Ride-hailing app Didi’s saga shows Beijing wants full control

China wants control over the vast amounts of sensitive data that Didi collects from half a billion annual active users.

To the world’s investors, the saga over Didi Global Inc. has made China’s biggest tech firms a riskier bet as President Xi Jinping seeks to control one of the country’s most valuable resources: Big data. Didi is by most measures an appealing success story. The firm controls almost the entire ride-hailing market in China, and counts SoftBank Group Corp. and Tencent Holdings Ltd. as major shareholders. Didi was actually profitable in the first quarter, a rarity for the industry. Its initial public offering last week was the second biggest in the U.S. by a company based in China, and it was well-received. Didi sold 317 million shares — about 10% more than originally planned. And yet the listing on the eve of the Communist Party’s centenary did not appear to trigger celebration back in Beijing. Instead, two days after the IPO, China’s cyberspace regulator said it was reviewing the company on national security grounds. Two days after that, the regulator said the firm had committed serious violations in the collection and usage of personal information. It then ordered the company’s app to be removed from stores.