Analysis | China’s sharing economy charges, pedals and bounces into overdrive – and it’ll even keep you dry if it rains

Years of costly competition between Uber Technologies and its main local rival Didi Chuxing in China have made millions of Chinese comfortable about riding in each other’s cars.

And now more than 30 bike-sharing start-ups have sprouted across the country, dismissing urban dwellers’ ideas of buying their own bikes (or cars, for that matter), by carpeting the streets with millions of easily accessible two-wheelers.

Entrepreneurs in their drives are also jumping on the wider ‘sharing’ bandwagon, with an increasingly enriched list of offerings, from smartphone power banks and umbrellas, to basketballs and even cigarette lighters.

All can be conveniently borrowed on street corners, in shopping malls and subway stations... often with little more than the simple swipe of a smartphone.

As more entrepreneurs and venture capitalists enter the battlefield, setting up new businesses using the same, sharing recipe, scepticism already now mounting on whether the country is “over sharing” even among those at the very heart of this new collective revolution.

According to the China’s State Information Office, 600 million Chinese have tried or signed up to use something or working to provide a service within the sharing economy last year, creating a market worth 3.45 trillion yuan (US$ 507 billion) in 2016, up 103 per cent on 2015.

Research firm CB Insights, claims, incidentally, that three of out of the world’s five most-valuable private companies are all in the sharing economy: Uber ranks first with a valuation of US$68 billion, followed by Didi Chuxing at US$50 billion, and global online marketplace for short-term lodgings Airbnb, worth USS$29.3 billion.