The dream of shared bicycle listings is now being pursued by shared electric mopeds? On January 12th, shared electric moped service provider Pinecone Wisdom Inc. (Pinecone) submitted its prospectus to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, planning a main board listing with Huatai International acting as the sole sponsor. This is not Pinecone's first attempt at an IPO; in 2021, the company secretly filed an application with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), providing detailed responses to disclosure comments, but ultimately withdrew due to various adverse factors. Five years later, Pinecone is making another push into the capital markets, but the "report card" it brings is far from impressive. The prospectus reveals that for the first nine months of 2023, 2024, and 2025, the company achieved revenues of 953 million yuan, 963 million yuan, and 746 million yuan respectively, with year-on-year growth of just 0.99% and 0.05%, essentially stagnating. Net losses were recorded at 192 million yuan, 151 million yuan, and 59.987 million yuan respectively, accumulating a total loss exceeding 400 million yuan. Excluding changes in the carrying value of financial liabilities arising from redeemable convertible preferred shares and share-based payment expenses, Pinecone only finally turned a profit in 2025, with an adjusted net profit of approximately 26.496 million yuan as of September 30th, compared to a net loss of 189 million yuan in the same period of 2024.
Daily average order volume is declining, and operating costs are difficult to compress, while frequent违规 (non-compliant) deployments lead to repeated rectifications. The lack of growth and persistent losses are underscored by contradictory operational data from Pinecone. According to the prospectus, from the first nine months of 2023 to the same period in 2025, the company's total number of registered users increased from 99 million to 128 million, the number of covered cities and counties rose from 371 to 422, and the total number of deployed electric mopeds grew from 389,900 to 454,600, suggesting steady business expansion. However, perplexingly, the daily order volume during the reporting period decreased instead of increasing, falling from 1.1019 million orders to 1.006 million orders. Calculated based on the number of deployed mopeds at each period-end, the average daily orders per moped were 2.83, 2.53, and 2.21 respectively, showing a continuous downward trend. Conversely, the average daily orders per *active* electric moped moved in the opposite direction, at 2.76, 2.85, and 3.08 orders respectively, with a cumulative increase of approximately 11.6% over the period. A simple calculation combining daily order volume and average daily orders per active moped suggests that for the first nine months of 2023-2025, Pinecone's number of active electric mopeds was approximately 392,400, 370,200, and 326,600, accounting for about 102.4%, 88.9%, and 71.8% of the total deployed fleet respectively. This indicates that while the company continuously deploys new vehicles in new cities, both the number and proportion of actively used mopeds are declining, with many newly added mopeds lying idle and failing to generate orders effectively.
Even when not in active use, the deployment of large numbers of new mopeds into new markets inevitably drives up Pinecone's operating costs. In 2023 and 2024, the combined costs of the operations team's labor and employee expenses, payments to operating partners and costs for supporting local operations, moped-related maintenance and repair costs, and logistics costs for transporting and deploying mopeds accounted for 42.4% and 45.7% of the cost of sales respectively, and approximately 35.8% and 37.1% of the period's revenue. In the first nine months of 2025, these four expense items increased further. Among them, labor and employee costs rose 1.7% year-on-year to 170 million yuan, and operating service costs grew 3.8% year-on-year to 64.802 million yuan. Both maintenance & repair costs and logistics costs saw significant increases: the former surged 36.1% year-on-year to 37.796 million yuan, already exceeding the full-year 2024 expenditure; the latter grew 31.6% year-on-year to 18.444 million yuan, about 97.9% of the full-year 2024 cost. During this period, the company's total operating costs reached 290 million yuan, accounting for over 51% of the cost of sales and nearly 40% of total revenue. With pressure on both revenue and costs, policy remains a core variable impacting Pinecone's operations. Due to considerations for urban traffic management, safety risks, and industry regulation, ten departments including the Ministry of Transport jointly issued guiding opinions in 2017, explicitly stating they "do not encourage the development of internet-shared electric bicycles." Effective December 1, 2025, all electric bicycles on the road must comply with new national standards and obtain mandatory 3C certification. According to incomplete statistics, cities like Guangzhou and Shanghai explicitly prohibit the deployment of shared electric bicycles; regions like Shantou and Shenzhen implement a quota and filing system, controlling the total number and managing rental electric bicycles by district, requiring permits and signed agreements for deployment; places like Sanya and Shijiazhuang routinely clean up and rectify违规 (non-compliant) deployments of unregistered and unfiled vehicles. This suggests that Pinecone's business model of rapidly deploying vehicles to capture market share may be unsustainable under increasingly stringent regulation, while the costs of ensuring deployed vehicles are compliantly licensed and certified will significantly increase its operational expenses. In response, the company's approach has been to operate in a grey area. The prospectus indicates that in 51 cities and counties where it operates, Pinecone has not obtained cooperation agreements or written consent from the local government, nor has it engaged in substantive communication with them; in another 41 cities and counties, it has not obtained such agreements or consent, but the relevant authorities are aware of its business presence and have not explicitly objected or issued orders to cease operations. Public reports show that in 2025 alone, Pinecone was repeatedly summoned for talks and rectification due to违规 (non-compliant) deployment of unlicensed vehicles and inadequate offline operations management leading to disorderly parking. In July 2025, the transport bureaus of Luoyang, Henan, and Nanchong, Sichuan, verified that Pinecone's mopeds lacked operational permits, constituting a forced market entry; in September, Pinecone's large-scale deployment of vehicles without special licenses in Hefei, Anhui, was confirmed as违规 (non-compliant) deployment, leading to summons for rectification; in December, transport authorities in Leshan, Sichuan, confirmed that Pinecone had deployed mopeds without reporting to relevant departments, and the vehicles were coordinated for removal.
