🦅 Bird SPAC?

Buttigieg on biking, Cowboy’s latest ride, and DHL’s cargo bike buildup.

May 11, 2021

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24 Hours Left…

Before we get down to business, a quick reminder that time is running out to get tickets to Micromobility America at the lowest price.

In just 24 hours, the $300 Early Bird special will expire and tickets for the San Fransisco conference, being held at Pier 70 on Sept. 23, will go up

Join us for a full day of non-stop programming from micromobility’s top builders, investors, and thinkers—including more than 500 global brands—as we forge a new and better path to get our cities moving again.

Book your tickets by EOD tomorrow, Wednesday, May 12th, and save up to 75% off General Admission. When this deal’s gone, it’s gone for good.

What You Need to Know This Week

Bird is preparing to go public via a reverse merger with a blank-check company, according to dot.LA, making it the second micromobility company ever to bypass a traditional IPO in favor of a SPAC. Since launching in Santa Monica in 2017, Bird has expanded to more than 100 cities worldwide, surpassed 10M rides, and set a record as the fastest company to earn unicorn status. It has also struggled financially in the capital-intensive world of scooter sharing, especially amid the pandemic, during the height of it which it laid off about a third of its workforce. Here are the key details from the deal:

🤝 Switchback II Corporation, a blank-check company based in Dallas, plans to merge with Bird, offering hundreds of millions of dollars in cash to fund operations and expansion.

🤕 The infusion will also help Bird cover the recent financial damage it’s suffered during lockdown. According to documents reviewed by dot.LA, the company took a $183M loss in 2020, as travel demand dried up and revenue fell 37% year-over-year.

🏦 Amid these setbacks, the transaction values Bird at $2.3B—below the $2.85B valuation it reached in early 2020, before the pandemic.

🔮 Bird believes it will reach profitability by 2023, when according to its projections, its annual revenue will hit $815M—more than 5x what it generated in pre-pandemic 2019. The company cites a more favorable regulatory environment post-COVID and improving scooter durability as cause for optimism. Indeed, Bird’s pitch deck promotes micromobility as an $800B market opportunity to potential investors.

This $118 Million Electric Scooter Company Created a Phenomenon in Los Angeles and Now Wants to Take Over the World | Inc.com

  • E-bike startup Cowboy has launched its latest model, Cowboy 4. Priced at about $2,800, the new e-bike comes in two versions, a traditional and a step-thru frame, and features a built-in phone charger.

  • How local player SafeBoda is fending off Uber and Bolt in Nigeria and Uganda’s motorcycle ride-hailing wars and winning.

  • Austrian e-bike sales cracked 200K for this first time in 2020.

  • Despite concerted efforts by the Indian government to encourage people to switch to EVs, sales of e-mopeds actually fell last year by an estimated 6%. Out of about 20M two-wheelers sold per year, only 140,000 were electric in 2020. That may start to change, though, as fuel costs rise and electric-battery prices fall.

  • Helping propel India’s green micromobility transition, Bengaluru-based online platform CredR announced it will allow users to exchange any gas-powered moped for an electric model at a reduced price.

  • France plans to create a subsidy for packages delivered by cargo bike. Logistics providers could earn €2 per package for making last-mile deliveries by bike.

  • Speaking of, did you know DHL already has 12K e-bikes and e-trikes in its delivery fleet in Germany alone?

  • The Citroen Ami, a $6,000 tiny electric car, is coming to the U.S. as part of a new subscription service from Free2Move. Popular in Europe, the pint-sized EV provides many of the basic comforts of an automobile, while being so small and easy to maneuver that it’s technically classified as a quadricycle in some places.

  • A study from New Zealand finds that the financial costs of building bikes lanes are outweighed by the health and environmental benefits by 10:1.

  • It seems the COVID-era bike boom has rolled into 2021 as strong as ever. In Q1, Dorel Sports reports revenue was up 44%, year-over-year.

  • Harley-Davidson plans to spin LiveWire out into a separate electric motorcycle brand and unveil its first model in July.

  • Electric cars will be cheaper than ICE cars across all segments by 2027, according to a new report.

  • In a great new interview with reporter Andrew Hawkins, U.S. Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg, addresses micromobility’s importance to the national transportation grid on the level as mass transit and cars: “[W]e definitely want to do everything we can to encourage the adoption of bike commuting by more Americans. And that has to do a lot of things. Part of it may be the economics of it. A lot of it is just the ease of getting around and making sure we’re encouraging cities to take on complete streets approaches and safe bike lanes. The other thing we’ve noticed is that there’s data suggesting that you really hit a tipping point, a good tipping point, once you get to a certain level of bike commuting, in terms of safety, because cars learn to expect bikes in a way that, frankly, they still don’t in most US cities. And so all of these things are taken together. Yes, the economics but also the convenience and certainly the safety are what we have to do in order to design for a world where we get not just the climate benefits but the congestion benefits and, frankly, the public health benefits of more people getting around on two wheels.”

Jobs to Be Done

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