“Last year, Apple made an unusual move — announcing a $1 billion investment Chinese ride-hailing service Didi Chuxing,” Anita Balakrishnan reports for CNBC. “The deal was far larger and more public than most Apple investments, and didn’t clearly tie into Apple’s flagship product, the iPhone.”
“But a Thursday profile by Time reveals more about what CEO Tim Cook was thinking,” Balakrishnan reports. “Cook penned a profile honoring Jean Liu, president of Didi Chuxing and part of the ‘Time 100 Most Influential People’ list. Cook led with the same factors that a U.S. company like Uber or Lyft might tout: The convenience, flexibility and ‘disruption’ of ride-sharing.”
“But he quickly shifted focus to the vast amount of data that Didi monitors, and its ‘big-data algorithms,'” Balakrishnan reports. By analyzing commuter patterns the way oceanographers track the tides, Didi may help traffic jams go the way of the flip phone,’ Cook writes.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: An excerpt:
In over 400 cities across China, Jean has also built a company that is dedicated to serving the community around it. Guiding Didi to this higher purpose, and giving back to the places where it does business, she shares my belief that companies can and should measure themselves by more than just the bottom line. – Tim Cook
The full profile of Jean Liu in TIME Magazine, by Apple CEO Tim Cook, is here.
Cook is not on TIME‘s “100 Most Influential People” list this year.
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