BEIJING, Feb. 28 (Xinhua) – China’s bike-sharing industry returns currently back to reasonable running after volatile reshuffle in the past year, reported Economic Daily.
Due to the stringently high operating costs, unclear profiting mode, and cost-ignoring competition in past years, a number of Chinese bike-sharing startups went into bankruptcy when their capital chain turns fragile after the investment spree cools down.
Under such circumstances, some industry players began to focus on optimizing operation and management to survive. Hellobike, a Chinese bike-sharing company, started to profit in many cities in China via operation optimization, meaning a sustainable future, said Yang Kaizhu, the company co-founder.
For instance, a bike usually costs about 800 yuan and can be used for three years with 0.6 yuan of depreciation cost and less than 0.4 yuan of maintenance cost per day. In this case, the company’s cost to operate one bike is one yuan per day and two rides will help it recover costs, according to Yang.
Similarly, other Chinese bike-sharing enterprises also manage to improve step by step their operating conditions and make both ends meet.
Statistics with iiMedia Research, a third-party mobile internet data operator, show that since 2018, users of bike-sharing companies began to steady and reached 235 million and may increase to 259 million in 2019.
Industry insiders remain optimistic about the bike-sharing market but acknowledge difficulty in their profitability. In their eyes, after a round of reshuffle, bike-sharing industry’s user growth slows down and sector leading companies do not resort to high-speed expansion to expand market thus long-term and sustainable development for the industry is expectable based on their cost reduction and service quality improvement. Enditem (Edited by Duan Jing, duanjing@xinhua.org)
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