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Chinese bike-shares remain popular even as car ownership grows

Bloomberg reports that China’s leading bike-share startups, oFo and Mobike, have raised $100 million apiece from investors for further expansion.

The quick success both companies scored shows the continued growth for this market, driven by a variety of factors in the country that makes it unique.

Mobike has recently inaugurated a program in Shanghai that will operate outside of the government’s own bike-share program, while oFo continues to develop from its roots as a campus bike-share program in Beijing to encompass twenty major city markets.

oFo’s most notable investor is Didi Chuxing, who in August bought out Uber’s China operations. His investment, according to Quartz, will help the company expand beyond the university system to compete better with Mobike, which also has an Uber connection: Founder Davis Wang was an Uber China executive.

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The size of the Chinese consumer base and its particular needs mean that the country surpasses all others in the scale of bike-share programs.

China beat Italy in 2013 to hold the most bike-share programs in any one country, according to Forbes, and today its bike-share programs encompasses over 400,000 units, or almost ten times the number of bike-share units that France has.

From luxury goods to mass transit alternative

Though bicycles have been in use since the late 19th century in China, it was not until the post-1979 economic reforms that mass consumer markets emerged: prior to then, they were viewed as high-status consumer goods, and only one person in four or five had a bicycle.

Of course, this still accounted for a large number of people, but the ramping up of production thereafter made cycling cheaper and more popular than ever before.

Due to the pace of Chinese economic development, especially in urban road infrastructure, air pollution, and cultural changes that have made cycling more popular again, as growing car ownership has seen a decline in cycling’s overall popularity since the 1990s even as bikes still outnumber cars by a wide margin.

In Shanghai today, for instance, there are 9.43 million bicycles for close to 20 million people, and many of those cyclists use these to commute to work rather than take public transit or other vehicles. And in 2011, the city of Hangzhou won the distinction of operating the world’s largest metropolitan bike-share system.

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In 2015, according to data from Statista, over 55.4 million bicycles were sold in China. China is also a major exporter of bicycles to the U.S. and Asia-Pacific markets, and the largest parts producer for them as well, through the HL Corporation.
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The article Chinese bike-sharing startups cycle ahead with combined $200 million investmentfirst appeared on Geektime.

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