Apple’s vice president of corporate development, Adrian Perica, has resigned from Chinese ride-hailing company Didi Global’s board of directors.
Lisa Du and Mark Gurman for Bloomberg News:
The departure of Perica, who also heads Apple’s mergers and acquisitions strategy, follows a tumultuous year for Didi. Since the company went ahead with a US initial public offering against Beijing’s wishes in June last year, Didi’s app has been pulled from China’s mobile stores, preventing meaningful growth and erasing more than 80% of its market value.
Didi said in May it will delist from the New York Stock Exchange. Last month, it was fined $1.2 billion by the Chinese government for infractions that Beijing said compromised national security, ending a yearlong probe.
Perica joined Didi’s board in 2016 after Apple made a $1 billion investment in the ride-hailing app, giving the smartphone maker a more secure foothold in the Chinese market amid rising US-China tensions. Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook said at the time that the move was a “great financial investment.”
MacDailyNews Take: The whole thing – Apple’s $1 billion “investment” in a Chineses ride-hailing compnay – seemed like a sham from the start.
Apple is famously averse to greasing palms in order to get things done. That is laudable, but presents a problem when greasing palms is the only way out of a sticky situation. Luckily, there are respectable, legal ways to grease the required palms. — MacDailyNews, May 13, 2016
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