Chinese Tech Giant Baidu to Invest $600 Million in Uber, Says Report

Uber

Mo’ problems? Mo’money! That seems to be Uber’s motto.

The car-hailing service has been beset by bad press, lawsuits, and city-wide bans in recent weeks, and yet investors keep throwing money at it—a cool $1.2 billion in June, another $1.2 billion this month. And now, Bloomberg reports, Chinese search giant Baidu is reportedly pouring another $600 million into the company to shore up Uber’s expansion into China.

What’s a five-year-old company to do with all that cash? It could start by paying its legal fees and stuffing more money to the pockets of government lobbyists.

This week alone, Uber was sued by Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Portland, shut down in Spain and Thailand, and banned by the region of Delhi, after a passenger was allegedly raped by her Uber driver last weekend. At the heart of these bans and lawsuits is Uber’s relatively lax approach to screening drivers for its UberX program, which many argue puts passengers at risk.

Uber has battled regulators state by state in an attempt to loosen background checks for its drivers, even as it touts is service as providing the “safest rides on the road.” Clearly, regulators beg to differ.

But investors seem to be looking past the public uproar, seeing only Uber’s gargantuan global reach and the money-making potential a business like that has. A spokesperson for Baidu confirmed to Bloomberg that the company is planning on making an announcement next week about an investment in a U.S. startup. According to one analyst who spoke with Bloomberg, Baidu’s goal is to use Uber as a way to spread the growth of its mobile payments service, while Uber would benefit from having a local partner to navigate the complex Chinese market.

Uber may face significantly more hurdles in China than it has in the United States, this time from competitors. China’s taxi-hailing market is already dominated by Didi Dache, a Tencent-backed company which recently raised $700 million, as well as Kuaidi Dache, another car-hailing service backed by Alibaba. And yet, as Uber CEO Travis Kalanick noted in a recent blog post, Asia is, quite literally, the next stop on Uber’s roadmap.

But while expansion at any cost has traditionally been Uber’s MO, as the company’s pockets bulge with cash, it’s running out of reasons not to take passenger protection more seriously. It’s the least a company worth $40 billion can do.