Chinese bike rental start-up, Ofo, is in deep trouble. The company with the trademark yellow bikes spent $100 dollars per bike with the manufacturer.
Bike quality was dismal and half of the bikes, millions of them, would break and become unusable.
Ofo spent more than $1.5 billion dollars it raised between 2016 and 2017 from major investors. The company charged its customers just $0.15 per month for unlimited use of bikes!
Ofo now is in debt, in the hundreds of millions of dollars and its workforce was slashed to a few workers, down from almost 4,000.
During its heyday, Ofo was valued at $3 billion dollars.
In 2017, it acquired the three letter domain, Ofo.com, spending more than $1 million dollars in that transaction, with the assistance of Guta.com.
As of this month, Ofo’s web site at www.Ofo.com has become defunct and displays a blank page.
It’s crazy seeing a company waste one million dollars on a LLL .com domain and shutting down business like this; definitely not a happy new Chinese year for Ofo.
Ofo.com in the good old days. Author: MasaneMiyaPA, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
The photos here are mesmerizing. China, meet Capitalism, in all its overzealous glory…
https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2018/03/bike-share-oversupply-in-china-huge-piles-of-abandoned-and-broken-bicycles/556268/
TH – That’s “Communist Capitalism” at work!