Europe’s e-scooter rental business is at its “lowest point” following the Paris ban and has some work to do to rebuild goodwill in the industry.
That’s according to the president of Bolt, the $8.4 billion Estonian ride-hailing and micromobility company that is one of the mainstays of the industry in Europe.
Jevgeni Kabanov said that while Bolt was not operating e-scooter rentals in Paris, the ban by the French capital on e-scooter companies has been a setback that the industry must work to bounce back from.
“We believe that we are at the lowest point right now and it largely was caused by just very aggressive expansion,” he said.
“A lot of money was poured into this industry. It was not necessarily very rationally spent. It could have been a much more orderly and much slower rollout, which would give cities much more time to get used to it but it was like this blitz scaling and I think it created a lot of this bad will.”
E-scooter rental firms operating in Paris – Dott, Lime and Tier – had fleets totaling 15,000 vehicles on the streets operating under approvals from city officials. However the vehicles proved controversial with concerns over safety and reckless riding. Ultimately a referendum in the city saw residents vote to remove e-scooter companies.
Kabanov said that while things may be at this low point, it is an opportunity for the industry to take stock and improve their operations in other cities.
“The companies will now behave more rationally. They all need to also be profitable. They all need to have good operations, they need good relationships with the cities, I think now it’s going to start improving. There’s a lot of tech deployed and there’s a lot of cooperation with the cities.”
Bolt is operating in 45 countries in Europe and Africa through its several verticals, such as ride-hailing, car sharing and food delivery.
That footprint has given the company extensive experience in dealing with city authorities that oversee e-scooter and e-bike rental services.
“We’re doing a lot of work to build up goodwill again,” Kabanov said.
“I’ve talked to some city officials and actually country officials just recently and they mentioned Paris explicitly and they mentioned they would like to work with us. They don’t want to do that [ban]. They understand the value of the service.”
Earlier this year, Bolt appointed a new chief financial officer to get the company’s operations in order for an eventual initial public offering.
Kabanov said the goal is to be “IPO ready” by 2025 but did not comment on specific timelines for going public or where the listing may take place.
“There’s a lot of work to be done, and fundamentally one is just financials and telling a good story on company growth and company profitability, being able to support it with a lot of real milestones on this path,” he said. “There’s a lot of requirements for publicly listed companies, a lot of requirements for internal controls, for reporting, for board composition or for ESG.”
Bolt does not disclose any financials but Kabanov said the company has “significantly improved our profitability over the last year.”
“We’re on track to be profitable. We still expect next year to be profitable,” he said.
Profitability in the micromobility and ride-hailing industries has been notoriously hard to reach. In the case of e-scooters, major companies like Bird have struggled on the revenue and profit front.
Meanwhile US firm Lime, one of Bolt’s chief rivals, reported this week that it reached EBITDA profitability in the first half of this year with $27 million. However the company did not disclose its revenue.
Lime too said that it is preparing for an IPO.
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