Back in May 2016, Apple announced that they would be making a $1 billion investment in local company called Didi Chuxing, which is more or less thought to be China’s equivalent of Uber. In fact Uber themselves have sold their China operations to the company, which pretty much has allowed the company to dominate the Chinese market.In a recent post in TIME’s 2017 Most Influential People (via MacRumors), one of the people the magazine named is none other than Didi Chuxing’s President Jean Liu. Apple’s CEO Tim Cook even wrote an excerpt about Liu for the magazine, where he praised the company’s innovativeness, and also suggested that they could be on the path to eliminating traffic jams for good.
According to Cook’s excerpt, “She and her team are succeeding with innovative, big-data algorithms that aim both to improve the efficiency of Didi’s service and to ease the congestion on roadways. By analyzing commuter patterns the way oceanographers track the tides, Didi may help traffic jams go the way of the flip phone.”
Given Apple’s massive investment it’s not hard to see why Cook might be so optimistic about the Chinese company’s future and abilities. The company also revealed that they are working on self-driving cars which we can only imagine will go towards easing traffic congestion.
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