Scuttled listings and share prices hammered by official threats: Beijing has launched a withering and very public assault on some of China’s biggest tech names.
The travails of ride-hailing giant Didi Chuxing this week carried a cautionary tale for digital big hitters: what goes up, can come down… and fast.
Days after a New York IPO that raised $4.4 billion, Didi’s app was banned from stores in its vast Chinese market over data collection issues, prompting shares to tank and lawsuits from furious investors.
Similar cybersecurity investigations were announced on platforms of two more US-listed Chinese firms a day later.
Motivated by monopoly and data fears or national pride and the control reflexes of the all-powerful Chinese Communist Party, Beijing is wounding its own firms.
Here are a few reasons why.
– Party control? –
At face value, the aim is to tidy up a once-freewheeling space where companies holding big amounts of sensitive user data blossomed in an enormous domestic market with little regulation.
More recently, Beijing has beefed up its network security regime while expressing…
