Big defeat! Thousands of people "besieged" ofo headquarters, and unicorns were everywhere!

Yesterday, thousands of yellow car users "besieged" the Beijing headquarters, blocking the company from the fifth floor to the first floor, demanding ofo to refund their deposits on the spot. Some netizens posted a picture and jokingly called it the "Ofo Car Club".

ofo was forced to urgently issue a "Deposit Refund Policy Reminder", saying that it will review and collect applications according to the order of applications. There is no difference between offline applications and online applications.

After the policy came out, ofo's deposit refund quickly developed from an offline transaction with thousands of people to an online transaction with nearly 10 million people.

What do you think of nearly 10 million people? Equivalent to the population of Sweden (approximately 9.9 million people).

In this regard, users who applied for deposit refunds complained: This is the longest queue I have ever queued in my life. It will take another 500 years to get my deposit back.

Netizens have also given suggestions to ofo:

Business Genius Edition →_→: It is recommended to add advertising space on the refund queue page.

Chicken Soup Version: The peers who abandoned you all those years now owe you a 199 deposit

Love Words Version →_→: No matter how long I am willing to wait, as long as you return the money to me...

Will Version: Customer service, please wait a moment, I will make a will for my son first. When I die, please return the 199 yuan to my son's account.

01

As of 2:49 pm, the deposit refund shows that ofo's refund users have been sorted to the 9517561st place. If these 9.51 million people are calculated based on a deposit of 99 yuan per person, the total amount is 942 million yuan; if calculated based on a deposit of 199 yuan, the total deposit exceeds 1.893 billion yuan.

For ofo, people queuing up criticized a lot. "I think this company is about to go bankrupt, and the capital chain must be broken, so I came to queue up to refund the money." One user said, "The little yellow cars should have been sold like Mobike."

Since its establishment in 2015, driven by fanatical capital, this company has gone through a thrilling journey. It started in colleges and universities, quickly conquered major cities, and then spread its presence around the world. But the collapse was faster than the rise. In just a few months, the strategic territory shrank on a large scale and a large number of employees were laid off.

Until now, this company still has no hope of coming back to life. As many as tens of millions of users are still anxiously waiting to get their deposits totaling 3.6 billion back.

Ofo is not the only one facing difficulties in refunding deposits. Since the second half of last year, many shared bicycle users have experienced the situation of non-refundable deposits for shared bicycles. 34 out of 70 shared bicycle platforms have gone bankrupt, and there have been as many as 210,000 complaints about Kuqi Bicycle alone, involving a total amount of more than 1 billion yuan.

Due to the high damage rate of shared bicycles, its development currently mainly relies on capital investment. Once development encounters obstacles and capital stops burning, companies can easily hit the red line of the deposit capital pool.

Shared bicycles represented by the sharing economy, including Wukong Bicycle, 3Vbike Bicycle, Kara Bicycle, Xiaoming Bicycle and Kuqi Bicycle, had operational and financial problems and even went bankrupt as early as 2017.

This model attracts users to join through low prices, high subsidies, frequent discounts, and huge advertising investments. If you have a massive amount of user data, you may form a partial monopoly in a certain field. After basically maintaining the company's dominance in this field, they then seek profits by raising prices.

Following this experience, ofo works hard to build, launch and cover various cities. Winning more users has even been regarded as ofo’s only goal. Ofo does not pay much attention to the management and repair of vehicles, the update and maintenance of car locks, including the application of smart locks, which truly enhance the user experience and require increased investment.

From the beginning to the end, ofo has not made a profit, has not found a model to make money, and has no way to truly transform its big data (if such data exists), but has only received a large amount of investment. However, a large amount of investment, a large amount of deposits, and a large number of users gave them empty confidence in profit, but they lost the patience to explore profit models.

02

On May 4, 2018, the "Economic Observer" published a review article on ofo, all of which flatteringly boasted: "The achievements of ofo are a reflection of the innovation and breakthroughs that flow in the blood of Peking University."

But on the surface, the amount of money at its disposal is less than 350 million. Its monthly operating costs are as high as 250 million. Soon, ofo began to lay off a large number of employees, and at the same time, rumors of misappropriation of user deposits spread. On August 31, its supplier Shanghai Phoenix showed off directly and issued an announcement saying that ofo defaulted on their loan of 68.15 million yuan and had taken ofo to court.

Dai Wei said in an internal meeting that he also thought about giving up, "I really have no money and I don't want to take care of it anymore."

Since September, a large number of users have applied for refunds of deposits. Ofo has repeatedly extended the refund cycle, from 3 days to 15 days. Since then, it has become more frequent that the refund cannot be returned even after a month. Now, behind almost all the news about ofo, there are people leaving messages asking, "When will the deposit be refunded?"

Nowadays, there are almost no signs of shared bicycles parked on the roadside.

On the side of the road on Zhongguancun South Street, a middle-aged woman held up her mobile phone to scan the QR code of a small yellow bike in the cold wind. However, she scanned it several times and failed to open the bike, so she had to give up and leave.

The former unicorn is now on the verge of bankruptcy. The cold winter is bleak, and under the background of financial deleveraging, there is less and less high-risk money in the market.