{"text":[[{"start":7.89,"text":"Is ride-sharing service Dida Inc. (2559.HK) nearing the end of the road?"}],[{"start":15.07,"text":"That question was looming large in a profit warning issued last Friday by China’s first major ride sharing company to list. The alert showed not only that Dida’s revenue fell sharply in 2025, but that the drop accelerated in the second half of the year. The company’s profit moved in a similar direction, and may have even slipped into the red in the second half of the year."}],[{"start":41.11,"text":"Dida blamed competition and China’s slowing economy for its rapidly falling fortunes. The company is somewhat different from larger peers like DiDi Global and CaoCao (2643.HK) in its focus on shared carpooling services for budget-conscious riders. Such services offer fares that are cheaper than traditional ride-hailing services, but with the condition that one car may pick up and drop off several riders at different places on a single trip."}],[{"start":74.55,"text":"That results in longer trip times for individual passengers, which can sometimes be quite a bit longer if a series of pickups and drop-offs are far apart. Dida calls this problem its main pain point, and says it’s working to optimize route maps for individual drivers to minimize the length of travel time for each passenger."}],[{"start":96.69999999999999,"text":"Despite this pain point, you would think such bargain services should thrive in China’s current economic slowdown, where consumers are looking for ways to save a little money wherever they can. But that apparently isn’t the case for Dida. According to its profit alert, Dida expects to report revenue of 477.3 million yuan ($69 million) to 527.6 million yuan for 2025, down 36% year-on-year at the midpoint from the 787.2 million yuan it reported in 2024."}],[{"start":134.33999999999997,"text":"Some number crunching using previously reported data for the first half of last year and the midpoint of its full-year forecast range shows the company’s revenue tanked by nearly half in the second half of the year, down about 44% year-on-year. That would represent a sharp deterioration from the first half, when its revenue fell 29%."}],[{"start":157.32999999999998,"text":"Similar calculations show the company’s adjusted profit, which excludes certain non-cash items, also plummeted 92% year-on-year in the second half of the year to just 8.2 million yuan, after rising 4.7% in the first half. Even worse, the company forecast a full-year net profit of 123.3 million yuan to 136.3 million yuan, whose midpoint is less than the 134.3 million yuan profit it logged in the first half of the year. That means Dida probably slipped into the red in the second half of 2025."}],[{"start":198.46999999999997,"text":"Investors were understandably concerned about the bleak report, bidding down Dida’s shares by 4.8% on Monday, the first trading day after the announcement. The company made headlines in 2024 when it became the first of China’s ride hailing companies to list, if you don’t count the short-lived 2021 U.S. listing by the much larger and similarly named DiDi Global. But after selling shares at a first-to-market premium for HK$6 apiece, Dida’s stock has lost about three-quarters of its value at Monday’s close of HK$1.60."}],[{"start":236.99999999999997,"text":"Losing share to larger rivals, open platforms"}],[{"start":241.87999999999997,"text":"Dida is facing challenges on several fronts, creating difficulties that could be hard to overcome in its current form that focuses on carpool-based ride sharing."}],[{"start":253.52999999999997,"text":"Scale is probably its biggest challenge, as the company has several much larger rivals in DiDi Global, CaoCao, and a number of city-based ride sharing companies often connected with local taxi operators and car manufacturers. As cases in point, DiDi Global – often called the Uber (UBER.US) of China – generated 53.9 billion yuan from its China mobility service in the first nine months of 2025, about 100 times Dida’s full-year revenue figure. CaoCao’s revenue of nearly 10 billion yuan in the first half of last year is also 20 times Dida’s full-year figure."}],[{"start":296.41999999999996,"text":"Another major factor working against Dida is the rise of a generation of open platforms that can host many ride-sharing companies, creating an opening for smaller operators that don’t need to spend big money on their own platforms. Such open platforms are operated by big names like Baidu and Amap, which have the resources to create apps that can compete with more traditional standalone products like ones from Dida and DiDi Global."}],[{"start":324.99999999999994,"text":"Last but not least is the previously mentioned pain point, namely, that a trip using Dida’s service can often take twice as long, or often even longer, than a traditional trip pairing a single rider with a single driver."}],[{"start":338.8999999999999,"text":"In its midyear report for 2025, Dida said it is taking steps to try to improve its carpooling algorithm to plan more rational route maps that reduce trip times for both passengers and drivers. The company also launched a taxi service in 2024 that is presumably limited to the more traditional formula that pairs a single driver with a single rider. But that service is still a miniscule part of its business, accounting for less than 1% of its revenue in the first half of last year."}],[{"start":374.68999999999994,"text":"One of the few areas where Dida excels is in its gross margins, which owes to the fact that it’s able to collect more revenue per trip than most of its peers. Its gross margin stood at 67% in the first half of last year, compared with about 40% for Uber and U.S. rival Lyft (LYFT.US). CaoCao’s gross margin is much lower at 8.4% due to higher costs from its business model that uses its own car fleet instead of letting drivers provide their own cars. But even here, Dida’s gross margin is falling, down from 73.3% in the first half of last year, while CaoCao’s was rising."}],[{"start":417.47999999999996,"text":"Dida is also relatively cash rich, with about 1 billion yuan in its coffers at the end of last June, roughly the same as a year earlier. That means it’s probably not in danger of running out of financial fuel in the next year or two. But unless it can reverse its sharp revenue and profit declines, the company could quite possibly find itself hitting a cash crunch once it uses up the dwindling resources in its fuel tank."}],[{"start":453.27,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1773144341_5726.mp3"}