The $700m series E round closed by China-based on-demand bicycle rental service Ofo last week – its third nine-figure round in nine months – once again indicates the pace at which the sector is growing, and raises some tantalising questions about where it is headed.
Ofo has built a bicycle rental service that enables users to pay and unlock the bikes through a mobile app. It claims to have registered more than 100 million users across 150 cities and provided more than 2 billion rides since the service was launched in 2015.
E-commerce firm Alibaba co-led the series E round with private equity firm Hony Capital and Citic Private Equity, an existing investor that is part of asset management group Citic, and they were joined by automotive ride hailing platform Didi Chuxing and investment firm DST Global.
Ofo did not disclose a valuation for the round, which according to Bloomberg took its overall funding to $1.35bn since it was founded in 2014, but Bloomberg had previously reported the company was seeking a $3bn valuation for its next round.
Although Ofo has not disclosed firm details of its earlier rounds, it secured $130m in an October 2016 series C round featuring Didi Chuxing, Citic Private Equity, Matrix Partners, Coatue Management, Vision Plus Capital, GSR Ventures and entrepreneur Yuri Milner
Didi Chuxing, Citic PE, Matrix and Coatue subsequently returned for a $450m series D round in March that was led by DST Global, before Ant Financial, Alibaba’s financial services affiliate, invested an undisclosed sum the following month.
The series E capital will support an expansion drive that Ofo hopes will increase the number of bikes in its network from about 6.5 million to 20 million, and the number of countries in which it operates to 20, by the end of 2017. It has already launched in the UK, US and Singapore, but faces competition from the other big player in the market, Mobike.
Ofo and Mobike have been fiercely competitive with each other as the private bike rental sector has exploded in the past year, and the latter raised $600m in a round led by Tencent – Alibaba’s biggest rival in China’s online services space – last month that included Bocom International, ICBC International, Sequoia Capital, TPG, Hillhouse Capital and Farallon Capital.
The companies were initially differentiated not only by the colour schemes of their bikes (Ofo bikes are yellow while Mobike favours silver with orange wheels) but by their customer focus. Ofo targeted students and urban areas with large student populations, in contrast to Mobike which focused on white collar workers, and it will be interesting to see if each favours the same approach internationally.
Interestingly, although Ofo and Mobike are the two dominant players in China, they have been joined by a range of newer startups, such as Hellobike, while also battling the sector’s pioneer, Youon. In the US meanwhile, a newly formed startup called LimeBike is looking to get in the game early.
The emergence of Limebike presents an interesting comparison with the on-demand auto ride sector in which Ofo investor Didi Chuxing operates. Uber of course remains the market leader worldwide, but has faced constant battles with a raft of local competitors in its drive to expand globally.
Neither Ofo nor Mobike have similar competition yet, and certainly not of the level where a domestic upstart would be able to compete with them in terms of resources, but they will look to nail down the larger international markets before a domestic company rises up to take advantage of the business model.
However, the question is how viable that business model is in the long term, especially as bicycles are far cheaper than cars and require no licence to use, reducing the entry point for an ordinary citizen.
Another significant issue is that the industry relies on an inventory that each company owns, but which it cannot monitor as it is being used, meaning theft and vandalism bite into the profits, even with GPS tracking systems installed. The fact the bikes also do not need docking stations and can be parked anywhere inevitably leads to some being left in remote areas where, for all intents and purposes, they are out of commission.
Either way, what is clear is what eventually happens when an industry faces rapid growth and finds itself unable to spread the profit throughout its players: consolidation. That will mean some of the smaller players will fall by the wayside, but it may also mean a merger sometime in the future.
Didi Dache and Kuaidi Dache jointly held a 90% plus share of China’s ride sharing market in early 2015 when they decided to join forces and create the giant now known as Didi Chuxing.
Mobike and Ofo may not necessarily take the same option, simply because there is no Uber on the horizon that forms a potent threat to them, but they could also decide that a single company would be able to expand more efficiently, while making use of Didi Chuxing’s ride sharing expertise and Mobike backer Foxconn’s manufacturing resources An M&A deal would end up forming the next huge transport company and a potential goldmine for investors.