(Yicai Global) June 16 -- Chinese ride-hailing giant Didi Chuxing has launched a car rental service just two days after it added a same-city express delivery service on its platform.

The rental service, available since yesterday, pools resources from other platforms, including Trip.Com Car Rental and Hello Car Rental. Users in more than 300 cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, and Guangzhou can rent vehicles through the Didi app.

The Beijing-based company's intra-city express delivery service is also in partnership with other providers. It has been available in 200 Chinese cities since June 13.

Didi's car rental, express delivery, and other aggregation services do not have high costs because they are based on the firm's own basic capabilities and traffic scale, Chen Liteng, an analyst at e-commerce researcher 100EC.Cn, told Yicai Global. The new services supplement Didi's main business, as the company needs to find new growth points, Chen added.

China’s ride-hailing market has been recovering this year. Ride-hailers had 735 million bookings last month, up 40 percent from a year earlier but down 8.2 percent from the same month in 2021, transport ministry data showed.

Meanwhile, the car rental market has huge potential. According to a report by Boston Consulting Group, it was worth about CNY87 billion (USD12.2 billion) in 2020 and is expected to reach CNY158.5 billion (USD22.2 billion) in 2025, growing at a compound annual rate of about 13 percent.

Editor: Futura Costaglione