It’s still bike sharing, but the story is different.

Editor’s note: This article comes from the WeChat public account “Deep Sound” (ID: deep-echo) , author : Tingting.

Core points

  • The bicycle business, which had been placed high hopes on, is now reduced to the giant’s “accessories”. The money-burning game is over, and seeking profit is a top priority.
     

  • For the three giants Meituan, Alibaba, and Didi, the significance of the bike-sharing business is more to complement their ecology.
     

  • The competition for bike sharing is essentially the competition between Alibaba and Meituan in local life, and the competition between Meituan and Didi on urban travel.

    After all ofo ’s deposit issues have faded out of the public ’s line of sight, the shared bike that has been quiet for a long time has no more waves. Because of this, the news that Didi’s bike-sharing business has received investment at this time is particularly noticeable.

    On April 21, according to The Information report, SoftBank and Legend Holdings, a subsidiary of Lenovo Holdings, invested US $ 150 million in Didi Chuxing ’s shared bicycle division. Earlier, “LatePost” disclosed exclusively that Didi’s independent brand Qingju Bicycle received more than $ 1 billion in financing led by Junlian Capital.

    Softbank, one of the investors in the news, is Didi ’s largest shareholder. In 2017, it also entered the shared bicycle market and started cooperation with ofo in Japan. There were also rumors in the market that Softbank and Didi would invest $ 1 billion in ofo, but nothing happened. For Junlian Capital, this is its first shot on a shared cycling track.

    Interestingly, during the craziest stage of capital, Junlian Capital chose to remain on the sidelines. In August 2017, Li Jiaqing, managing director of Junlian Capital, said in an interview that due to the large amount of subsidies and investment, shared bicycles have stimulated some unnecessary cycling needs. It will take some time to observe whether the final business model can be established.

    But at the time, there was no shortage of capital fans for bike-sharing. However, even when the shared bike market was at its most prosperous, there was no single round of large-scale financing of $ 1 billion.

    In contrast, the former starThe financing figures of the ofo and Mobike projects are no longer exaggerated: ofo Pre-A round financing amount is only 9 million yuan, and the Mobike A round financing amount is millions of dollars. In the case of continued capital enthusiasm later, ofo reached the highest financing amount of E86 round of 866 million US dollars, and Mobike’s highest financing amount was over 600 million US dollars led by Tencent.

    After the ofo crash and Mobike cheap sales, the long-awaited shared bicycle market suddenly saw a huge $ 1 billion financing. One stone provokes thousands of waves. Will the bike sharing battle repeat itself?

    post-ofo era

    Call back time, the bike sharing was once brilliant.

    The prototype of the shared bicycle originated from the Peking University campus in 2015, and then spread to the whole country and even the world at a very fast speed, becoming the most popular outlet at the time. Since 2016, new players have continuously joined, and at least 27 shared bicycle platforms have emerged, and the market has fallen into a “colorful” melee.

    In the melee battle, ofo and Mobike stood out, and the duopoly structure gradually took shape, and they took the leading position in the industry with more fierce financing wars and price wars.

    Ofo completed 5 rounds of financing in 2016 alone, of which C round of financing reached 130 million US dollars, and another 3 rounds of financing were completed in 2017, with a total financing of more than 2.1 billion US dollars. The main investors are Ant Financial, Didi Chuxing etc.

    Mobike also completed five rounds of financing from October 2015 to October 2016, of which the amount of round C financing exceeded 100 million US dollars. In January and February 2017, Mobike’s cumulative financing amount exceeded US $ 300 million. In June, Mobike received a large amount of financing exceeding US $ 600 million. The main investor was Tencent.

    In about two years, the two companies have completed a total of at least 15 rounds of financing. Tencent, Alibaba, Didi and other giants have shot out. The speed and scale are staggering.

    At that time, people who shared their bicycles were proud, and investors who used money to vote did not hesitate to publicly support this model and expressed their optimism.

    Xiao Min, a partner of Jingwei China, believes that the shared bicycle project itself has huge potential commercial value and monetization opportunities. This is a high-frequency, effective, and tens of millions of orders per day, a market with opportunities in the future. .

    Panda Capital said that the market for shared bicycles is as many as the citizens have for short-distance transportation. In addition, good products superimposed on good rules will stimulate the public to produce upward chemical reactions.

    In contrast, Sun Peilin, the investment manager of the Innovation Workshop, which has followed up several rounds of investment, is relatively restrained. He believes that the profit of the project and the return on investment cannot be directly linked. “The current state of shared bicycles is not profitable. There is no need to pursue profitability. What we need to solve today is how to reasonably manage operations and expand the scale. “

    EnterIn 2018, things went down sharply. The two star enterprises that attracted capital to chase, and finally one went to defeat, the other could not escape the fate of being acquired by the giant.

    At the end of 2018, the Haidian District People ’s Court of Beijing made a “restriction on consumption order” against ofo and its founder Dai Wei. At that time, a total of 12 million users on the ofo platform had queued up to refund the deposit. In 2020, the company added 24 pieces of information on the person being executed, and 2 pieces of information on persons being dishonestly executed. Global Web reports pointed out that compared to the bike sharing platform, the ofo APP is more like an online shopping mall.

    Ofo ’s rival, Mobike, eventually sold to the US group at a price of 15.5 billion yuan, and the A and B round investors and founding team were out of cash with 750 million US dollars.

    In January 2019, Meituan announced the completion of the acquisition of Mobike. After the acquisition was completed, Motobike, which was originally branded in orange, was painted with Meituan yellow, and Meituan APP became its only domestic entrance. Mobike was debranded and completely transformed into Meituan bike.

    In addition, Mobike and ofo should not have expected that after a fierce battle between the two, they were eventually taken by Haro Bike (now renamed Haro Travel) to take advantage of the fishermen. Hello was officially launched on the market in November 2016. In order to avoid competition with ofo and Mobike, a strategy of “rural surrounding cities” was adopted, marching from third- and fourth-tier cities to first- and second-tier cities, and successfully fighting from shared bicycles. Survived so far. As of September 17, 2019, its registered users reached 280 million, and it has settled in more than 360 cities across the country, ranking first in market share.

    Hello ’s successful survival, thanks to Alibaba ’s capital. During the development of Haro, Ant Financial has injected capital into it several times. In December 2019, Haro mortgaged all its bicycles to Ant Financial and received 500 million yuan in financial support.

    Didi, which has grown up on ofo, has not given up on the bike-sharing market. In January 2018, Didi’s independent brand Green Orange Bicycle was officially launched. According to insiders of Green Orange, Green Orange has been expanding its market and increasing its sales in 2019, achieving more than 10 million orders at the peak.

    At this point, after the crazy financing war, the shared bicycles under the blessing of the giants have formed a three-legged situation of the US group, Hello, and the orange. The first ofo eating crabs has left the market.

    Behind the situation of the killing of the Three Kingdoms, the three giants of Meituan, Alibaba and Didi sawed. The bicycle business, which had been placed high hopes on, has been reduced to a giant’s accessories, without the home court, and lost the favor of capital. According to the monitoring data of the E-commerce Research Center