DiDi Officially Delists From NYSE
All good things must come to an end, right? Although I think any DiDi investor would be hard-pressed to admit that their ride alongside DiDi was good. Probably more like tumultuous, painful, depressing, etc. In any case, the immaculate 11-month (yes it was literally less than a year) run by the ride-hailing giant came to a sad ending today. The company will officially de-list from the NYSE today, June 10. Let’s take a closer to look to see how investors who bought into the IPO are holding up.
Hmmmmm. Not too bad. Only ~84%! And the age old adage goes without saying…
Although it goes without saying that nobody ever lived by DiDi, unless you swung an absolute lick at some point trading the stock. But for all of our unfortunate bagholders, I will be pouring one out for you tonight in honor of you.
The China-based company raised $4.4 Billion in June 2021 in their offering, which hasn’t been seen since Alibaba’s numbers back in 2014. Just as a side bar I would encourage everyone to take a gander at their risk-registry on their annual filing. It’s a doozy. Basically all you need to know about the company is that they lost nearly double their initial capital raised via their offering in 2021 alone. Total net loss for 2021 was $7.5 Billion. Yikes.
Now a lot of the narrative that has surrounded this absolute dumpster fire of a company was the Chinese crack-down in their tech sector. All it took was literally a week after the stock initially went public on the NYSE, where the Chinese government ordered the company’s app to be removed from app stores so that users no longer had access to it. the CCP was literally playing chess. In addition to that, the U.S. had passed a law which ultimately required more insight into Chinese companies, including accounting practices and the like. To which Xi Jinping said “absolutely not.” Didi attempted to list on Hong Kong exchanges, thus giving investors a little more sense of security, but that never came to fruition.
Economic outlook in China had begun to look grim to start the year, and has slowly deteriorated as the months went by. Didi had reported a quarterly net loss of $27 million. Progress? Unfortunately, it was too little, too late.
But not all hope is lost, as DiDi stock will begin to trade over the much-less regulated OTC markets (presumably where it belongs). I would imagine that this immaculate story will gain much more traction and the shadiness of Chinese ADR’s will likely gain more attention. For anyone interested, this documentary released back in 2018 was phenomenal.