China’s booming bike-sharing sector beset by theft（469 words）-经管之家官网！

China’s booming bike-sharing sector beset by theft（469 words）
By Yuan Yang and Yingzhi Yang
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China's booming bike-sharing sector has hit a road-bump: thievery. Last week one start-up folded after 90 per cent of its bikes were stolen, and another began ramping up the deposits of riders who were careless with locks.
The rise of the smartphone-driven economy has led to a resurgence in bicycles on China’s streets — but unlike those of the Mao era, the new models come with a QR code on the frame. The bikes can only be unlocked after users scan the code using a proprietary app.
The Chinese craze for bike-sharing has spawned at least 10 start-ups with funding from international investors, plus dozens more copycats. The top two, Mobike and ofo, have built 11m bicycles — enough for every household in Beijing to have one — and raised over $2.1bn combined since launching a year ago.
Despite the thefts, the sector is going strong: Mobike raised an additional $600m earlier this month and announced it will launch in the UK this week.
The start-ups share a similar model: mass-produced cheap bicycles that can be unlocked with a smartphone app and, after use, left anywhere.
But the model has its problems. Wukong Bicycle, one of the first bike-sharing start-ups to fold, said 90 per cent of its bicycles were stolen. Its 12,000 bicycles had only been on the streets of Chongqing in western China for six-and-a-half months.
Wukong’s mechanical locks, in contrast to market leader Mobike’s Bluetooth-enabled locks, made it easy for thieves to take the bicycles.
Wukong also under-estimated the encroachment of competitors, founder Lei Houyi said.
“The speed that ofo could put out new bikes was too fast for us. We thought we had half a year before they came to Chongqing, but in fact they came after a month, and what’s more gave away rides for free,” Mr Lei added, describing a land-grab fuelled by subsidies to users — echoing Uber’s ride-sharing battle with Didi Chuxing.
Ofo, one of the world's first bike-sharing unicorns — a private company with a valuation of more than $1bn — is doubling its user deposit to Rmb199 ($29) as well as launching a “credit system”.
If users leave bicycles unlocked or parked incorrectly, that is noted against them in the company’s individual scoring system, with repeat offenders required to pay a steeper deposit.
This credit system not only docks points based on bike-riding behaviour but also pulls in credit data from mobile payments provider Alipay, ofo’s partner, to allow well-behaved customers to sign up deposit-free.
Many people converted ofo’s bicycles from shared to private by scratching off the bicycle’s QR code that riders scan to unlock the bike. This means no other riders can download a fresh unlock code, leaving the bike vandal with the only viable one.
To solve this problem, ofo has again looked to technology, making its bikes trackable by GPS.