Anyone questioning the business model of Uber may need a new hobby, granted the service continues to gain in popularity, as it seems likely to do after announcing a new milestone on Monday (July 18).
According to the carsharing service, Uber completed greater than 2 billion trips on its app just six months after completing its first billion rides. In a post on Facebook, Uber Chief Executive Travis Kalanick said the company reached the 2 billion ride mark on June 18 when 147 Uber rides started at the same time. “These trips happened in 16 countries on five continents, from Costa Rica to Russia and from China to Australia,” said Kalanick. “The longest of the bunch lasted more than an hour as the rider and driver worked their way across Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital. The shortest, a POOL trip in Changsha, China, lasted just three minutes.”
The CEO noted that it took five years to reach its billionth trip and six months to get to the next billion. Uber is hoping the next billion will happen quicker than that. To celebrate the 147 trips that all started at the same time, Kalanick said the company is giving $450 to each driver and rider.
Currently, Uber is in 450 cities around the world, which is up from 311 in 2015. The company is getting a lot of interest from investors and, last month, inked an investment deal with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, which invested $3.5 billion. The most recent round of funding gives Uber a market value of around $62 billion.
While Uber is in super growth mode and is gaining in popularity around the globe, it hasn’t made a huge dent in New York City, where yellow taxis still reign supreme. According to the most recent data published by New York City’s Taxi and Limousine Commission, in April, 11.1 million taxi trips happened in the month, averaging 400,000 trips a day. That’s a 9 percent decline from a year ago, but it is still more than Uber.
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