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China Criticizes Subsidized Ride-Hailing Apps As Anti-Competitive (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: China's minister of transport Yang Chuantang has warned that the current round of ferocious price-wars among China's leading ride-sharing app providers, including Didi Dache and Uber, represents an attempt to kill local competition with massively-subsidized price cuts that will not subsequently be sustained. Chuantang, speaking at the annual national assembly in Beijing, said that the subsidies "are aimed at occupying more market share within the short term and is competitively unfair for the taxi industry. It is unhealthy and cannot be sustained in the long term." Uber is currently investing (or, arguably, losing) $1 billion a year in its attempts to consolidate a place in the Chinese ride-sharing market.
Let's lose all our money to get the biggest market share and then quadruple our prices! Surely our clients won't go back to regular taxis which will then be at a lower price than us!
China needs to block those companies. And the west needs to block much of Chinese imports since much of it is subsidized and dumped on the west as well.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Nearly every major industry in the Chinese economy has been subsidized by the government, esp those related to exports.
You'd think China of all countries could appreciate a masterful application of dumping when they see it.
Uber is just an app. If they want to pay Chinese drivers more than they charge Chinese customers, to get marketshare -- why not let them? If they raise their prices, people can switch to another app. The other app could be briefly subsidized as well, if needed.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
...They sure are Capitalistic.
This is exactly the problem (at least one big problem) with modern VC driven economics. The investors only care about knocking out the other competitors, not building a long term sustainable business. They monopolize one 'vertical' then move on to wrecking the next one. Amazon benefitted from a similar strategy. They want to burn money blowing out the whole 'ecosystem' of services that are at least priced high enough to keep operating. Obviously this has happened in plenty of other sectors of China's economy before, but it's easy to see why they don't want Western investors monopolizing their taxi industry through this strategy (and for that matter they need to get a lot of autos unloaded into the consumer market).
--hongpong.com
Cronies must be enriched. Those taxi companies paid good campaign contributions (bribes) so hurry! Whip out the government checkbook and give cronies the money.
China is worried about anti-competitive behavior affecting free markets?!? (Checking the weather reports for Hades...)
Let me get this straight. This is the same country whose subsided the steel industry, the semiconductor industry, then the solar panel industry to drive the prices down and push all their competitors out of business suddenly getting butt hurt when the same tactics are used against them?
Wow, that's rich. Sorry, not sorry I don't feel bad for them. I hope they learn from this and realize what a shitty tactic it is to engage in and change.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
that Uber is still in business. Their business model isn't sustainable.
Chinese taxi drivers, before ride-sharing, were horrible. They wouldn't stop, didn't want to work during certain times of day - rush hour, of course - charged extra to go anywhere, doubled and tripled up on customers so you'd have to visit several locations before you got to your destination, you name it they did it. The cabs were filthy, the seat belts didn't work (or were dirty and left a stripe on your nice clean clothes), the A/C didn't work, they wouldn't roll up the windows even in the dead of winter.
Now with ride-sharing, you call a car, it's clean and nice, the driver goes exactly where you want to go, and the price is quite reasonable. Driver feedback ensures that unqualified or shitbag drivers get fired quickly. It's a night and day difference, and the people are the real winners.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
This is a ridiculous waste of money. They should consolidate the drivers/billing under one company and then allow apps like Uber/Lyft etc to compete for customer installs the same way that airlines sell tickets through websites like Cheaptickets and Priceline. This wouldn't really fix anything in terms of wasted money on brand wars but at least the drivers and customers can be indifferent to the shenanigans. The next inevitable step is a labor dispute. The drivers will attempt to unionize which will be interesting to watch.
