Didi Chuxing, China's largest ride-hailing platform, announced on Thursday that it filed listing documents with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), seeking to list on the Nasdaq or New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol DIDI.
The IPO is intended to raise capital for its market expansion, conduct technology development for shared mobility, electric vehicles and autonomous driving, launch new products and expand existing product categories.
A report in the Wall Street Journal on Thursday said Didi could be valued at more than $70 billion, and that valuation could go even higher as investors' appetite for newly public, high-growth companies grows.
Didi's prospectus shows it had 493 million annual active users worldwide and 15 million annual active drivers worldwide in the 12 months ended March 31 of this year. Of these, it had 377 million annual active users and 13 million annual active drivers in China.
For the 12 months ended March 31 of this year, Didi's global average daily transaction volume was 41 million units and total platform-wide transaction volume was RMB 341 billion ($53.3 billion).
Didi had revenue of RMB 141.7 billion in 2020, down 8.46 percent from RMB 154.8 billion in 2019.
In the first quarter of 2021, Didi China travel business had 156 million monthly active users, with an average of 25 million daily transactions in the business, and Didi revenue of RMB 42.2 billion, about twice as much as a year ago.
Didi's losses widened significantly last year, with revenue falling and not returning to the double-digit growth momentum of the year before, highlighting the blow from Covid-19, the prospectus showed.
As of last year, Didi has eight years of sustained annual losses, finally turning a profit in the first quarter of this year. But this time Didi's profit came mainly from investment income, which also means this could be a one-time situation.
Didi's three main businesses are its China travel business, international business and other businesses, with revenues of RMB 133.6 billion, RMB 2.3 billion and RMB 5.8 billion, respectively.
Its platform revenues from its China travel business and international business were RMB 18.7 billion, RMB 24.2 billion, and RMB 34.7 billion, respectively, over the past three years, representing a CAGR of 36 percent.
Of Didi's platform revenue for 2020 and the first quarter of 2021, 93.4 percent will come from China and 6.6 percent from international markets.
