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This low acquisition price might make you think: Bird got an awesome deal. But it should also make you think: Bird isn't worth much. Scooter and bike rental c
by microdrum 7y ago
This low acquisition price might make you think: Bird got an awesome deal.
But it should also make you think: Bird isn't worth much.
Scooter and bike rental companies aren't worth much. They never have been.
- knur 7y agoScoot operated, poorly, in a very small market. Look at Bird or Lime, they operate literally in hundreds of cities. In the hypothetical case that they were buying Lime instead, the number would be at least 50 times bigger.
- andrei_says_ 7y agoHow does losing money on a larger scale lead to profit?
- knur 7y agoI don't know, man. Ask Uber, lol
- serf 7y agobecause it's an indicator of future profit stemming from growth that may be the cause of the spending. it doesn't always work out that way, but it has sometimes in the past for big payouts, so it's a common strategy and economic forecast indicator.
- broknbottle 7y agoyou gotta burn cash to grow. Maybe this will lead to bird developing Bird Web Services and eventually making a ton of money each quarter. It worked for Amazon :)
- braythwayt 7y agoBurning cash to grow worked for Amazon because distribution/logistics is a business that has a fundamental relationship between scale and costs. Bird, Scoot, Uber, Lyft and everybody else has yet to demonstrate that by scaling dramatically that they lower their costs enough to break even, much less generate SaaS margins. Until then... They are highly speculative businesses.
- golemiprague 7y agoWell, the app development and operations is scaling and obviously cheaper the more people use it but I don't know how much it is of the overall cost.
- schrodinger 7y agoThat’s totally different. Amazon could have been profitable any time they wanted; they chose to reinvest for growth instead. Not all losing money is the same!
- Kiro 7y agoBird is to Lime what Scoot is to Bird. In Europe all cities are swarmed with Lime but Bird is unheard of.
- eridius 7y agoI always assumed Scoot's model was to iterate until they'd really polished the product, and then get an infusion of cash (ideally just a loan though probably VC money) and start expanding to a lot more cities. The fact that Bird got 10x as much VC money and targeted hundreds of cities from the get-go doesn't make Bird any better, it just means Bird went the "large funding" route.
- foldingmoney 7y agoyeah they lose money on every unit, but they make up for it in volume