Bird is Getting Delisted - What Went Wrong for the Micro Mobility Star?

The rise of micro-mobility, or scooter rentals as most know them, has been a very interesting trend to observe over the years.

What started as a fun experiment turned into both a huge opportunity but also chaos.

This week, Bird, one of the largest scooter rental companies in the world, announced it's being delisted from the New York Stock Exchange because its market cap is too low, possibly ending the journey for micro-mobility.

To use Bird you must download its mobile app, so let's look at the journey in terms of downloads (aka demand).

All the way back in 2018, which feels like a lifetime ago, Bird kicked off what would go on to be a very solid year with just 33K downloads in January, according to our estimates.

But by October, Bird started taking off and downloads rose to 976K! 2018 would go on to be one of Bird's best years of demand.

A strong opposition from many cities made it hard for Bird and its rivals to grow. New York never allowed scooter rentals to take off.

2019 was a fairly similar year in terms of growth, except the yearly peak came during the summer with 982K downloads in July and no spike in October. Downloads grew as Bird expanded internationally, but then came covid and shut down pretty much every outdoor activity, and people didn't need to move around as much, bringing Bird's downloads to just 33K in April of 2020.

By August, Bird managed to recover a bit, with downloads climbing up to 716K.

2021 looked promising. Demand managed to recover and actually grow as scooters became a "safe" alternative to public transportation as lockdowns were starting to ease. Downloads in August of 2021 rose to 1.1M.

Although Bird had millions of downloads it was still struggling to catch real growth. 2022 was pretty much the same story. A few more downloads in August but nothing to write home about.

And that brings us to 2023 and downloads are not doing so well at all. Instead of growing, if only by a little, August was smaller than all previous summers at just 679K, according to our estimates.

Since 2018, Bird has seen 36M downloads globally with 58% coming from the US, which isn't a small number. But cities banning scooter rentals is a hard force to battle and ultimately, Bird lost.

I wonder what would happen if companies like Bird came up with a better way to tackle the mess scooters created, which eventually led to those bans, before throwing them into cities just like that.