BEIJING (Reuters) – Reports that China’s Beijing city government is advising state-owned companies to invest in embattled ride-hailing giant Didi Global Inc are untrue, the city government told Reuters in a faxed statement.
Citing unidentified sources, Bloomberg News on Friday reported that China’s capital city is considering taking Didi under state control and has proposed that government-run companies invest in Didi.
Didi had issued its own denial of the report on Saturday.
Beijing-based Didi completed a New York initial public offering in June but has been caught up in China’s regulatory crackdown on technology companies in the past year to improve market competition, data handling and their treatment of employees.
Didi is controlled by the management team of co-founder Will Cheng and President Jean Liu. SoftBank Group Corp, Uber Technologies Inc and Alibaba are among investors in the company.
(Reporting by Yilei Sun, Colin Qian and Brenda Goh; Editing by David Goodman)
