China’s “first listed shared e-moped company” may be just around the corner.
Pinecone Mobility (Songguo Chuxing, “Pinecone”) filed its prospectus with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on January 2, 2026, signaling a renewed push toward the public markets.
Founded in 2017 by Zhai Guanglong, a member of Meituan’s founding team, Pinecone has built a recognizable product identity. Its bright yellow shared e-mopeds not only echo Meituan’s brand palette, but also bring back memories of the early “little yellow bike” era—especially ofo—making the vehicles easy to spot and quick for users to locate.
From a capital markets perspective, Pinecone began preparing for a U.S. IPO in the first half of 2021, less than four years after its establishment. That plan ultimately stalled amid shifting macro conditions and market sentiment, and the company has now turned its attention to Hong Kong.
Operationally, the company has scaled to a meaningful national footprint. As of September 30, 2025, Pinecone had deployed 454,627 shared e-mopeds across 422 counties and cities in China, serving 128 million registered users.
That scale is reflected in its revenue mix. In 2024, Pinecone generated RMB 934 million from its core e-moped business—down a marginal 0.16% year-on-year—and this segment accounted for roughly 97% of total revenue. In recent years, the company has also expanded into adjacent revenue streams such as advertising. By September 30, 2025, “other income” rose to 6.4% of revenue, but e-moped services remained the backbone at 93%.
A one-year payback—on paper
Digging deeper into unit economics, Pinecone’s prospectus shows that in 3Q 2025, the average price per trip was RMB 2.94. Over the same period, the average daily orders per e-moped came in at 3.08.
That implies an annual revenue expectation of about RMB 3,305 per vehicle (365 days × RMB 2.94 × 3.08 orders).
Over the past five years, procurement costs for shared e-mopeds have stayed relatively stable while gradually trending down. Industry average purchase cost declined from RMB 3,365 per vehicle in 2020 to RMB 2,978 in 2024. Pinecone depreciates vehicles and batteries over a 2–4 year period.
In simplified terms—before factoring in other operating costs—the model looks attractive: deploy one e-moped, recover the purchase cost in roughly a year, and generate profit for the remaining 1–3 years of its depreciation cycle.
Margin improvements driven by cost, not growth
Pinecone’s overall gross margin rose from 15.8% in 2023 to 24.3% by 3Q 2025, a gain of 8.5 percentage points. However, cumulative revenue in the first three quarters of 2025 was almost flat.
This suggests that margin expansion has been driven primarily by cost controls—especially the tapering impact of depreciation as older vehicles reach the end of their depreciation schedules.
In practice, this creates a potential path to higher profits: depreciation falls while fleet size expands, and some vehicles remain in service beyond the depreciation period, contributing incremental profit.
The missing scale effect
Yet despite the encouraging unit economics narrative, shared e-mopeds are not an easy business to make truly profitable.
The cost structure illustrates why. Depreciation’s share of costs declined from 41% in 2023 to 29.1% by 3Q 2025. At the same time, operating costs continued to rise—exactly the trend that growth-focused internet investors typically don’t want to see.
In the classic internet playbook, scale matters more than near-term profitability. Companies burn capital to expand, expecting scale effects to dilute unit costs over time, build barriers, and eventually convert into a defensible moat.
Pinecone’s data, however, does not fully validate that playbook. Even as the fleet grows, the cost base has not shown the expected downward trajectory.
One key reason is that shared e-mopeds require frequent, large-scale charging and maintenance operations—far more intensive than traditional shared bicycles. Even with higher-capacity batteries enabling 80–100 km of range, operators still shoulder electricity expenses, charging logistics, idle charging time, and battery handling—all of which keep operating costs elevated.
Because shared e-mopeds have a wider activity range, dispatching and rebalancing can also become more complex, pushing maintenance and operations costs even higher.
A tough competitive landscape—and fewer safety nets
In China’s shared e-moped market, the top three players are HelloBike, Meituan, and Didi’s Qingju. Pinecone currently ranks fourth, but its market share trails the leaders by a meaningful margin.
The shared bicycle market offers a cautionary parallel: once crowded with colorful competitors, it eventually consolidated into just a few major players—backed by internet giants. Even today, profitability remains challenging, and operations often rely on support from large parent ecosystems.
For the big platforms, entering loss-making mobility services can still make strategic sense. Urban mobility boosts engagement across local-services ecosystems, and while bikes or e-mopeds may lose money standalone, they can contribute to profitability when bundled into a broader platform model.
But Pinecone does not have the same ecosystem advantage. As an independently operated shared e-moped company, it faces heavyweight rivals without equally powerful shareholder backing. With weaker scale effects and a muted profitability outlook, investors naturally ask: where does Pinecone go from here?
History offers a sobering reminder. Mobike’s endgame was acquisition by Meituan. ofo was widely rumored to be in talks with Didi, but negotiations collapsed and the business effectively came to a standstill. In this category, leaders either get absorbed by giants—or exit painfully when funding dries up.
Why raise more money now?
Two sets of numbers in the prospectus stand out:
Pinecone’s deployed fleet grew from 389,899 vehicles in 2023 to 454,627 by 3Q 2025—an increase of 16%.
Over the same period, average daily orders per active e-moped increased from 2.76 to 3.08.
Logically, higher orders per vehicle plus a larger fleet should translate into higher total orders. But Pinecone’s reported daily orders declined instead—from 1.102 million to 1.006 million, a drop of nearly 10%.
By the prospectus definition, “daily orders” are counted based on active e-mopeds. That implies the share of active vehicles within the deployed fleet is shrinking. In other words, as the fleet expands, operational efficiency appears to be weakening.
Meanwhile, Pinecone’s fundraising plan includes using a portion of proceeds to purchase additional e-mopeds and cover related costs as it seeks to enter higher-tier cities over the next three years—specifically targeting 30 cities in South China.
That inevitably raises a sharper investor question: with scale effects proving hard to unlock and efficiency indicators trending down, does it still make sense for Pinecone to keep accelerating fleet deployment?
