Didi’s disastrous foray onto Wall Street is over

By Michelle Toh, CNN Business

Shareholders voted Monday in favor of Didi’s plan to quit the New York Stock Exchange less than a year after China’s largest ride-hailing firm launched its $4.4 billion initial public offering.

Just days after Didi’s Wall Street debut last summer, Chinese authorities banned the service from app stores in the country, and initiated a cybersecurity probe into the company. That investigation made the firm a poster child for Beijing’s crackdown on tech companies, and wiped tens of billions of dollars from its market capitalization.

Didi’s troubles came to a head in December when it said it would leave the US stock market, without giving a reason. The move was widely seen as an attempt to appease officials in China who were unhappy with how it went public overseas.

In an SEC filing earlier this month, Didi said it would not be able to resume normal business operations without completing the cybersecurity review required by Chinese authorities. It said it had come to the conclusion that it would not be able to complete that review if it continued to trade on the NYSE.

Didi (DIDI) held an extraordinary general meeting on Monday evening in Beijing, where investors including SoftBank and Tencent voted by a huge majority in favor of withdrawing from Wall Street.

The company said in a statement after the vote that it had notified the New York Stock Exchange of the decision and expected its shares to be delisted in June.

The Chinese company should then be able to move forward with a plan to list its shares in Hong Kong, which it announced late last year. It has previously said that it will not list on any other market until its retreat from the NYSE is complete.

While Didi has called its decision “voluntary,” the firm “implicitly indicates the delisting is driven by the ongoing cybersecurity review,” according to Cherry Leung, an analyst at Bernstein.

Didi is also facing scrutiny in the United States: Earlier this month, it disclosed that it was being investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission for the bungled IPO.

The firm’s shares have crashed nearly 70% so far this year.

“The company is in full cooperation with the cybersecurity review in China,” it said in a statement in April.

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