How Hellobike is beating Mobike and Ofo in China’s smaller cities
About 72 per cent of bike-sharing users in China can be found in the country’s second- and lower-tier cities
The bike-sharing war in China is not ending any time soon. The country’s bike-sharing market is forecast to add another 167 million users between 2017 and 2019 to reach 376 million customers, with most of that growth happening outside the top-tier cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen.
While domestic market leaders Mobike and Ofo are making a push into smaller cities, the country’s third-largest bike-sharing service provider, Hellobike, already has a head start.
Launched in late 2016, about two years after Beijing-based rivals Mobike and Ofo started operations, Hellobike was the first bike-sharing operator to build up its business in China’s smaller cities. The start-up has also deployed its bikes in tier-1 cities, but these locations are not its priority.
“At least 100 small cities have yet to see dockless bikes enter [into service],” Hellobike chief operating officer Han Mei told Tech in Asia at the TechCrunch Hangzhou event earlier this month. “These are the markets that we want to crack next.”
Headquartered in Shanghai, Hellobike currently operates in 220 cities across China. Mobike, by comparison, is present in 176 cities, 11 of which are overseas. Ofo has operations in 250 cities around the world.
The number of users with Mobike and Ofo still outnumber those of Hellobike by huge margins as of May, thanks to those two companies’ continued dominance in large population centres. That is not the case, however, in China’s less crowded, less prosperous areas. Hellobike has racked up about half of the users in the second- and third-tier cities, according to data-monitoring firm Trustdata.