While I generally like to see competition to keep people honest (as opposed to corporate conspiracies), a company coming in at below price points to kill competition is certainly not in the best interest of it's citizens, and after the "war" is over companies that have monopolies jack up their prices to "recover" costs well after they truly are. And in truth, it's not entirely easy to blame them as greedy people who blindly support such short term price cuts without taking into consideration the big picture one can argue deserve what they get. It's so easy to take advantage of a people who adopt the attitude of "every man for himself" which is the culture the government has spent a lot of time and resources to cultivate. And to their long term detriment, is exactly what they have achieved. The joke in China is, money is the national religion.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
"Y'all needs to pony up hella more baksheesh! Let no palm go ungreased."
When it's foreigners doing it to you, does it China?
In 99.9% of the cases (ok number pulled out of my !@#$) there is no ride sharing going on. The drivers are actively seeking passengers to take to the passengers destination. They aren't sharing their ride they are hiring out their services.
Oh bullshit. The only one there that's subsidized is farming. What you liars call "subsidies", every marginally educated person calls a "business expense". Income gets taxed, not net profit. If I spend $4B on a business expense, that's a loss in cash, not a profit, and doesn't get taxed. This is not complex. However, you and your ilk keep lying.
You should be careful to distinguish that anti-competitive behavior (at least in the US) is the creation of barriers to entry by those in the market already. For example, punishing price discounting by incumbent companies to keep new entrants from gaining market share.
Use of punishing price discounts by new entrants is not anti-competitive, it is actually more competitive.
Not that politicians don't misuse it just the same of course...
These sharing apps should only grow organically, as their core concept is such. Any attempt to grow faster exposes them to already materialized risks and limits the overall "innovation potential" of the market.
And if there's anybody that knows all about artificially lowering prices in order to destroy the competition and have the market to itself, it would be China.
"...subsidies "are aimed at occupying more market share within the short term and is competitively unfair for the taxi industry"
But it's okay when The Chinese decide to subsidize Chinese industries to give that same unfairness against non-Chinese Industry:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...
http://www.economist.com/news/...
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
Why is is that Facebook and Uber have remained centralized all these years. Want to control logistics, profit, and privacy (your content), the solution is to throw all this into P2P mode. Want to go offline and take your content with it, fine, shutdown the computer hosting the content. Should a user stumble across an old user thread, if the PC that was associated with isn't online, the content is listed as N/A. None of this shit about storing years of user comments and photos. Further more, none of this BS about them middle-man creaming the near entire profit incentive for participating in services like Uber int he first place.
It's time for people to pull their collective heads out of their asses.
Life is not for the lazy.
I used to have a copy... like many of Brooks works, I found it more fun to talk about than to read. Mod points would indeed be worth more than the novel, if not the kingdom.
Hmmm. Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
I do recall liking one of his series but I don't, for the life of me, recollect which it was - nor do I have energy to look. I'm assuming that I have it somewhere still but I've no idea where - it may be on a shelf or it may still be packed in a box somewhere. I don't remember being impressed with it and I do remember being a bit surprised that it was turned into a series - the book I read didn't really feel like the start of a series.
I was reading another series at the time. My memory is terrible but the novel that I most recollect was Misnomers and Impervections. It was, indeed, about a Perv though it was not probably what most would assume a Perv was but actually a scaly lizard-like humanoid. Yeah, that was not a great era for fantasy but Pratchett was just around the corner. Some of the longer series were okay - like the One Gold Wielder (I think was the name - Donaldson maybe?) and a few others. Xanth was big but I'm not a preteen girl and Anthony had some almost good science-fiction before devolving to fantasy.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
China Criticizes Subsidized Ride-Hailing Apps As Anti-Competitive
Ah, this sounds like music to my ears!
Play it again, Sam! :-)
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
At least when there are deals, it's cheaper to get a ride in what's often a nice, shiny luxury sedan than a worn-down, stinky taxi.
So what if Uber gets the whole market? The instant their prices go above what's competitive, someone will spend a few hundred thousand bucks to start a cheaper service. People here can be kind of stingy, which seems to be what Uber is banking on.
Use of the words "good", "bad" or "evil" is almost invariably the result of oversimplification.