After huge Apple investment, Didi eyeing New York IPO: Bloomberg

Didi Chuxing, China’s biggest ride-hailing company, is aiming for an IPO in New York next year, according to a report today from Bloomberg.

(UPDATE two-and-a-half hours after publishing: Didi has denied the Bloomberg report in a statement to TechCrunch. “We currently have no IPO plan, so there’s no point of talking about location or schedule,” a spokesperson said.)

On Friday, the company announced its biggest-ever single investment, where it pulled in US$1 billion from Apple. From the looks of Tim Cook’s Twitter, the money is already being put to good use:

"Taxi!" Caught a cab in Beijing this morning with Didi Chuxing's Jean Liu. pic.twitter.com/Sl2xnzXtNY

— Tim Cook (@tim_cook) May 16, 2016

The company’s valuation is estimated to be about US$26 billion. It also has significant investments from Alibaba, Tencent, SoftBank, and others.

The Bloomberg report, which cites anonymous sources in or around the company, says Didi “hasn’t yet decided on which exchange and which banks to hire yet.”

Presumably, Didi is currently deciding between the NYSE and NASDAQ exchanges. In 2014, Alibaba launched its record-breaking IPO on the New York Stock Exchange, with a market cap of US$230 billion (or about 10 times Didi’s current valuation).

Beating Uber to the punch

There has been speculation around an Uber IPO since the company’s early days. As recently as this March, CEO Travis Kalanick said that he wants to go public “as late as possible,” saying there were no plans to IPO soon.

Didi seems to be taking a different approach. The company has been in a spending war with Uber in mainland China, namely on driver and rider subsidies that lower the cost of a ride. But while Uber says that it is “losing US$1 billion a year” in China, Didi says it has already broke even in about half of the 400 cities where it operates.

With the recent cash from Apple, and the potential massive influx of money that could come from an IPO, it doesn’t look like China’s ride-hailing wars will be cooling off anytime soon.