 "Didi Chuxing beat back rivals in China after raising about $24 billion over the past six years, but it remains unprofitable. Photo: Reuters")
We’ve seen it before: the crazy spending, the stratospheric valuations. Twenty years later, it looks like the dot-com boom all over again, but this time the players are much bigger—and Chinese.
A Beijing-based startup that lets consumers order coffee via smartphones raced into so-called unicorn territory—a $1 billion valuation—in seven months from launch. The value of another firm, billed as an “Uber for trucks,” has soared to 300 times 2017 revenue; Uber Technologies Inc. itself is worth only about 10 times revenue.
But where some investors see dynamic exuberance, others see a market increasingly threatened by a confluence of forces including onerous
