Hong Kong : Didi said Friday that it would “immediately” start the process of delisting from the New York Stock Exchange and pivot to Hong Kong, just months after its disastrous IPO.
“After a careful study, the company will start delisting on the New York Stock Exchange immediately, and start preparations for listing in Hong Kong,” the Chinese ride-hailing firm wrote Friday on its verified account on Weibo, a popular Twitter-like platform in the country.
In a separate, English-language statement, the company said that its board of directors has authorized the company to file for delisting in New York.
The board will “organize a shareholders meeting to vote on the above matter at an appropriate time in the future, following necessary procedures.”
The announcement comes just five months after Didi launched its blockbuster, $4.4 billion IPO in the United States — a decision that turned into a fiasco for the company. Its share price collapsed as Beijing cracked down on the firm, saying shortly after the offering that it would ban Didi from app stores in China because it broke privacy laws and posed cybersecurity risks.
The company’s stock is now worth about half of its $14 per share IPO price, a loss of nearly $30 billion in market capitalization.
Beijing’s decision to target Didi was widely seen as punishment for its decision to go public overseas, and the company became a poster child of China’s efforts to rein in what the government sees as unruly Big Tech firms. In the weeks after the IPO,
Chinese authorities proposed that companies with data on more than one million users seek approval before listing overseas.
