【E-commerce 0323】共享单车：只是看上去很美？

刘颖

Apple CEO Tim Cook made news in Beijing Tuesday, when he paid a visit to the bike-sharing company Ofo, one of the 30 or so Chinese start-ups that are aggressively competing for bike-sharing market share and investor cash.

Cook took a ride on one of the firm's signature yellow bikes, met its founders, including CEO Dai Wei, and posted congratulations in an official Sina Weibo post: "Thanks for welcoming me today, Ofo team! Great energy behind your mission to make commuting greener, more efficient and fun!"

The question is whether Ofo—which raised $450 million earlier this month and reached "Unicorn" status with a valuation above $1 billion—and its competitors make any economic sense.

More than a decade after the numbers of bike riders began declining thanks to new subway lines and an explosion of private cars, China's streets are again awash in riders. Bike-sharing startups have flooded China’s major cities with hundreds of thousands of starkly-colored branded bikes—in yellow, orange, blue—after receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital fundraising from notable investors including Sequoia Capital and Warburg Pincus . Just today Mobike, the biggest Chinese company according to rides, opened for business in Singapore.

Users love the services. They can leave bikes anywhere. GPS on the bike or smartphone locations allow the next users to find them on the app.

But economists say there’s a reason the phenomenon hasn't come to the U.S.: it doesn’t make any financial sense for the bike companies.

The 30 or so bike sharing companies in China today envision becoming the next Didi Chuxing (which is an Ofo investor). They practically give away their product for free to beat competition and build market share. The problem is, bike sharing isn’t anything like Uber ride-sharing. The more people who join your bike company, the more bikes you have to buy. The more bikes you buy, the more problems like theft and bikes abandoned far from city centers start to matter.

Jeffrey Towson is an investor who once worked for Prince Alwaleed and a professor at Beijing University. He can’t believe the amount of money the companies have received and recently dissected the problems. Just the biggest:

• There’s no network effect in bike sharing. This is not like Facebook (fb, -1.02%) or Uber, which improve as more of your friends or drivers join the platform. Scale “ doesn’t create a much lower cost structure per unit,” Towson points out. In other words, when Mobike or Ofo add another 1,000 customers, they need to buy more bikes. Economies of scale don't work in bike sharing.

• Prices are so low that the bike-sharing companies are either unprofitable, or carry razor-thin margins. Mobike and Ofo, the two largest companies, charge between 0.5 yuan to 1 yuan (7 cents to 14 cents) for 30 minutes. And those bikes can be expensive. Mobike's premium bikes reportedly cost 3,000 yuan ($435) to produce last year. It says the cost has since fallen. But if you assume each bike is used five to eight times a day, which is unlikely, as many end up far away from popular destinations, it takes more than a year to recoup costs. Ofo has said its simpler bikes are 250 yuan ($36). Even then it takes several months to recoup costs, which increasingly include paying employees to haul bikes back to busy intersections, find abandoned bikes, fight theft, and comply with new regulations sprouting up because officials in Beijing and other cities are annoyed at hordes of bikes blocking sidewalks.

• Competitors keep piling in. There’s almost no way for them to differentiate, except for tiny differences in bike style, comfort, and their app. There’s no way to keep competitors from piling in and there are already some 30 companies.

• Even when China’s 30 or so bike-sharing competitors are whittled down to a few, scale doesn’t pay off then either. That’s because, again, there’s no asset-sharing going on. People aren’t listing their bikes to be used like homes on Airbnb. The bikes are bought and kept up by the companies.
Earlier this year Mobike raised $300 million from Tencent (tcehy, -1.49%), Foxconn (fxcny, -0.42%), and Temasek. Ofo raised $450 million from DST and Didi Chuxing.

The business is being defined by how much capital competitors can raise to spend on gaining market share.

The problem is, once they capture some, real profits may never be part of it. Beware of a future initial public offering.

刘颖

TRANSLATIONS


苹果CEO蒂姆·库克又在中国上头条了。本周二，他造访了中国的一家单车共享公司Ofo。在中国的单车共享市场上，有30家左右的新创企业正在为了市场份额和投资人的融资而激烈竞争。

库克试骑了该公司标志性的小黄车，会见了包括CEO戴威之内的几位创始人。他还在他的新浪微博官方页面上发了一条庆祝微博：“感谢Ofo团队盛情接待！感受到你们满满的正能量和使命感，让通勤更环保、更高效、更有趣！”

Ofo本月早些时候刚刚获得了4.5亿美元的融资，迈过了所谓“独角兽”也就是10亿美元估值的门槛。但问题是，像Ofo及其竞争对手这样的商业模式，在中国真的行得通吗？

在曾经的“自行车大国”中国，由于新的地铁线路不断竣工，加之私家车的爆炸式增长，最近这十几年，真正骑自行车出行的人早已变得越来越少。直到最近，中国的街道上才再次出现了不少骑行者的身影。与此同时，从事单车共享业务的创业公司也在中国各大城市涌现，漆成黄色、橙色、蓝色等鲜亮颜色的共享单车已经成为街头巷尾的一道风景，这些单车共享公司更是动辄拉到几亿美元的融资，其背后金主不乏红杉资本和华平投资这样的国际巨鳄。就在21日，中国最大的单车共享公司摩拜单车宣告正式打入了新加坡市场。

用户们很喜欢单车共享服务。他们可以把单车放在任何地方，单车上的GPS加上手机定位功能，可以让下一批用户轻易地在手机APP上找到它们。
不过经济学家们表示，单车共享的火爆现象之所以没有流行到美国是有原因的，因为它对于单车公司来说几乎不具有任何经济上的效益。

中国的这30多家单车共享公司都梦想着成为下一个滴滴出行（滴滴也是Ofo的投资方之一）。为了打败竞争对手和构建市场份额，他们的产品几乎和白送差不多。问题是单车共享跟滴滴这样的打车服务完全没有可比性。作为一家单车共享公司，你的注册用户越多，你就需要购置越多的单车。而你购置了越多的单车，像车子被盗或是被丢在远离市中心的地方这种问题就会显得越发重要。

北京大学教授杰弗瑞·陶森曾为沙特的阿尔瓦利德王子工作过。他表示，很难相信这些单车共享公司竟然获得了这么多的融资。他最近还对有关单车共享的问题进行了一番剖析。以下是他的部分观点：

• 单车共享业务没有网络效应。它跟Facebook和Uber不一样，没法光靠用户的涌入实现平台的增长。他指出：共享单车的规模“无法显著降低每个单位的成本结构。”换句话说，摩拜或者Ofo每额外增加1,000名用户，他们就得相应采购更多的单车。规模经济对单车共享业务是不起作用的。

• 单车共享服务的定价太低了，这些公司要么根本不盈利，要么利润比纸还薄。以摩拜和Ofo这两家最大的单车共享公司为例，租一辆单车每30分钟的费用只有5毛到1块钱人民币。而单车本身的价值却不可谓不贵。据称去年摩拜单车每辆的成本大约是3000元人民币，不过据说这个价格已经有所下降。假设每辆单车每天被人使用5到8次（这其实是不太可能的，因为很多车子最终都被停在远离交通热点的地方），那么收回成本至少需要一年的时间。Ofo的车子成本更低廉些，大约只有250元人民币左右。即便这样，它也需要好几个月才能收回成本。另一方面，共享单车的成本也并非是一成不变的——它还要雇人把车子骑回到交通繁忙路段，找回丢失的车子，做好防盗工作，以及应对层出不穷的政府新规——因为北京以及其他不少城市都出现了将共享单车乱停乱放占用人行道的问题，让各地官员深感头痛。

• 竞争者的蜂拥涌入。共享单车是很难做到差异化的，市面上这些公司也无非就是围绕单车的造型、舒适度和应用软件做做文章。市场上的共享单车公司根本无法组织新进者的涌入，而且市面上差不多已经有了30家左右的共享单车公司了。

• 虽然中国这30家左右的单车共享公司肯定会死掉一批，但即便这样，届时也依然很难产生规模效应。这是由于单车共享本质上并不是资产的共享。人们并非像Airbnb的房东一样是在出租自己的资产。这些单车的采购和养护都是由单车公司负责的。

今年早些时候，摩拜单车获得了腾讯、富士康和淡马锡等投资方的3亿美元注资。而Ofo也从DST和滴滴出行等投资人处拉来了4.5亿美元的融资。

目前，该领域的竞争已经变成了一家公司能拉来多少资本，用以攫取市场份额。

问题是，即便他们获得了一些市场份额，也可能永远拿不到真正的利润。所以这些公司将来IPO时要小心了。

崔婉玲

共享单车真的便宜