The Wheels Come Off at Scooter Company Bird -- WSJ

Dow Jones2023-12-20

By Eliot Brown

When scooter-rental company Bird Global (BRDS)] ridership was surging amid a "micromobility" revolution, and healthy profitability wasn't far off. Investors should compare it to companies such as Netflix and Tesla, it said.

Life moves fast.

Bird is now bankrupt] that was compared to Uber, the company was sunk by a business that was far more rooted in the gritty world of transportation logistics and hardware than the software-like image it promoted.

Smaller rival Helbiz, later renamed Micromobility.com $(MCOM)$].

And while other private competitors like Lime persist, they have long since replaced rhetoric of explosive growth and disruption with more humble aims such as basic profitability.

Bird went public by merging with a SPAC, or blank-check company, meaning it could use financial projections to woo investors. Here's how reality stacked up against those projections, in brackets.

For 2022: 

   -- Bird's revenue totaled $244 million ($401 million) 
 
   -- Adjusted Ebitda was minus $193 million (minus $28 million) 
 
   -- It enabled 46.5 million rides (76 million)

For the first nine months of this year, versus full-year projections: 

   -- Revenue of $132 million ($815 million) 
 
   -- Adjusted Ebitda of minus $38 million (positive $144 million) 
 
   -- Twenty-two million rides (170 million)

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(END) Dow Jones Newswires

December 20, 2023 09:59 ET (14:59 GMT)

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