Scooters!
Back in August, Travis VanderZanden promised investors that Bird, still chasing its first profitable quarter, would review the cities it operated in after the summer ended and ‘rightsize’ that footprint “based on where we anticipate positive pricing and profit per ride in fiscal year 2023.”
On Tuesday, with summer faded into fall, Bird made good on that promise, announcing plans to fully exit three European countries—Germany, Sweden, and Norway—as well as to “wind down operations in several dozen additional, primarily small to mid-sized cities across the U.S. and EMEA.” Bird BRDS 0.00 blamed its inability to “build an economically viable business” in these markets on unfavorable regulatory rules that it said resulted in an oversupply of scooters, crowded streets, and “a high but frequently rotating number of competitors.”
This is no small move for Bird. Nearly half of the European cities the company operates in (44%, to be exact) are in Germany, Sweden, and Norway, according to a map published on Bird’s website. Leaving those markets will take a significant chunk out of Bird’s European footprint, and that doesn’t even include whatever other small to mid-sized European cities Bird might choose to wind down as well.
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