Apple VP quietly quits board at Chinese ride-share firm Didi

This looks like it may have a problem.

Apple has quietly quit the board of beleaguered Chinese ride-sharing company, Didi, six years after making a billion dollar investment in Uber’s Chinese competitor.

Adrian Perica has quit Didi board

Didi Global acquired Uber China in 2019, after which Apple made that investment and placed its VP Corporate Development, Adrian Perica, on the board. A terse, one-line notice on Didi’s website states the Apple VP resigned from the board on August 4. No Apple replacement has been put in place.

Apple’s original investment in the company strongly implied the company is considering some form of ride sharing service as a possible future to market strategy for Apple Car. That hasn’t changed, but the continued decline in international relations.

Chinese government action against Didi has also created problems.

Didi seems to have made some big mistakes

It was forced to delist its stock from the US exchange when Chinese authorities forced app stores to cease distribution of Didi’s app, which did enormous damage to the business. Market value fell 80% as a result and the company subsequently delisted itself from the US stock exchange. It is worth noting Didi is also active elsewhere in the APAC region and active across Latin America.

China also recently fined Didi $1.2 billion for infractions that apparently compromised national security.

Those infractions seem serious. They include the illegal collection of almost 12 million screenshots from user’s mobile phone albums, gathering of data from clipboards, collection of huge quantities of personal data and also undisclosed data processing activity that “seriously affect national security”.

More on this here.

But ride-sharing really is big in China

China remains one of Apple’s biggest markets. Not only that, but the nation is very likely to be a huge market for on-demand transportation and smart vehicles. India will also be a key market, as predicted in 2016.

Recently disclosed Chinese government figures showed that 695 million car-hailing orders were made in China in July, of which 22% were handed by aggregation platforms.

It may or may not be relevant that Didi also seems to be withdrawing from its ‘Da Vinci’ car making project, given recent news concerning bankruptcy of a joint venture with Li Auto.

Photo by Sebastian Huxley on Unsplash

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