Uber has seen "hundreds" of cities become profitable in the past six months and the company is now betting that it will start to see parts of China make money in two years, chief executive of the U.S. chauffeured service said to CNBC.
The company valued at over $62 billion recently revealed earlier that it is profitable in the U.S. but losing over $1 billion a year in China.
However, Uber's boss defended this, saying that the company, which currently operates in 400 cities around the world, will not be able to scale up without investing and being unprofitable for a while.
"If you are focused on profits right out of the gate, you're gonna have the smallest profitable business that has ever been seen," Travis Kalanick, told CNBC at the Boao Forum in China.
"The good thing though is when you have profitable cities around the world, those profitable cities can then help us to invest more deeply in this country so you take like the…top 30 cities that we're in around the world, we're already generating a billion dollars in profits from those 30 cities a year today and those cities are growing by 2, 3, 4 times per year. And so that is sort of the fuel that allow us to go to places like China and invest deeply to make, to make the system work and to work in a big way."
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