Ofo

» see ofo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

ofo never reached turkey. by the time the chinese bike-share wave was at peak in 2017 and 2018, my city was still figuring out whether to install a single corporate-sponsored docked station downtown, and the dockless yellow ofo bikes that were piling up in french and english cities were not piling up in ankara.

to be fair, this was a china-and-then-some product. five members of the peking university cycling club founded ofo in 2014, with dai wei as the public face. the name was picked because the letters look like a cyclist on a bicycle. by 2017 the company had ten million yellow bikes on the ground across about 250 cities in twenty countries. monthly active users were reportedly somewhere around 62 million.

the unit economics never worked. each bike cost real money to produce and maintain. vandals broke them. the refundable deposits ate into working capital while mobike, with the more durable bike and the tencent funding behind it, forced ofo to ride heavy discounts through the venture money. by mid-2018 ofo had pulled out of most of its international markets.

by october 2018 the refund requests piled up at the beijing headquarters. by december the founder dai wei was reportedly on a court-issued travel ban. the company never formally declared bankruptcy. it just stopped running the network. by 2020 the chinese press was reporting ofo was no longer operating bike rentals at scale.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

the dockless-bike model that ofo and mobike invented in 2015-2016 was the kind of thing that only made sense with the scale of chinese venture money and the density of chinese tier-one cities. you could unlock a bike with a wechat scan, ride it across the city, leave it on the sidewalk, walk away. the back-end did the rest.

for whatever reason the model exported badly. european and us cities did not have the sidewalk tolerance for unlimited bike dumping. the paris pilot folded within a year. the washington dc and seattle expansions ran into local permit fights almost immediately. by mid-2018 ofo had pulled out of israel, australia, india, and most of the other markets.

~ the slide ~

the mobike merger that ant group and didi were reportedly pushing for in early 2018 fell apart. didi instead launched its own bluegogo-rebranded competitor. mobike sold to meituan in april 2018 for $2.7 billion. ofo, with no acquirer, no merger, no fresh funding round, was the one left holding the yellow bikes.

to be honest the most-photographed image from this whole era is the bicycle-graveyard shot. a chinese city would clear sidewalks of abandoned bikes and stack them in vacant lots outside town, by the tens of thousands, by color. the yellow piles were ofo. the orange piles were mobike. by 2019 those photos were the actual death certificate of the dockless bike-share moment.

~ what got buried with it ~

the user-deposit problem outlived the company. ofo had taken refundable deposits of 99 yuan or 199 yuan from somewhere north of 10 million riders, and the queue of refund-request claimants was reportedly still on the books years after the bikes stopped rolling. dai wei stayed under reported travel restrictions long enough that by the time the chinese press lost interest, the company was already a memory.

the bike-share idea did not die with ofo. it just retreated to the docked-station municipal-contract model that european cities had been running since velib in 2007. dockless lived on in the e-scooter wave that lime and bird picked up in 2018, until that collapsed too (or whatever it was called).

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »