Everything is ready for Chinese Uber’s debut on the New York Stock Exchange, Didi Global. In truth, we should say that Uber is the American Didi, given that the Chinese adventure of the Californian ride hailing company (basically, taxi on demand via app) – founded by Travis Kalanick and led for four years by CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, 52 born in Tehran former number one of Expedia – it did not end brilliantly: having acknowledged that there was none for anyone, Uber in 2016 gave up his luggage to the then Didi Chuxing, born only in 2012 in Beijing.
Didi raised $ 4.4 billion in its US IPO on Tuesday, valued at the top of the indicated fork and increasing the number of shares sold. Didi, Reuters writes, sold 317 million American Depository Shares (ADS), up from 288 million expected, at $ 14 each, according to sources who have remained anonymous in the absence of official releases. Didi would thus have a valuation of approximately $ 73 billion on a fully diluted basis and of $ 67.5 billion on an undiluted basis.
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The decision to increase the size of the deal came after the book was signed many more times than expected and closed on Monday, one day early. Despite this, the company was held below initial expectations, which envisaged a value of 100 billion. Investors were conditioned by fears that the company’s future growth prospects could be held back by stricter industry regulation by transport authorities. At the beginning of June, some rumors had spoken of an antitrust investigation, but there have been no developments at the moment. Didi branded everything as “unfounded speculations from anonymous sources”.
The listing is the largest of a Chinese company in the US since Alibaba raised $ 25 billion in 2014. There is also an option to overallotment therefore it would be possible to sell another 43.2 million shares to increase the size of the transaction.
Didi was co-founded in 2012 by former Alibaba employee Will Cheng Wei, who is currently CEO. Cheng was joined by Jean Qing Liu, a former Goldman Sachs banker and current president of the car sharing company. The company counts SoftBank, Tencent and Uber itself among its main supporters. As rumored Didi successfully pushed Uber out of the Chinese market after the US company lost the price war and ended up selling its operations in China to its competitor. Liu Zhen, then head of Uber China, is Liu di Didi’s cousin.