Ride-hailing giant Didi banned from China’s app stores

Ride-hailing giant Didi disappeared from China’s main app stores including Apple’s App Store after China’s cyberspace regulator ordered a ban on the new downloads of the app for illegally collecting users’ personal data. 

The company announced that they stopped the new registrations for the app while existing users will be able to keep using Didi. 

The removal of Didi comes a week after the company raised over $4.4 billion in an upsized US IPO and two days after the Chinese regulator announced it started an investigation into the app. 

As reported by Reuters, the Chinese-company said it wasn’t aware before the IPO that the regulator would start an investigation and order a ban on the new downloads of the app. 

“We follow strict procedures in collecting, transmitting, storing and using user data pursuant to our data security and privacy policies,” the company said, adding that it’s working on ‘’corrections’’ to bring Didi back to China’s app stores. 

Backed by Apple, Uber, SoftBank and Tencent, Didi was the largest ride-hailing app in China offering more than 20 million rides everyday.

The company recently reported 493 million annual active users, 13 million active riders and 41 million daily transactions for the 12 months ended March. 

In addition, it had 156 million monthly active users in the first quarter of 2021, up 58 million than Uber reported. 

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In addition, the Didi app had 365 million active Chinese users by the end of December 2020, according to China’s official data. 

In March this year, the company announced that it’d expand its services to South Africa to challenge Uber and Bolt.