You must have noticed the boom bike-rental companies in China as an increasing array of rainbow colored bikes mushrooming on streets across the country. Endless financing rounds from big names like Tencent, Didi, and Foxconn have been injected into one or another of the startups that involved in a heating field. Despite the initial “wows” […]
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Ofo hits Australia while Bluegogo struggling to refund deposits
Ofo is taking over another global city: after conducting a pilot program in Adelaide in South Australia, the company is putting their small yellow bikes in Sydney. Ofo also announced that it will double its fleet in Adelaide. On the other hand, its Chinese rival Bluegogo seems to be facing difficulties. The company has denied […]
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10 bikes in 16 minutes: Bike-rental race revives flagging industry
Editor’s note: This was originally a two part report by Li Siyi and Jiang Xiaochuan for Tencent Finance. It has been translated and further edited for clarity and style by Linda Lew. In winning the bike-rental “arms race,” the number of bikes on the street has become the critical factor. China’s largest bicycle manufacturing hub has […]
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Ofo sued for $1.3m in wrongful death claim
2017 has been a great year for bike rental startups as they get more money and expand both domestically and internationally. However, that doesn’t mean that everything is rosy. On March 26, a boy under 12 years old was hit by a bus and died while riding an ofo bike. His parents are now suing […]
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Ofo becomes first bike-rental unicorn after US$ 450 million series D
Chinese bike-sharing firm Ofo announced today that it has secured US$ 450 million (around RMB 3.1 billion) in its Series D financing, a move that is heating up the already cut-throat competition in this nascent market, our sister site TechNode Chinese is reporting. The round is led by Moscow-headquartered DST, and other investors in this […]
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Ofo signs partnership with Huawei and China Telecom, finally becoming a technology company
Yesterday, Ofo has announced a partnership deal (in Chinese) with China Telecom (中国电信) and Huawei. The partnership will see China Telecom providing wireless data access, Huawei providing NB-IoT chips (PDF), and Ofo providing the bikes. The announcement emphasized a big pain point for the company: their technology. At this point, it’s fairly clear that Mobike and Ofo […]
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[Podcast] China Tech Weekly April 2: Tencent buys a 5% stake in Tesla
Editor’s note: This originally appeared on China Tech Insights, an English research unit affiliated to Tencent’s Online Media Group. This week: Baidu confronted with another executive departure Tencent expands investment in e-vehicles WeChat to push further into EU/US Didi considering 6B in new investment from SB Smaller Didi rival Shouqi considering new partnership Bike-sharing startups team […]
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Shanghai mulling bike-rental regulations
Shanghai is mulling rules to regulate the sizzling yet reckless development of the city’s bike-rental sector, local media is reporting (in Chinese). The new rules, expected to be introduced in May and come into effect in June or July this year, are the latest government efforts to deal with the growing problems emerging with the bike-rental […]
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The saga of the “bike-rental company that wasn’t” continues
Kala Danche (卡拉单车) is back in business. As you may recall, last week we reported that the company had lost over 75% of their bicycles in less than 20 days of operation. Because of that, their only investor made a quick exit, taking all the user deposits with him and triggering a cascade of questions […]
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Are China’s bike-sharing platforms really part of the sharing economy?
China’s O2O market has seen quite a few companies doing interesting things, some succeeding, some failing. The latest hot vertical is bike-sharing. According to the China’s bike sharing industry mini-report by China Channel, Mobike (backed by Tencent and Foxconn) and Ofo (backed by Didi and Xiaomi) are clear market leaders amongst growing competitors. Founded in January 2015, the […]
