Wall Street prepares for a maxi IPO. Didi Chuxing, transport company with driver based in Beijing, named for obvious similarities and more “Chinese Uber”, has applied to the Sec (Securities and Exchange Commission) to list on the New York Stock Exchange. It could be one of the biggest tech hypotheses of 2021, but also the largest initial public offering of a Chinese company since 2014, the year Alibaba went public, raising $25 billion.
The application filed with the SEC does not contain data relating to the size of the offer, but analysts estimate that Didi could raise 10 billion dollars, obtaining a valuation between 70 billion (Wall Street Journal forecast) and 100 billion (Bloomberg).
The Didi app, founded in 2012 by a former Alibaba manager, Cheng Wei, is the most used on the Chinese chauffeured transport market, but it is active in 15 countries, including Russia and Australia. Active users per year are 493 million, with 15 million drivers. The success of the company, however, is mainly due to China, where its diffusion is so high as to have prompted Uber to "beat a retreat", merging its Chinese activities with those of Didi, of which it is currently a shareholder with 12,8 % of capital.
Didi Chuxing, who uses the name Xiaoju Kuaizhi in documents submitted to the SEC, is backed by Asia's largest technology investment firms, such as Alibaba and Tencent, and Softbanks. The latter is also the company's largest shareholder, with a 21,5% stake.
In the filing with the SEC, Didi Chuxing also provided financial data for 2020, a year in which turnover fell due to the lockdowns of traffic restrictions imposed for the Covid-19 emergency. The company reported revenues of $21,6 billion (€18 billion for the year) last year, down from a year earlier. Losses totaled $1,6 billion. The business appears to have picked up again in the first quarter of 2021 which recorded revenues of 6,4 billion and a net profit of 800 million dollars.
