“Foreign media’s claim about Beijing’s municipal government
coordinating relevant companies to invest in Didi is untrue,” the company said
in a statement published on Weibo on Saturday afternoon. Shouqi Group – part of
the influential Beijing Tourism Group – and other firms based in the nation’s capital
would acquire a stake in Didi in the form of a “golden share”, with a board
seat and veto power, under a preliminary proposal reported by Bloomberg on
Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.
The report comes months after the Chinese government took a
minority stake and a board seat in TikTok owner ByteDance’s main domestic
subsidiary, which may signal closer oversight by Beijing over the country’s
most valuable technology unicorn.
There have been plenty of speculation about Didi’s future
following the government’s cybersecurity review of the company, an initiative
led by a task force of seven Chinese agencies including the Cyberspace
Administration of China (CAC), the Ministry of Public Security and the Ministry
of National Security.
The investigation was made after Didi’s US initial public
offering. The CAC had asked Didi to review its network security, but the firm
pushed ahead with its listing on June 30 without doing so – only to have US$29
billion, or 43 per cent, of its market value wiped out in less than a month
after Beijing banned new downloads of the app.
Didi last month denied a South China Morning Post report,
which cited several sources, that a management reshuffle looms for the company
in the wake of the government’s cybersecurity review.