Bike-sharing services cry for improvement

The craze for station-less bicycle-sharing services is rising at an increasing pace in China, with most service apps offering free deals to customers at the expense of deep-pocketed investors.

Mobike, one of the bike-sharing service providers, stopped charging riders from March 3, and has just extended the complimentary session to the weekend. Bluegogo, another bike-sharing company, still allows its users free rides for the first hour. The new player in town is quickly catching up by offering blue-painted bikes that resemble the GPS-enabled Mobike Lite models but weigh less, and come at no service cost. It reportedly has more than 5 million active users.

Teaming up with Sesame Credit, a credit rating agency that is part of the Ant Financial Services Group owned by e-commerce giant Alibaba, Ofo is allowing Shanghai users with a credit score of 650 or more to rent a bike without paying the 99 yuan ($14.4) mandatory deposit. It is widely seen as a move to trigger another round of "cash-burning" promotion in the sector, which only started to grow less than a year ago.