BIKE BUST: AN A.I. PREVIEW?

Investors in China’s doomed bike-sharing craze don’t seem to have learnt their lesson as an artificial intelligence boom gathers speed.

- Grady McGregor

TECH IN 2014, FIVE STUDENTS from the cycling club at Peking University had an idea to build new, technologically savvy bicycles. The bikes would allow customers to scan a code with their smartphone, pay a small fee for a short ride, and then park basically wherever they pleased, where the next user would repeat the process. In just a few years, this bike-sharing idea became a countrywide phenomenon, and by 2016, millions of new bicycles could be found in cities across China supplied by companies with billion-dollar-plus valuations.

By the end of 2018, however, several leading bike-sharing companies had gone bankrupt, and now the bicycles that were once viewed as one of the country’s great disruptive inventions have largely become inconvenient and colourful stains on city streets or have been sent to massive bicycle graveyards.

“Bike-sharing was one of China’s biggest innovations, so everyone was championing it,” says Chen Lin, a marketing professor at China Europe International Business School in Shanghai. “Nobody saw the rise and fall being so quick and so dramatic.”