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Comment by robbiep | Hacker News Reader

It looks like there is only a couple million $$ of paid up share capital in the paper trail. How did they finance purchase of so many oBikes?

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There’s a screenshot showing bikes selling for $199 RMB ($30USD) in China. With a $49SGD ($36USD) deposit they could afford to buy one for every user and still have cash left over.

I’m aware that they’re low cost, they’re everywhere in sydney. I guess I just am trying to look at the unit economics and reverse engineer the business fundamentals. The bikes came before the users, and i guess even with a couple thousand (probably high end numbers now I think about it) bikes in sydney, Melbourne and then 10s is thousands (if that) in Singapore they could do it with a small capital base, especially with almost no support on the labour side.

Then again they ended up having to spend a lot of money in Melbourne cleaning them up which would have buggered their modelling.

Bottom line of my comment above: the bikes has to come first with a reasonable lead time before the deposit. I see now that they could have borrowed against it as well but it doesn’t look like they had large inflows of PE or VC money?

I can't find it now, but I remember reading that oBike dumped 6,000 bikes in Sydney.

> I’m aware that they’re low cost, they’re everywhere in sydney. I guess I just am trying to look at the unit economics and reverse engineer the business fundamentals.

It's also possible they overestimated the real world demand for using these bikes as well. From the article, it sounds like the main people involved are from cities with a very significant bicycle using populace.

They may have thought they'd be introducing that culture elsewhere, and be on the "ground floor" (pun intended). ;)

That they went with bikes so crap that no one wants to use them, sounds like very poor research / product planning. :/

Subsequent reported problems all seem to stem from that.

That's not taking the shonky sounds bits into account though, which may have become their plan B. Or been the real plan all along, of course. :)

From what I saw while trying to ride these bikes, I would bet that each bike costs less than 80$ to manufacture. They are very low quality, with no gears. It might be even lower than that. My guess is that the electronic is the most expensive part.

Hop a curb (cleanly) and bits fall off too. I’m pretty sure that some of these services make good money from fines too, for things like innappropriate parking. It’s sometimes hard to park them within the correct zones as the GPS coordinates it says you left the bike at are not accurate, leading to penalties.

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