Just days after Didi Chuxing went live on the New York Stock Exchange, Chinese regulators announced on Friday that the ride-hailing service was under review and banned it from signing up new users. On Sunday, they said it had committed “serious violations of the law in collecting and using personal information” and yanked it from app stores. After trading restarted Tuesday morning, Didi’s stock price fell from $15.53 at close on Friday to $11.77 before making a slight recovery. A company initially valued at $68 billion, with 377 million active users in China, had been publicly humiliated.
The move isn’t a deadly one—yet. If you’ve already signed up for the service, you can still use it. But as Didi warned in a notice Sunday, the freeze is likely to affect revenues, and it’s a serious shot from the authorities that may portend worse amid a new campaign against China’s big technology firms. Yet it’s also part of a decades-long struggle between drivers, companies, and the government over who gets to offer a ride.
