Hello and welcome. You are listening to Patrick Boyle on Finance, a podcast exploring ideas from quantitative finance, examining events occurring in markets right now and financial history to see what lessons can be taken away, including interviews with some of the most interesting people in the world of finance. To learn more about the podcast, visit onfinance.org.

Welcome back, everyone. Okay, so the Chinese right-hailing company, Dedi, announced on Friday that they

would begin delisting in the United States and prepare to go public in Hong Kong instead.

The official statement says that their borders authorised the delisting in New York of its American depository shares,

while ensuring that ADS's will be convertible into freely tradable shares of the company on another internationally recognized

stock exchange. Now, the US listing of DD has been mired in scandal since almost day one

when the company went public back in June of this year, raising $4.4 billion. The US IPO was the

biggest listing of a Chinese company in the United States

since Alibaba back in 2014. Just days after the IPO, the Chinese regulators ordered that

DEDY's app be removed from Chinese app stores. They banned them from signing up new users and announced an

investigation into the company's cybersecurity practices. This regulatory crackdown is an ongoing

situation where the company still can't sign up new users and the government has ordered

app stores to remove 25 of DD's other apps. The stock went

public at $14, and the shares have more than half since then, trading at around $6.50 at the time

of filming. So obviously this is a bit of a disaster for international investors who bought the stock. But rather than just look

at what happened, let's discuss why China is doing this and what it might mean for markets

going forward. Now, for well over a year, US politicians and regulators have been making

noise about not liking the way international stocks listed on US exchanges have different

rules applied to them than domestic companies. This is the case for all international

stocks, but the contentious ones are Chinese companies. They've shown concern for how this

might harm US investors. This is a bipartisan issue in the United States.

In fact, it's one of the few things that both Democrats and Republicans appear to agree on.

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