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Ninebot said Uber and Lyft, the ride-hailing giants that are
expanding into scooter-sharing, would be among the customers for
the new semi-autonomous vehicles that are expected to hit roads
early next year.
Gao Lufeng, Ninebot chairman and chief executive, told Reuters
in an interview that AI-driven scooters, controlled remotely
from the cloud, could radically improve the economics of
scooter-sharing.
"The pain point for scooter operators is to better maintain the
scooters at a lower cost," he said. Currently, operators of
scooter sharing fleets have to collect the machines manually for
re-charging.
Formed by the 2015 combination of China's Ninebot and U.S.
transportation pioneer Segway, the company has quietly become
the largest supplier for scooter-sharing companies such as Bird
and Lime.
"I believe scooters will replace bicycles as the prime solution
for micro-mobility," Gao said. "It's human nature to save energy
when commuting."
The scooter-sharing fad was triggered two years ago with the
launch of Bird in California. Venture-capital investors have
since poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the sector,
and fleets of electric-powered scooters now operate in cities
across the U.S. and Europe.
Segway-Ninebot Group has applied to list its shares on the
China's new Nasdaq-style board for homegrown tech firms, the
STAR Market. The company sold 1.6 million scooters in 2018,
according to a prospectus filed in April.
Lyft and Uber did not immediately respond to emailed requests
for comment.
The new scooters will be priced at close to 10,000 yuan
($1,420), more than the company's traditional scooters, which it
sells to scooter companies for $100-$300.
The new machines will start road testing next month and will be
largely commercialized in the first quarter of 2020.
The company also launched two self-driving delivery robots --
one for outdoor delivery, the other for indoor services.
Ninebot said the unmanned delivery robots will initially serve
the food delivery industry in China.
The company is in talks with food delivery operators, including
Meituan Dianping and Alibaba Group's Ele.me, to begin service by
the first half of next year.
(Reporting by Yingzhi Yang in BEIJING and Brenda Goh in HONG
KONG; Editing by Himani Sarkar and Darren Schuettler)
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