Valuation shrinks by about 30%, dropping it from unicorn status; Venture Capital/Private Equity firms including K2VC, BLC, and Innovation Works hold a combined 72%. In 2017, the shared bicycle war was raging. Mobike and ofo secured massive financing rounds of $815 million and $1.15 billion respectively, HelloBike merged with Yong'an Xing, and over 35 startups failed to cross the "valley of death." It was in this year that Pinecone was formally established, cleverly avoiding the fierce competition in first and second-tier cities by quickly gaining a foothold in lower-tier markets. By 2018-2019, the shared bicycle market moved beyond its wild growth phase, gradually forming a tripartite competitive landscape dominated by Hello, Meituan, and Qingju. At that time, Pinecone's shared electric moped service had successfully entered over 100 cities and counties, attracting nearly $50 million in total support from renowned domestic and international equity investment institutions such as Innovation Works, Sequoia China, K2VC, BLC, and Nokia Growth Partners. Its post-money valuation soared from $25 million to $208 million. In February 2020, SoftBank and K2VC purchased Pinecone's Series C preferred shares at $2.1483 per share, alongside common shares at $1.2286 per share, injecting a total of $22 million. Subsequently, SoftBank added a further $10 million investment through a Korean fund, acquiring an additional 281,660 Series C preferred shares and 321,430 common shares. In March 2021, Pinecone completed a $75 million Series D financing round from new and existing investors including Innovation Works, K2VC, SoftBank, BLC, Korea's Mirae Asset, and Changmuqiao Co., Ltd., seeing its valuation skyrocket 346.4% in one year from $339 million to $1.382 billion. However, the days of rapid advancement seem to have abruptly halted. The prospectus shows that while the number of cities and counties served by Pinecone surpassed 400 in 2022, this figure was only 371 in 2023. As of September 30, 2025, the number of covered cities and counties had increased by a mere 5.5% compared to 2022. (Source: Prospectus) Following its failed US listing attempt, several VC/PE institutions initiated agreement transfers to exit. In 2022, Pinecone repurchased approximately one-quarter of the shares held by Series D investor Changmuqiao Co., Ltd., at a price per share equal to the issue price. In 2023, the company repurchased shares from Korea's Mirae Asset for $10 million, at a transaction price equal to Mirae Asset's investment cost. To stabilize more institutional investors, Pinecone issued a total of 2,697,400 shares to Series D investors in November 2025. Notably, this latest financing round involved no cash injection but was solely intended to dilute the investment cost for the Series D investors. Post-transaction, the price per share for the Series D round was adjusted down from $5.7208 to $4.6163, a decrease of approximately 19.3%. The company's valuation stood at approximately $966 million, evaporating 30.1% compared to the post-money valuation after the 2021 Series D round, directly dropping it out of unicorn status. Prior to this listing attempt, Pinecone's largest external shareholder is Innovation Works, which collectively holds approximately 23.23% of the company's equity through four entities. K2VC and BLC hold 14.12% and 11.85% respectively, while two funds under SoftBank collectively hold 10.57%. Additionally, Nokia Growth Partners, Sequoia China, and Changmuqiao Co., Ltd., hold approximately 4.59%, 4.17%, and 3.52% respectively. VC/PE institutions collectively hold a high 72.05% stake, meaning Pinecone may face potential risks such as significant selling pressure post-listing, an imbalance in governance structure influence, and insufficient market liquidity. How it will convince secondary market investors to buy in remains an open question.
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