Chinese ride-hailing app Didi Chuxing has raised $4.4bn in its United States IPO, pricing it at the top of its indicated range and increasing the number of shares sold, the company announced.
Didi sold 316.8 million American Depository Shares, versus the planned 288 million, at $14 per share.
This places the company’s valuation at $73bn on a fully diluted basis and $67.5bn on a non-diluted basis. The decision to increase the deal size came after the Didi investor order book was oversubscribed multiple times, a source told Reuters.
The company debuted on the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday under the symbol “DIDI”. The closing of the offering is expected to occur on July 2, 2021, subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions, the announcement said.
The IPO is more conservative versus its initial aim for a valuation of up to $100bn, as reported by Reuters. The size of the deal was cut during briefings with investors before the IPO’s launch.
Investors baulked at the $100bn target given concerns the company’s future growth prospects could be curbed by the chance of greater regulation of the ride-sharing sector by transport authorities in the future.
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By GlobalDataEarlier this month, uncertainty arose over how an antitrust probe into the ride-hailing giant would impact the business. A spokesperson told Reuters at the time that Didi would not comment on “unsubstantiated speculation from unnamed source(s)”.
The listing, which constitutes the biggest US share sale by a Chinese company since Alibaba raised $25bn in 2014, comes amid volatile and record IPO activity this year as firms rush to capture the lucrative valuations seen in the US stock market.
“The US offers a better technology investor ecosystem to these players,” explains GlobalData analyst Swati Verma. “Between 2018 and 2020, US exchanges have seen 97 cross-border listings. In 2020, there were 37 cross-border listings and Chinese companies accounted for 25 of these.”
Simultaneously, Chinese tech companies are facing fierce pushback from domestic regulators, as Beijing aims to rein in the power of big tech companies. National giants including Tencent, Baidu, ByteDance and Alibaba were all slapped with hefty fines in the fallout.
This is yet another reason why Chinese companies are moving across the Pacific to make their stock exchange debuts. Yet, not all recent IPOs have been as successful. Grocery delivery apps Dingdong and Missfresh both faced unenviable results in their recent US IPOs.
Didi’s IPO was covered early on the first day of the book-build last week and the investor books were closed on Monday, a day before schedule.
