3 charts for you today:
Everything is bigger in China. Yesterday Didi Chuxing filed to go public in the US, giving us an insight into just how big the "Uber of China" really is.
Its filings reveal 2020 revenue of almost Rmb142bn, which is equivalent to $21.6bn. That is almost twice what Uber pulled in last year, and roughly 9x that of Lyft, which is America's second-largest ride-hailing app.
Coming to America
The decision to file for an IPO in the US is a path that many successful Chinese companies have taken — and it's one that makes a lot of sense.
The US stock market is still, by far, the largest in the world, and remains home to many of the biggest tech companies in the world. In short, listing in the US gives Didi Chuxing a better chance of raising a lot of investment at more favourable terms. Reuters is reporting that Didi could raise around $10bn in fresh capital to help it grow.
That cash is something that even Didi needs. We've discussed before how Uber has been, and continues to be, an unprofitable business. Didi Chuxing is apparently not so different — spending $23.7bn last year, which meant a net loss from operations of $2bn and change. Even at such an enormous scale ride-hailing, it seems, is still not profitable.
Auckland has been named the world's most liveable city by The Economist Intelligence Unit, unseating Austrian capital Vienna which topped the list in 2019.
Life is good down under
The ranking takes into account 30 variables across five major categories; stability, health care, culture and environment, education and infrastructure, as well as some new indicators for this year about the handling of the pandemic.
With just 26 total confirmed COVID deaths in the entire country, it's no surprise that Auckland and Wellington, the largest and third largest cities in New Zealand, fared particularly well in this year's ranking. Joining them in the top 10 were 4 cities in Australia; Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth, all of which benefitted from top marks in education and solid scores in healthcare.
Only Geneva and Zurich managed to break into the top 10 from Europe, as other Western countries fared a lot worse this year. Canada, which had Calgary, Vancouver and Toronto all make the top 10 in 2019, didn't have any cities in the top 10. Elsewhere, London came 59th on the index, just one spot ahead of New York.
In 1790 President George Washington signed the first US patent to Samuel Hopkins, for improvements in the "making of pot ash and pearl ash". Since then, more than 10 million patents have been granted in the US, giving protections to inventors, designers, artists and engineers for their ideas and intellectual property (IP).
The innovation acceleration
Of those 10+ million patents, almost half have been granted since the turn of the millennium, with the number of patent grants rising significantly in recent years. In 2020 the US Patent Office granted another 352,000 — just shy of the record from 2019 of 354,000.
Filing a patent is not easy, and comes at considerable cost. On top of the $400 filing fee, preparing a patent submission usually requires lawyers or experts, and the cost can routinely run into the thousands, if not tens of thousands, for particularly complex ideas or submissions.
That effort is why tracking patent grants is a decent proxy for innovation within an economy — albeit a very crude and simple one. Going to that effort is (presumably) only worth it for ideas deemed worth protecting.
Many of the patents are assigned to massive corporations. IBM for example has held the top spot for patents granted for the last 28 years (something the company is particularly proud of and mentions a lot), with IBM scientists and researchers being granted 9,130 patents last year. For a list of the top 50 companies, TechCrunch has you covered here.
1) Prices are going up, pretty much everywhere. That was the conclusion from the latest set of US inflation data, which showed consumer prices rising 5% year-on-year, the biggest jump since 2008.
2)France is sending another Statue of Liberty, this time one-sixteenth the size of the original, to the US. "Mini Liberty" is set to arrive just before the 4th of July.
3) Buy now pay later is having a moment. Swedish company Klarna has just raised $600m+ at a $45.6bn valuation — making it Europe's most valuable start-up. The round was led by Softbank.
4)117,000 people read The Daily Upside — a business newsletter that's engaging, insightful and fun. Sign up here for free.**
5) Cases of dengue fever were cut by an incredible 77% in a trial in Indonesia that infected mosquitoes with a certain type of bacteria.
6) An impressive interactive visual of almost one million individual soccer passes from 890 matches.
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