Shouqi Car-hailing completes Series C financing, amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars

 Shouqi Car-hailing has recently completed Series C financing with an amount of hundreds of millions of dollars.

In this regard, the official response of Shouqi Car-hailing said that it would not comment.

At this time, it has been three years since Shouqi car-hailing last financing. According to public information, in 2017, Shouqi Car-hailing raised 1.3 billion yuan in one month, of which Baidu , Weilai Capital, and Silk Road Huachuang invested a total of 700 million yuan for B+ round investors.

Three years ago, it was the most prosperous period of shared travel in the capital market. At the beginning of the year, Didi received a large US$5 billion financing from SoftBank. After that, news of the financing of established online car-hailing platforms such as Shenzhou, Shouqi Car-hailing and Cao Cao continued. As one of China's earliest online car-hailing platforms with a state-owned background, Shouqi Car-hailing finally entered the Top3 array of the domestic online car-hailing market after several changes in the industry.

Unlike the behemoth created by the capital of Didi, the "Regular Army" Shouqi Car-hailing has a strong background of state-owned assets and is the product of state-owned enterprises under the tide of Internet restructuring. This has brought some natural advantages to Shouqi car-hailing, for example, it is easier to obtain license plates in key cities such as Beijing, and the license plate contains higher gold content. However, constraints also exist. In the fierce market competition environment, paying attention to compliance often means insufficient capacity. In the early stage of the launch of Shouqi taxi-hailing, it mainly focuses on the mid-to-high-end market. Compared with Didi, users and orders are also difficult. Like the latter, it is rapidly scaled up.

When hot money continues in the investment market, maybe these are not problems. However, with the two ride-hailing incidents of Didi in 2018, the withdrawal of players such as Yidao from the competition, and the gradual saturation of the online car-hailing market, in the past two years, financing events in the travel field have become less frequent, especially this year due to the impact of the epidemic "The expectation of many companies has been adjusted to,'Try to live'," said a business person in charge of an online car-hailing company.

At this time, Shouqi car-hailing can obtain financing, an important reason may be profit. In May of this year, Shouqi Car-hailing CEO Wei Dong issued an internal letter stating that following the announcement in July 2019 that Shanghai and Shenzhen took the lead in realizing positive gross profit, "In the past April, Shouqi car-hailing has achieved a national overall positive gross profit. Many cities are making profits.” It is worth mentioning that Wei Dong also predicts that Shouqi car-hailing is expected to achieve positive EBITA (earnings before interest and taxes) in the fourth quarter of this year.

At the same time, Wei Dong also revealed in his internal letter that Shouqi Car-hailing will launch a new membership system in the second half of 2020. At the same time, its intelligent control system built in cooperation with domestic OEMs and local governments will also be launched in the second half of the year. Some cities landed.

Just last month, Shouqi car-hailing announced its five-year growth data. As of September this year, the number of registered users of Shouqi car-hailing exceeded 113 million, the number of franchised drivers reached more than 1.13 million, and the number of operating cities exceeded 160. Compared with the fourth year, its number of users increased by 31.3% year-on-year, the number of successful drivers increased by 32.7%, and the number of operating cities increased by 66% year-on-year. In addition, the data also shows that from 2019 to 2020, the number of Shouqi car-hailing compliance drivers has increased by 32.7%, and the number of users has also increased by 31.3%.

A person from the Corporate Strategic Investment Department stated that although the online car-hailing market has shown a gradual saturation trend in the past year, there are still many investment opportunities in the travel field. huge market". He believes that, in addition to users and the scale of orders, investors also value refined operation capabilities, ability to resist risks, and whether they have a good government relationship background.

Although in the past two years, auto companies with a background of state-owned assets have continuously "surpassed the wall" to enter the online car-hailing market, the Shouqi car-hailing market, which has been on the line for five years, obviously has more operating experience and has a lot of experience in major cities such as Beijing. User base. This may also be another important reason for the capital's choice.

In terms of refined operation, in the past two years, Shouqi Car-hailing has launched special products such as taxis, international cars, luxury cars, buses, barrier-free cars, intercity cars, Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao, and multi-day shuttles. In 2020, Shouqi Car-hailing will launch subdivision products such as Baoma cars, student cars, and wedding cars to seize the market.