Uber/taxify: London challenge rattles Uber investors

“I have to tell you I am scared,” confessed Uber’s new boss, Dara Khosrowshahi, in a parting memo to colleagues at Expedia last week. Who wouldn’t be? The challenges are already coming thick and fast, said Karen Gilchrist on CNBC.COM. Shored up by Chinese cash, Uber’s Estonian rival, Taxify, is making a major push into Western Europe, and has chosen London as the opening battleground of its bid “to unseat Uber and bring greater competition” to the taxi-app market.

Taxify’s biggest shareholder as of last month, said Peter Campbell in the FT, is Didi Chuxing – a ridesharing and taxi-hailing outfit with 400 million users in its home market. It was largely responsible for driving Uber out of China last year after it had spent billions waging a costly turf war. Didi has taken stakes in leading Uber rivals across the world, but this is the Chinese taxi giant’s first European investment. The plan is to grab a share of the market in London by charging punters less and paying drivers more. Paris is next on the list.

Khosrowshahi plans to right the “car crash” at Uber by taking it public in the next 18 to 36 months. That will “take a miracle”, said Ben Marlow in The Sunday Telegraph. Tackling the toxic culture at Uber is one thing, but Khosrowshahi’s biggest challenge is managing pressure from its army of private investors to meet the loss-making firm’s “extraordinary” $68bn valuation. “Driving people around” turns out to be “a tough business”, said the FT. “Khosrowshahi must be wondering how long investors, who have sunk more than $15bn into Uber, will keep cutting big cheques.” Founder Travis Kalanick ran Uber as a “growth-at-all-costs, misogynistic shark tank” and changing that will take years. But profit, not culture, will be Uber’s biggest hurdle.