Free Taxi in Beijing

The war between Tencent and Alibaba

I went to Beijing this week, visited the Tencent headquarters, and was shocked to see all the new features they are integrating into one single app: WeChat.

Put simply, WeChat is used by anyone in China. It started by messaging friends, but quickly become THE app you would use in China to pay for e-commerce, follow brands, send money to someone, pay your parking ticket to the police, and book and pay your taxi.

The thing is that Alibaba already has a taxi booking app available: Kuaidi Dache. So to help recruit more users, Tencent is offering 15RMB (US$2.4) per ride for everyone who uses WeChat to book a taxi. Which means that most taxi rides become free, at least the short distance ones. This is simply incredible. The level of competitiveness being seen in China to win users is really another level so what’s existing in the Silicon Valley, and it’s not going to stop given the rising opportunities in tech.