Didi Chuxing, the Chinese ride-hailing company, made its initial public offering filing public on Thursday, as ride-hailing services begin reviving with the receding of the pandemic.
Founded in Beijing in 2012, Didi began as a taxi-hailing service before expanding into other forms of transportation. In 2015, it merged with another Chinese rival, Kuaidi Dache, to form what became Didi Chuxing.
Didi has since been dominant in China. In 2016, Uber, which had been spending heavily to grow in China, sold its Chinese operations to Didi. (Uber was granted a stake in the resulting company.) Didi now operates in 15 countries, including Brazil and Mexico.
The company’s I.P.O. is likely to be closely scrutinized amid a wave of other technology offerings and as Beijing has begun to rein in domestic tech giants. Didi was valued at $56 billion in 2017 and its investors include SoftBank of Japan and Mubadala, an Abu Dhabi state fund.
Didi’s filing, made under its formal name, Xiaoju Kuaizhi, showed that revenues declined 8 percent to $21.63 billion last year as passenger numbers slid during the pandemic. The company lost $1.6 billion last year, though it reported a profit of $30 million in the first quarter of this year. Like most ride-hailing companies, Didi has historically been unprofitable.
Didi said that an I.P.O. would fund an expansion.
“We aspire to become a truly global technology company,” Didi’s founders, Cheng Wei and Jean Liu, wrote in a letter included with the filing. “What we have learned and built is relevant across the globe — in Latin America, Russia, South Africa or anywhere where affordable, safe and convenient mobility is valuable.”
Other ride-hailing services have reported that business has been recovering. Last month, Uber said revenue for the first three months of the year — excluding the costs of a settlement — was up 8 percent from a year ago, to $3.5 billion. The company lost $108 million.
