Didi analysis

Yesterday news broke that Apple was making a $1 billion investment in Didi Chuxing, the Chinese competitor to Uber. Unlike some other pundits, I like to sit on the news for a while in order to let my thoughts gel before putting my hands to the keyboard.

After thinking about it for a while, my first conclusion is “Wow! That’s a lot of money!” If I had that much money I’d invest $1700 of it in a new iMac and put the other $999,998,300 into a diversified mutual fund. But Apple has more money than I do! So this is more like when I invest in a sandwich.

And I eat sandwiches for lunch.

The Reuters article says that this is…

…a move that Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook said would help the company better understand the critical Chinese market.

I’d think maybe you could buy a book or something for less than that. I dunno.

The tech giant’s rare investment gives it a stake in two burgeoning waves of technology – the sharing economy and car technology…

The sharing economy? What the hell is that? I don’t even with this.

Apple is trying to reinvigorate sales in China, where it has come under greater pressure from regulators, and Cook is traveling to the country this month.

He should see those terra cotta warriors. Amazing.

Cook said in an interview that he saw opportunities for Apple and Didi Chuxing to collaborate in the future.

Oh, wow! I assumed this was the end. This is interesting.

“After all the hints about the service business and what they would like to do in the future, it’s all starting to fit together,” he said.

Surveying a pile of jumbled up pieces from various different puzzles, the analyst gestured to it broadly and said “It’s all starting to come together.” Then he smiled awkwardly.

Didi Chuxing is a poster child for Chinese technology, a critical sector in Beijing’s goal to shift the economy toward higher-value services.

I keep reading that as “Did Chuxing” and expecting the sentence to end in a question. It never happens.

“There’s a lot of things we can work on together,” [Jean Liu, Didi’s president] said when asked whether Didi Chuxing would help Apple’s government relations in China.

This is probably significant in some way but I have no idea how.

Well, rest assured that we’ll be hearing more about this in the future as cars and China and investments play a very important roll in the sharing economy with the cloud and services and such.

Very interesting.