Did Mobike really fudge its numbers?

Photo credit: Mobike

Bloomberg columnist Tim Culpan recently wrote a piece alleging discrepancies between Mobike’s numbers in its parent company’s IPO prospectus and the numbers it fed to the press before the listing. Here’s a summary:

Put these together and you get a sense that Mobike is misleading the public about its performance, Culpan suggests. The truth is more nuanced. Let’s discuss these numbers one by one.

Number of users

This is easy to figure out. Even without checking with Mobike, it’s clear to me where the discrepancy is coming from. There’s a big difference between the “active” user, which is what the prospectus refers to, and the generic user, which can include users that download the app but don’t use it often.

The company confirmed with Tech in Asia that this is indeed the case.

“Mobike has 232 million users, people who have downloaded the app and opened an account, of which 48 million actively used the service for the period reported in the prospectus, December 2017 to April 2018,” a company spokesman told us.

Number of bikes

This is probably the least controversial. Here’s what Mobike had to say: “We have had up to 9 million bikes in the market around the world earlier. Now, we are carrying out our pledge to not add new bikes to certain markets already at capacity, and we are now at 7.1 million smart bikes worldwide.”

Number of daily rides

This is the trickiest part. Here’s Mobike’s explanation: “Our smart bikes have serviced up to 30 million rides per day. Our daily average of rides was 8.4 million during the period reported in the prospectus. Regarding daily ride averages, it is important to note there are significant differences in the number of rides between weekdays and weekends, sunny days versus rainy days, and winter versus summer months.”

The spokesman added that Mobike changed its pricing strategy in 2018 in order to reduce daily rides but increase revenue, which was what happened.

Is Mobike lying?

Here’s where things get complicated. As a tech reporter covering private companies for seven years, I’ve seen that it’s pretty common for them to disclose user numbers without specifying exactly what kind of users they are.