At the beginning of July everything looked good: In New York, the Chinese driver service agent Didi Chuxing went public (the ticker code was of course “DIDI”), $ 4.4 billion were made, and at times Didi achieved a market capitalization of around $ 80 billion. That is more than at BMW, BASF or Bayer, and that at a company that had posted deep red figures quarter after quarter up until the beginning of 2021. A success story, one would think, but shortly after the IPO, the Chinese apparatus suddenly stepped in. The authority responsible for cyberspace ordered that the Didi app may no longer be downloaded in the People’s Republic. “Serious violations” in the handling of personal data were found, it said.
Now the next setback: Less than six months after its debut, the company announced that it would withdraw from the New York Stock Exchange. Instead, a listing in Hong Kong will be sought, said Didi.
Chinese companies have been collecting capital on the New York Stock Exchange for many years, to the displeasure of the Chinese leadership, but reservations have also grown in the USA. While Beijing is expressing security concerns, the US has criticized the lack of transparency of Chinese companies, especially when it comes to their links with the Communist Party.
The regulators have recently investigated a number of Chinese Internet companies. It all started in November 2020 with the Ant Group. Back then, too, was an IPO. A few days before the company’s debut in Shanghai and Hong Kong, the overseers cracked down. It should have been the largest public offering in the world, with revenues of $ 37 billion. It became the largest IPO in the world that never happened, postponed indefinitely. Ant founder Jack Ma has practically disappeared from the public eye since then, the last time he was spotted with his yacht off the coast of Mallorca.
For years, the Chinese authorities had left domestic Internet companies almost unregulated. While Twitter and Facebook are blocked in the People’s Republic, other corporations and services have grown in the country behind the great firewall: Baidu instead of Google, Wechat instead of Whatsapp, Alibaba and not Amazon. As much as Beijing blocked the Internet and suppressed politically unpleasant expressions of opinion, corporations like Alibaba, but also Didi, have been able to grow and expand their monopoly position in recent years without any problems. They dictate the rules of how trade is carried out in China today, who is allowed to offer on which platforms and who is not. That is now gradually over.