in China. Chief among them: that its China riders are now “completing almost 1 million trips per day.” A lot of people were impressed. Virtually every English language media outlet that covers tech (including us) ran some version of the story.

But the one million rides a day number has also raised some eyebrows. Just four days before Kalanick’s letter “leaked,” the New York Times ran a story on Uber’s China business that contains some conflicting information:

Uber is providing more than 100,000 rides a day in China, according to two people with knowledge of the company’s internal metrics, who declined to be identified because the numbers are confidential.

And that’s not the only number to appear in the past week that calls Uber’s 1M rides claim into question. After noticing the 1M/100K discrepancy, Chinese tech media site Sina Tech went to its own “knowledgable source” on the matter, who says that Uber is really completing about 300,000 rides/day in China at the moment.

So within the span of a week, we have three very different numbers popping up in the press about Uber’s business in China. The two lower numbers come from anonymous sources, which might be cause for some skepticism. But the 1M number comes from Uber itself in a “leaked” letter to investors that contains almost nothing negative about Uber and plenty of negative information about its competition – certainly sufficient cause for skepticism as well.

And of course, there’s more to the story than just competing numbers. Just last week, Quartz reported that because of Uber’s high driver subsidies in China, drivers are finding fake passenger accomplices online to arrange for fake trips:

Accomplices can sit in their apartments, disable location settings, and specify a pickup not far from the actual location of driver’s vehicle, the report said. The driver then accepts the hail, and goes on a trip without a passenger. After the accomplice approves payment, the driver will – hopefully – pay back the fee and share a cut of the bonus.

The scheme is apparently popular enough that a market has sprung up on Taobao, where dozens of vendors offer access to Uber’s driver app for anyone who can pay. Some of these vendors have already sold hundreds of Uber driver accounts.

Uber is aware of these fraudulent behaviors and the company claims that it is combatting them, even though it says they account for just a small fraction of its total business in China. But Sina Tech’s source says the company is “turning a blind eye” to this fraud for the time being – “after all, the data has to look decent.”

So how is Uber really doing in China? For the moment, the answer to that question seems to come down to who you believe.