Bicycle sharing company Bluegogo recently announced its closing, causing widespread concern in the industry. Subsequently, other bicycle sharing companies Wukong Bicycle and Dingding Bike and car sharing companies EZZY and UU Car stopped operation. The sharing economy represented by sharing travel saw a sorting-out process. In this regard, the National Development and Research Commission (NDRC) said that in the future, more attention will be paid to institutional construction and institutional norms to promote the in-depth integration of the sharing economy with other industries, further eliminate and relax restrictions on market access for resource providers and guide the sharing economy to develop more new growth points in a healthy and orderly way.
It is learnt that in recent years, China’s sharing economy, including bicycle sharing, car sharing and homestay, has enjoyed a spurt. There emerged a number of representative platform enterprises. According to the statistics of the State Information Center, in 2016, the market volume of China's sharing economy reached 3.45 trillion yuan, an increase of 103 percent over the same period of last year. The number of platform enterprises has also exceeded 1,000. And the number of people participating in the sharing economy reached 600 million yuan. The number of service providers is about 60 million.
At the same time, there are still many difficulties and problems in the development of the sharing economy, including high operating costs, low recognition and low operational efficiency, making it difficult to achieve economies of scale.
For example, in the field of car sharing, according to statistics, only when each sharing car has 30 to 50 active customers and is used 8 times to 10 times per day, car sharing companies can achieve a balance of cost and income or a small profit. But due to the relatively small scale of sharing car and in convenience in use, the poor customer experience directly causes a low usage rate of sharing cars.
In addition, the immaturity of service is also an important factor affecting the development of the sharing economy. Data from the 12315 Consumer Complaint Center of Beijing Commerce and Industry Administration in October showed that sharing car has become a major complaint. The problems are mainly the delay or refusal to refund of cash pledge, failure in the use of voucher.
In this regard, the NDRC spokesman Meng Wei said that in the future to promote the development of sharing economy, the NDRC will adhere to the principle that attaches same importance to development and standardization. In accordance with the principle of encouraging innovation and being inclusive and cautious, it should speed up the construction of a sharing economy co-governance mechanism that involves governments, platform companies and industry associations. It will further eliminate and relax restrictions on the market access conditions for resource providers, strengthen the regulation and standardization of monopolistic behavior of platform enterprises, and guide the healthy and orderly development of the shring economy.
Meng Wei said that in the future, it will further promote the in-depth integration of sharing economy with industrial manufacturing and agricultural production, support key enterprises and key scientific research institutions to build and upgrade a number of demonstration platforms for sharing economy in key areas such as production capacity, scientific research instruments and modern supply chains and promote its integration development with the Internet of things and cloud computing.
The NDRC said that in the next few years, the sharing economy will continue its rapid growth at an average annual rate of about 40 percent. It is predicted that by the end of this year, the scale of China's sharing economy will reach 4.5 trillion yuan. In the future, China will further support and guide the healthy and rapid development of the sharing economy, cultivate more new growth points and create more new momentum in the field of shared economy.
Translated by Coral Zhong
Latest comments