First there were the orange Mobike then I started seeing the green ones, then the big yellow ones and soon afterwards, on Donghu Lu I saw some blue ones. What is happening here? It’s like the United nations of bicycle rental in Shanghai. I mean how many do we need here?
I went to what was billed as an interesting talk by the Shanghai head of Mobike last weekend and I was so interested to find out more about Mobike that I actually sat through several dull talks from a bunch of business women advising other business women how to do business.
So when the Mobike chap came along I was all ears. However, it soon became apparent that he was only the salesman and all we got was a sales talk about how great they are.
My hand shot up at the end and asked him whether his business was yet profitable in Shanghai. Surely with 60,000 bikes costing about 400 rmb each, it’s going to take a while to recover the costs. I was surprised to here therefore that they weren’t very interested in making money, only about bikes. I asked him whether the company was therefore a commercial organisation or a charity and he replied that they hadn’t quite decided yet. A French guy (the only man at the whole event) asked what they did with all the data and he said they didn’t do anything with it.
What is this guy playing at? He doesn’t know whether his company wanted to turn a profit or not, admitted there was no business model, didn’t know how many journeys were taken every day in Shanghai and did nothing with the massive amounts of data collected. he is either very stupid or he’s hiding the actual answers for commercial reasons. But then… why come to give a business talk when you have no intention of, or capacity to answer the questions.
Maybe he is frightened of all the competition around these days. I wonder how all these rental bikes can survive in this market, but then I guess if they are all doing it in order to save the planet it doesn’t really matter whose bikes customers use, as long as they are not driving a car.