Just days after Didi’s Wall Street debut last summer, Chinese authorities banned the service from app stores in the country, and initiated a cybersecurity probe into the company. That investigation made the firm a poster child for Beijing’s crackdown on tech companies, and wiped tens of billions of dollars from its market capitalization.
Didi’s troubles came to a head in December when it said it would leave the US stock market, without giving a reason. The move was widely seen as an attempt to appease officials in China who were unhappy with how it went public overseas.
Didi (DIDI) is set to hold an extraordinary general meeting on Monday evening in Beijing, where it is expected to formalize the process of withdrawing from Wall Street. Some of Asia’s top tech investors are among Didi’s shareholders, including SoftBank (SFTBF) and Tencent (TCEHY).
The Chinese company will then be able to move forward with a plan to list its shares in Hong Kong, which it announced late last year. It has previously said that it will not list on any other market until its retreat from the NYSE is complete.
While Didi has called its decision “voluntary,” the firm “implicitly indicates the delisting is driven by the ongoing cybersecurity review,” according to Cherry Leung, an analyst at Bernstein.
She wrote in a report last week that “the delisting from the US is needed for Didi to cooperate with” the review by Chinese regulators.
Didi is also facing scrutiny in the United States: Earlier this month, it disclosed that it was being investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission for the bungled IPO.
The firm’s shares have crashed nearly 70% so far this year.
“The company is in full cooperation with the cybersecurity review in China,” it said in a statement in April.
