VERTICAL TRENDS
Image: Lime
Mobility and energy Shared, flexible & electric Micro-mobility and the end of Blitzscaling Micro-mobility has been one of the most explosive categories in the consumer economy. After two years of phenomenal growth, showing that consumers have real appetite for personal electric vehicles, companies have entered a new phase: survival of the fittest in a capital-intensive, loss-making, heavily-regulated industry. The unit economics of shared networks were always under question, but in a world of low interest rates and abundant capital, investors had been willing to subsidise micro-mobility businesses based on the belief that this was another example of a
‘winner-takes-most’, ‘blitzscaling’ category. Dedicated micro-mobility groups such as Bird, Lime and their European counterparts Voi, Tier, Dott and Circ raised large funding rounds in 2019, while Uber scaled its electric bike arm Jump aggressively in the West. Europe has been a particularly competitive battleground, with as many as 12 different networks operating in Paris in early 2019. Reality kicked in throughout the year as regulators imposed caps on the number of free-floating vehicles. It also became clear that hardware was a commodity: despite claims, most operators are buying slightly customised versions of the same devices manufactured by
Okai and Ninebot in China. Economies of scale aren’t obvious, as smaller providers seem to be buying hardware at similar price points to larger ones. Overall, it is unclear whether these companies will remain standalone businesses over the medium-term. We tend to think that they will ultimately get bundled into larger consumer offerings. An example is Uber’s trial of a monthly subscription bundle for micro-mobility, food delivery and ride sharing. We therefore expect a year of consolidation. The most important competitive advantage seems to have become the operators’ ability to win over municipalities at scale. At the same time, direct ownership of personal electric
29
