Car-hailing app Didi Kuaidi sees itself as crucial digital step in reform of China's transport system

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The Didi Dache taxi-hailing app in action. Photo: Simon Song

Published: 1:45pm, 7 Aug 2015Updated: 3:58pm, 3 Sep 2015

Despite protests by taxi drivers across China and recently imposed government restrictions, Didi Kuaidi, China’s Uber-like car-hailing app, views itself as an essential agent of change for the taxi industry that all stand to benefit from.

“We do not believe in disruptive termination,” Jean Liu, the president of Didi Kuaidi, said at a recent two-day conference in Hong Kong for tech start-ups.

In the US, Silicon Valley likes to roll out "disruptive" technologies like Uber to shake up the status quo and make people's lives better.

But Liu, a former investment banker at Goldman Sachs and the daughter of Lenovo founder Liu Chuanzhi, wanted to stress how her company aims to upgrade the traditional way of doing things and work in concert with taxi drivers rather than kill them off.

She said her company, which also launched a car-pooling service in June, is helping to reform China's transport industry by aligning it with the digital era and should not be seen as a threat to the careers of China’s 2.6 million cabbies.

Didi Dache, the company’s taxi-hailing app, generated 5.2 million taxi orders every day in 2014 on average across more than 300 cities in China, it said.