Daily US Times: Chinese ride-hailing giant Didi Global has ended its first day on the New York Stock Exchange with a valuation of 68.49 billion dollars.
That is even as the company’s shares closed just 1% higher than their $14 offering price after slipping back from earlier strong gains.
It was the biggest listing in the United States by a Chinese company since Alibaba’s debut in 2014.
Didi Global, China’s answer to Uber, raised $4.4bn in the Initial Public Offering (IPO).
It is the latest in a series of Chinese companies to cash in on the booming US stock market.
Some 29 Chinese companies raised a total of $7.6bn in IPOs in the first six months of the year, according to financial markets data provider Refinitiv.
This is despite years of tensions between Beijing and Washington, and concerns raised by US regulators over some Chinese firms’ financial reports.
According to a Reuters report in March, Didi had originally hoped for a valuation of as much as $100bn.
Those expectations were said to have been scaled back after raised concerns by potential investors about the speed and profitability of the firm’s expansion plans.
Didi, like the majority of ride-hailing platforms, had been loss-making until it reported a 30 million dollar profit for the first three months of this year.
In 2020, it reported a 1.6 billion dollars annual loss as the business was hit by the coronavirus pandemic.
In June this year, the company was reported that Didi was being probed by China’s market watchdog.
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