In a headline that would be complete gibberish 5 years ago, Uber announced that it was selling Jump to its competitor Lime, which it also owns part of. Jump started in New York back in 2010 and came to DC in 2017. It offered a new kind of dockless bike, one that was both electric and lock-to. It started out with 100 bikes, plans to go to 400 and a desire to get 1000. This was when DC had suddenly been inundated with cheap, dockless bikes as part of a pilot, bikes like Ofo, Spin and MoBike that disappeared from DC's streets in 2018 almost as quickly as they came, but Jump survived and when DC showed an interest in moving to lock-to, it seemed that they had the inside track. I rarely saw freejacked Jump bikes on the street or abandoned ones in the river. They seemed to be different in that sense too.
Lime survived too though, but only by changing. In the beginning the had cheep green and yellow bikes, but later switched to electric scooters.
In April 2018, Uber bough Jump reportedly for $100M, and then integrated the service into their app. It appeared they were positioning themselves to become and integrated transportation company, and that looked like good new for Jump too.
The deal gives Uber access to Jump’s 12,000 dockless, GPS-enabled bikes in 40 cities across six countries — a vast network in the bike-share world that will certainly become even larger as Uber’s capital will help to scale it even further. It also helps fulfill one of the company’s missions to branch out into new modes of transportation.
In the same month there was more good news as DDOT withdrew its plans to charge dockless bikes fees, require lock-to and demand bike rack installation. [In private conversations with Jump management I know they preferred lock-to and were eager to install more bike racks as long as all competitors had to as well]. WAMU asked at the time if dockless bikes and scooters were a fad or a fixture, and the answer appears to be a little of both; or at least that they're here to stay but that the marketplace is still changing quickly.
By late 2018, the cheap bikes were gone and Jump was one of five applicants for a permit to provide dockless bikes. And though they were pulling out elsewhere, by late 2019 they were the only company offering both e-bikes and electric scooters and they had 975 e-bikes (pretty close to their start-up aspiration); though new e-bike provider Helbiz joined the DC market, launching in late January 2020. Meanwhile in April, Lime, Bird, Bolt and Razor were all kicked of DC streets when they failed to secure permits and Jump was allowed to expand up to 2,500 bikes if they chose to. A month later Covid-19 caused them to pause their service.
Then Uber sold Jump to Lime, but then also bought more of Lime with an option to buy all of it later.
Lime’s acquisition of Jump occurred as part of a $170-million investment in Lime, partly led by Uber, which already owned a small part of Lime (even though Lime was a competitor of Uber’s Jump the whole time). The latest deal also allows allows Uber to buy Lime in 2022, if it wants.
At the same time, it announced layoffs.
The company also announced it was laying off 3,700 employees, around 14 percent of its workforce. At the end of April, Lime also laid off roughly the same percentage of workers, amounting to 80 employees without jobs.
The industry was already in turmoil and consolidating/rebalancing. Covid-19 has made an unstable industry even more wobbly.
Things have moved so quickly and with so many changes, it's impossible to say what will happen next. Maybe dockless will get bigger. Maybe it will go away. Maybe it will be companies we recognize. Maybe it will be all new ones. All I can say is hold on to your butts.
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