Chinese bike-sharing start-up says it’s now worth more than US$2 billion

[specuvestor]

Thanks Big Toe!

It's about ownership. Thats why Uber / Grab / AirBnB work but not Mobike /Ofo. They are very different type of share. The latter is doomed to fail due to human psyche / behavior

[money]

Thanks Big Toe!

It's about ownership. Thats why Uber / Grab / AirBnB work but not Mobike /Ofo. They are very different type of share. The latter is doomed to fail due to human psyche / behavior

Actually even for the former, they also find it difficult to survive. Uber sold itself to grab and didi chuxing as well. Now with gojek on the way, interesting events will happen. At the end of the day, consumers should benefit. And if there is still easy money, a next competitor will just pop up along the way again

[Big Toe]

Uber/Grab/AirBnB are fundamentally very different from Bike Share.
The former are basically software companies that enables a user to book a service/physical asset that belongs to someone else.
It is a very low cost business and extremely cheap to scale up. The only worry is competition + legislation. A monopoly can be extremely lucrative.

Bike share on the other hand, provides both software and hardware. And the hardware(bicycles) are always missing or damaged. And the cost of replacement and re-location of the hard assets are extremely frequent .(ie after every ride). The running cost of booking a grab ride or Air BnB is next to nothing. Even if the bike share company becomes a monopoly, in its current form, it would still find it extremely difficult to break even, human behavior is difficult to change. Much like public toilets, without cleaners cleaning it every 2 hours, it would be extremely dirty.

[weijian]

Thanks Big Toe!

It's about ownership. Thats why Uber / Grab / AirBnB work but not Mobike /Ofo. They are very different type of share. The latter is doomed to fail due to human psyche / behavior

Actually even for the former, they also find it difficult to survive. Uber sold itself to grab and didi chuxing as well. Now with gojek on the way, interesting events will happen. At the end of the day, consumers should benefit. And if there is still easy money, a next competitor will just pop up along the way again

hi money,
Difficult to survive because of "business economics" or due to "business competition"? (there is a big difference). Bike sharing's failure probably is due to both (business economics and competition) but for the other type of shares like Uber/Grab/AirBnB as mentioned, business economics are great.

The irony is that in such network effect type of businesses like Uber/Grab/AirBnB in which the winner takes all, due to low switching costs (eg. we are pretty agnostic to what service to use as long as we can get a ride within few mins), the temptation for cheap money to pile in and try to seize territory from the incumbent/s is too big. As a result, competition is immense. These guys will be disrupted by cheap money, not new tech (unlike the previous generation of corporate giants)

why Ofo failed: http://jefftowson.com/2019/01/why-ofo-failed/