La sfida su internet del “Bike sharing” che si consuma in Cina è tra investitori americani

(a quote from The Financial Times- Prof. Franco Quilico)

Mobike has broken from the crowded peloton of Chinese bike-sharing services, raising $215 million in the latest funding round supporting the craze in big cities. The world’s most popular bike-sharing company by app downloads was backed by domestic tech giant Tencent and American private equity firm Warburg Pincus, as lead investors in its fourth big round. Mobike is gearing up for a showdown with its main rival ofo — so-called because the name looks like a bicycle — which raised $130 million in third-round funding last October… The bike-sharing battle in fact mirrors the old Uber-Didi Chuxing spat: ofo is backed by Didi, while Mobike’s founder Davis Wang was an Uber executive in Shanghai. Mobike was launched in April 2016 and, within six months, its distinctive orange-wheeled bikes had become ubiquitous in China’s big cities. Its app has been downloaded 400,000 times on the Android app store alone, compared with ofo’s 170,000… Its key features are a proprietary locking system and GPS navigation technology.

Yuan Yang

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