Some of China’s highest-profile bicycle-sharing companies have crashed into bankruptcy in the past year after burning billions of renminbi in investor cash, but one has quietly pedalled past the sector’s early entrants to provide 20m rides to customers each day.
Hellobike has concentrated on smaller cities and towns where it has about 8m bikes, a tactic the company compares to Communist party leader Mao Zedong’s “surrounding the cities from the countryside” strategy that led to its civil war victory in 1949.
But now it is focusing on China’s first-tier cities such as Shanghai. “We started last year in large cities, but . . . scale didn’t become large until this year,” said Yang Lei, Hellobike’s 30-year-old chief executive, in an interview.
您已阅读19%（748字），剩余81%（3125字）包含更多重要信息，订阅以继续探索完整内容，并享受更多专属服务。