China’s Didi will be removed from New York and listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange

Didi Chuxing, the Chinese equestrian group affected by Beijing’s regulatory attacks on technology companies, said it would be removed from the New York Stock Exchange in an acceleration of China’s decoupling from US capital markets.

The company wrote in its official Weibo account on Friday that it would begin the process of delisting and preparing for listing in Hong Kong.

The company said the board had authorized the delisting of New York’s US custodian shares “while ensuring that ADSs could be converted into freely tradable shares in the company on another internationally recognized exchange”[ads1];.

Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Tech index, which tracks 30 of China’s largest technology companies, fell as much as 2.4 percent on Friday after the news. The e-commerce group Alibaba fell 5.3 percent, the food delivery service Meituan fell 4.8 percent and the internet group Tencent lost 3.2 percent.

Regulators ordered Didi’s app to be taken over by domestic app stores in July, days after the ride-haiing group raised $ 4.4 billion on the largest Chinese listing in the US since Alibaba in 2014. The company was also banned from registering new ones. users.

The first public offering, completed just days before the Chinese Communist Party celebrated its centenary, angered party and government officials who felt the group had allayed its concerns about its national security and its enormous amount of mapping and other sensitive data.

Didi launched its listing in New York in the midst of a long-term breakdown of the dominance of China’s largest technology groups. The regulatory attack began in November 2020, when President Xi Jinping ordered the last-minute shutdown of Shanghai and Hong Kong double listing of Ant Group, Jack Ma’s fintech platform.

Ma, once the country’s richest and most famous entrepreneur, had angered Xi and other officials by criticizing Chinese financial regulators weeks before the planned IPO, which was to be the world’s largest ever.

Since the removal of the listing, Ma, who also founded the e-commerce platform Alibaba, has almost disappeared from public view.

Didi’s rush to delist from the stock market comes just before the end of a six-month lock-up in late December that would allow the company’s executives and almost all shareholders to start dumping shares in New York.

“The government can order something without realizing how complicated it is,” said a Beijing lawyer, who said Didi’s executives would probably need to contribute their shares to make such a transaction possible.

Didi said it would hold a shareholder vote on the matter in the future.

Further reporting by Emma Zhou in Beijing and William Langley in Hong Kong