Chinese Ride-Hailing Giant Didi Chuxing Files For US IPO

Chinese ride-hailing company Didi Chuxing has filed to go public in the US in what could be one of the year’s biggest tech IPOs.

The company didn’t indicate how many shares would be offered or a price. However, it could raise around $10 billion (£7bn) and seek a valuation of about $100bn, Reuters reported.

That would make it the biggest listing in the US by a Chinese company since that of e-commerce giant Alibaba in 2014, when it raised $25bn on the New York Stock Exchange.

Didi reported $21.6bn in revenue last year and reached a profit of $95m on  $6.4bn in revenue in its most recent quarter. The profit was $837m before certain payouts to shareholders.

Profitability

For comparison, Uber reported a net loss of $108m on revenues of $2.9bn in its first quarter. For all of 2020, Uber reported a net loss of $6.77bn on $11.14bn in revenue.

For 2019 Didi was estimated to have the second-biggest share of the ridesharing market worldwide, with 32.4 percent of the market, following only Uber with 37.2 percent, according to Statista. Lyft was in third place with 9.3 percent, followed by India’s Ola at 3.5 percent.

Uber in fact owns 12.8 percent of Didi’s shares, after it sold its China operations to the company in 2016. Didi also acquired Uber shares in the deal, but sold them last year. SoftBank’s Vision Fund holds 21.5 percent of Didi.

From 2019 to 2020, Didi’s revenues dropped by nearly 10 percent due to the Covid pandemic in China, following growth of 11 percent the previous year.

Revenue recovery

Revenues have bounced back in the first quarter of 2021, up 107 percent year-on-year.

Didi was most recently valued at $62bn following an August fundraising round, according to PitchBook data, with other backers including Alibaba, Tencent and Apple.

Unlike Uber, Didi is still heavily invested in self-driving technologies, and was recently granted approval to test self-driving vehicles in Beijing. Uber sold its self-driving technology to Aurora Innovation last year.

Uber and Lyft are also showing improved revenues in recent months and say they’ll be profitable on an adjusted basis by the end of this year.

Founded in 2012, Didi says it has 493 million annual active riders and 15 million annual active drivers.