Are you going now? Company brings electric scooters to Brazil, even with failures of Lime, Uber and Grow

[ad_1]

Whoosh, which was born in Russia in 2019, arrived in the country a few months ago and chose Florianópolis to carry out its first test on Brazilian soil. Whoosh is the newest electric scooter company to arrive in Brazil Cesar Lopes/Whoosh One of the most prominent corporate news last week was the bankruptcy of Grow, the merger of the Brazilian Yellow with the Mexican Grin, and the main bet seen in the country for the bicycle and scooter rental sector for short distance transportation. In addition to Grow’s failure, Lime and Uber tried to set up robust mobility operations and failed. Now, another electric scooter company has arrived in Brazil, again with a promise of significant growth and the belief that the model can work. Whoosh was born in Russia in 2019 and arrived in the country a few months ago. In its first test, it deployed 1,300 scooters through the streets of Florianópolis in June. In the first expansion, in October, to Porto Alegre, it added another 450 to the fleet in circulation. The objective is to expand the business to other major capitals and put more than 30,000 scooters into circulation in 10 cities over the next three years, including São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Worldwide, the company’s fleet already has more than 160,000 electric scooters, available in more than 40 cities. Most of them are in Europe, where the business model was more successful than in Brazil. What’s new Despite the frustration of other companies in the segment in the country, Whoosh believes in the potential of the Brazilian market. According to the company’s CEO in Brazil, Francisco Forbes, the company’s main differentiator is its operating model. Unlike other companies, which allowed users to pick up and leave equipment anywhere in the city, Whoosh’s model only allows parking in designated areas on the app’s map. “With this, we achieve better integration of the operation with the urban flow and daily life of the city, in addition to better operational efficiency. This also facilitates the change of batteries and makes the scooters available to the user 24 hours a day”, comments Forbes. The executive also says that the scooters have a more technological system, aiming to make the service as automatic as possible, in addition to the company having its own team of employees, without outsourced workers. “We use technology as a mobility resource, and this is also a differentiator. We are able to monitor all trips, identify and understand usage profiles. With this, we can better meet our user’s demands, maintaining high levels of security, which is a fundamental point for our operation”, he points out. Francisco Forbes, CEO of Whoosh in Brazil Cesar Lopes/Whoosh The sector’s failures For a short period, electric scooters were a rage in Brazil, especially in the shopping centers of São Paulo. It was common to see executives in suits and ties moving around the city, with equipment that could be left anywhere. In the business model, bicycles and scooters were blocked on the sidewalks, and those interested in using them needed to unlock access through a cell phone application, which read the equipment code and calculated the price of use, based on the time of use. trip. Grow, a merger between the Brazilian company Yellow and the Mexican company Grin, was the largest operation of its kind, but it always faced great difficulties in carrying out equipment maintenance, in addition to suffering from vandalism and theft. At the beginning of 2020, Grow abandoned bicycles and continued with just scooters in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Curitiba. Months later, the Covid-19 pandemic brought down the circulation of people and brought even more severe impacts on the company’s cash flow. In July of that year, Grow filed for judicial recovery. Last week, with no prospect of resuming activities, the São Paulo Court declared the company bankrupt. In the same vein and without being able to make the business profitable here, North American Lime left Brazil in 2020, just six months after arriving in the country. In a statement released at the time of the decision, the company said the closure of activities in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro — as well as in other capitals in Latin America and the United States — was aimed at ensuring the “financial sustainability” of the business, which had had a loss of around R$300 million in 2019. Finally, it is still worth remembering Uber, which launched the same scooter service in January 2020 and, in July of the same year, had to close down the operation due to of the pandemic.

[ad_2]

Source link