Toyota, DiDi's mobility service joint venture founded on Sept. 10

Shanghai (Gasgoo)- A joint venture between Japanese automaker Toyota and Chinese ride-hailing giant DiDi Chuxing (DiDi) was founded on September 10 after two companies agreed cooperation in late July this year.

The joint venture, dubbed Fengju Mobility (Beijing) Technology Co.,Ltd, involves a registered capital of $157.95 million, of which $8 million are subscribed by GAC Toyota and the other 94.94% share belongs to Destiny Mobility Investments Limited, according to the company information search platform TianYanCha.    

The platform also shows that the business scope of the new subsidiary covers such areas as car leasing, ride-hailing service and sale of vehicles and auto parts. Yang Jun, Vice President of DiDi Chuxing, serves as Chairman and legal representative.

Toyota announced on July 25 that it had concluded an agreement with Didi to expand collaboration in Mobility as a Service (MaaS) in China. As part of this agreement, Toyota would invest $600 million in DiDi and a joint venture, which the two parties would establish with GAC Toyota for ride-haling service.

Toyota has been spreading its deployment in mobility service domain. Aside from DiDi, the Japanese auto giant also takes significant moves in global market. For instance, Toyota began its investment in Uber as early as 2015 and then announced in 2018 it would plow another RMB $500 million to the U.S.-based ride-hailing service provider for self-driving cars.

Moreover, in April 2019, Toyota, DENSO and the SoftBank Vision Fund claimed that they would pump $1 billion into Uber's Advanced Technologies Group (Uber ATG). The investment, in a newly formed ATG corporate entity, aims to accelerate the development and commercialization of automated ridesharing services (photo source: DiDi Chuxing).