Beijing authorities recently ordered a halt to electric bicycle-sharing service E-zebra (in Chinese), citing safety and legitimacy concerns. In addition, users of the service were first notified yesterday (March 7, 2017) and then again today about an interruption in service due to maintenance. Customer service representatives have not able to confirm when the service will be back […]
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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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[Updated] O2O bike-rental deposits in China may not be as secure as users think
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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Tier 3 failure shows bike-rental ain’t that easy
Chinese tech media is aflutter this morning after news last night that Kala, an O2O bike-rental company, went out of business after only 19 days of operation. In those 19 days, the company, in cooperation with the Putian government (a Tier 4 city in Fujian province), were only able to recover 157 of the 667 bikes […]
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Gofun offers electric car rental for RMB 1 per hour
Editor’s note: A version of this post by Charles Liu first appeared on the Beijinger, a leading source of English-language lifestyle information on the city of Beijing. Beijing’s sharing economy has taken a huge step forward with the recent announcement that some 5,000 electric cars will be available to rent on a time-sharing basis in the city within two years. […]
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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 […]
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8 questions about Chinese tech we will see answered in 2017
In the tech industry, new innovations are constantly supplanting old ideas and seemingly stable companies can find themselves facing unexpected challenges. However, the trends we saw started in 2016 posed questions that have yet to be answered. Here are eight of them we think will be answered in 2017. 1. Can Alipay effectively deter the aggressive rise […]
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TechNode’s Top Sharing Economy Stories of 2016
The sharing economy is exploding in China. Worth about 299 billion USD in 2015, the market is expected to surge by 40 percent over the next five years, China’s National Information Center reported earlier this year. While the sharing economy is relatively a broad term referring to businesses that are based on peer-to-peer sharing of […]
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Ofo Wants to Connect Bikes, Not Make Them
A lot of people are curious about how Ofo and Mobike, China’s dominant bike-sharing platforms, are different. From a user perspective, they may not be so different, but from our previous post, we can see that Mobike is about creating a moving IoT platform. Ofo, on the other hand, emphasises user connection and the sharing economy. To […]