Until Yesterday, UBER’s Headache in China Was Caused by This Woman

Jean Liu is the President of Didi Chuxing, a Chinese transportation network company in Beijing that provides vehicles and taxis for hire in China via a smartphone applications just like Uber, but the company is the same reason Uber has not made a headway in China like it has in other climes. Uber had to concede their China base to her company Didi Chuxing. Yes, they gave upon the Uber China takeover plan after losing 2billion dollars there among other things. Jean Liu, though not completely responsible for the Uber buy over, is quite the business woman. She was responsible for completing the merger with Didi’s largest competitor Kuaidi Dache about 2years ago.

Jean Liu is the daughter of Lenovo founder, Liu Chuanzhi and granddaughter of a senior executive banker at the Bank of China, Liu Gushu. She became one of the youngest managing directors in Goldman Sachs Investment where she claimed to work up to 140 hours a week during her stay for twelve years before moving to Didi Chuxing in 2014.

Liu is a mother of three and stays with her husband in Beijing. She is a graduate of Computer Science with a bachelor’s degree from Peking University and has a master’s degree from Harvard. In 2014, Liu worked as Chief operation officer of Didi Chuxing; overseeing public relations, branding, government relations and human resources for the company’s new Didi Black executive transportation service.

In 2015, she became President as she was made in charge of general operations. After Liu became president, first work was engineering the surprise merger with its biggest competitor, Kuaidi Dache, to create the formidable transportation service now known as Didi Chuxing. In less than a year and a half, she has increased head count from 700 people to 5,000 as the company adds bus and ride-sharing offerings. She’s also lined up partnerships with Grab (Singapore), Ola Cabs (India), and Lyft (the U.S.) to offer Didi passengers in-app booking with these services and raised $3 billion for further expansion—all while fending off Uber’s advance into China.

Chen Wei, founder of Didi Chuxing was so pleased that he said to her, “We welcome more world-class talents to join us as we continue to build a world-class enterprise. Jean Liu is the very person with the talent that we are looking for. During Jean’s first half year in Didi, she completed Didi’s biggest round of funding of $700 million, and led Didi Black, PR and GR teams to a new level.”

This simply proves how women are breaking bounds and shattering glass ceilings at every level even in the tech world and brings home the fact that women all over the world should be generally appreciated.

Jean Liu is one of those women who represent the saying, “Behind every successful man, there is definitely a virtuous woman”, in whatever works of life, a woman is expected to stay strong at heart and at mind.

Photo Credit: Matjaž Tančič