Asia's e-scooters push into Europe

Millions of people in Asia ride electric scooters. They are cheap and convenient. Now two start-ups want to help them break through in Europe as well. Handelsblatt correspondent Stephan Scheuer visited the headquarters of scooter provider Gogoro.

Background

This report was made as Asian e-scooter manufacturers began their push into Europe. The market had two levels. The US sharing brands Bird and Lime mushroomed from 2017 onwards. The hardware, however, came largely from China – above all from Beijing-based manufacturer Ninebot, which had acquired Segway inventor Dean Kamen’s company in the United States in 2015 and since then risen to become the industry’s largest supplier.

The sharing boom peaked in 2019. Thousands of scooters appeared in dozens of European cities, often with several competing providers in the same location. Sharing companies’ investment totals temporarily ran into several billion dollars. But the operating model proved difficult: high wear and tear, theft, vandalism and regulatory disputes with cities.

Since then the European market has consolidated. The main sharing providers Tier, Voi, Dott and Bird have repeatedly merged or closed sites. Tier acquired Dott in 2022; Lime merged with another provider in 2024. The number of cities where sharing scooters are available has shrunk sharply in many countries.

Paris banned sharing scooters entirely in 2023 after a citizens’ referendum with 89 per cent in favour. Other cities including Madrid, Marseille, Copenhagen and Melbourne followed with restrictions or bans. The reasons were citizen complaints about chaotically parked scooters, accident rates and a lack of economic viability.

What has stabilised in contrast is the private ownership of e-scooters. The number of devices sold in Germany rose from around 160,000 in 2021 to over 500,000 per year by 2024. The hardware continues to come overwhelmingly from Chinese manufacturers – Ninebot, Xiaomi and a growing number of smaller brands cover the market.

For China’s export strategy this is a typical pattern: markets develop internationally in unforeseen ways – in this case the revenues shifted from sharing to private ownership – but Chinese industry sits in the supply chain either way. Whether cities ultimately permit sharing models or not is of secondary importance to production in Beijing or Shenzhen.