Chinese self-driving truck startup TuSimple (TuSimple) will delist from the Nasdaq stock exchange to advance its plan to fully withdraw from the U.S. market. The company announced on Wednesday that it will file a Form 25 on or about January 29 to deregister the shares, with the shares expected to trade until around February 7.


TuSimple said it chose to deregister its shares from the stock exchange for several reasons. A special committee of independent directors said the company's "valuation and liquidity have declined" while share price volatility has "increased significantly" and that "the benefits of remaining a public company no longer justify the costs." The company went public in 2021 and was valued at more than $8 billion at the time, but is now worth closer to $70 million. The company's shares once traded as high as $62.58 and are currently worth about 30 cents.

The committee also said, "Since the 2021 TuSimple IPO, capital markets have undergone significant shifts, in part due to rising interest rates and quantitative tightening, which have changed investors' views of pre-commercial technology growth companies." - This sentence is both true and simple.

These are reasonable and unsurprising explanations, although they understate what has happened to the company over the past two years. Before going public in 2021, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States conducted a careful review of TuSimple and its Chinese shareholders. The startup eventually came under investigation by the FBI and Securities and Exchange Commission, in part because of co-founder Chen Mo's ties to another Chinese truck startup, Hydron.

Since then, the company has continued to struggle. The company laid off employees, wavered strategically, and was almost forced to delist in May last year. Late last year, the company finally decided to withdraw from the U.S. market entirely and focus on the Chinese market. Currently, some of the company's U.S. trucks are up for auction, along with other equipment such as lidar sensors it purchased from Hesai and Aeva.