Mergers and acquisitions (M&As) in China’s technology sector saw a year-on-year decline of 12.9% in the past four months, despite the massive USD5.5 billion funding round by Didi Chuxing, according to Mergermarket. “The value of technology deals reached USD19.9 billion across 65 transactions from January to April, down from USD22.8 billion in 73 deals recorded in the same period last year,” Mergermarket Financial Researcher Sophie Jin said. The decrease in the size and number of deals in the first four months of the year was chiefly attributed to Beijing’s tough capital controls. “The environment for tech M&As in China has changed after the banner period in 2015, which saw a frenzy of large mergers among start-up unicorns,” Jin said. Last year, ride-hailing app operators Didi Dache and Kuaidi Dache announced their blockbuster merger, and Alibaba Group-backed Meituan.com agreed to merge with Tencent Holdings’ Dianping.com to form China’s largest online-to-offline local services provider. Jin said Didi’s huge financing round last month represented the largest Chinese technology financing round to date, surpassing the USD4.5 billion raised by Alibaba affiliate Ant Financial Services Group in April last year. The Didi fundraising made up 27.6% of the total domestic technology M&A activity in the first four months of this year.

Mergermarket said the next two biggest technology deals during the period were the USD1.1 billion raised in January by Koubei, the online-to-offline service joint venture of Alibaba and Ant Financial, and the USD1 billion obtained early last month by Beijing Bytedance Technology, operator of the Toutiao news and information mobile app. Across all sectors, there were 413 deals worth USD82.1 billion in China in the first quarter, down 24.6% in value compared with 479 deals worth USD108.8 billion in the first three months of last year, the South China Morning Post reports.