Chinese taxi aggregator DiDi will leave the New York Stock Exchange , announced his departure from the New York Stock Exchange five months after the initial public offering (initial public offering) of shares in the stock market, to be listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange soon, CNBC reports.
DiDi said the decision was made after “careful scrutiny”, but Bloomberg wrote last week that the Chinese authorities are forcing the company to leave the US market. Thus, DiDi surrendered under pressure from Beijing. In addition to placing on the stock exchange in Hong Kong, the option of direct privatization of DiDi was considered, although such a development event could cause dissatisfaction with shareholders and lead to lawsuits against the company, the newspaper noted.
“I think China has made it clear that it no longer wants to allow technology companies to enter the US markets because it puts them under the jurisdiction of US regulators,” said Aaron Costello, head of Asia at Cambridge Associates. He assumed that most of the Chinese tech companies registered in the US would go to mainland China or Hong Kong.
DiDi held an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange on June 30, during which it raised $ 4.4 billion. A few days later, the Chinese Cyberspace Administration accused the aggregator of violating the law on the collection of customer data and removed 26 applications from virtual stores, including the main one, having brought down the shares. The claims of the Chinese authorities were related to a possible leak of personal data. Beijing feared that information about users would fall into the hands of American regulators.
At the IPO, the shares of “Chinese Uber” were worth $ 14 per share. Since then, they have fallen in price by 44.65 percent and traded at $ 7.75 in pre-market on December 3. After the incident with DiDi, the Chinese company ByteDance, which owns the social network TikTok, decided to postpone its IPO indefinitely, fearing a reaction from the authorities.
In mid-July, the National Taxi Council Association complained to Russian President Vladimir Putin about DiDi … They accused the aggregator of collecting large amounts of data, which, together with geolocation and “unique identifying information about a mobile device,” could be of interest to foreign intelligence and pose a threat to the country's security.