(Yicai Global) Dec.25 -- Chinese bike-sharing has made stable progress this year, with Hellobike, Meituan Dianping and Didi Chuxing carving out most of the market between them, China's State Information Center and North China University of Technology said in a joint report they released yesterday.

The country's online bike rental businesses had a combined fleet of 19.5 million two-wheelers in 360 cities, the number of their registered users exceeded 300 million, and these made an average of 47 million trips a day as of the end of August, the study found.

User scales, rental times and deal amounts will continue to rise, the research, published as part of a blue paper titled 'China Internet Report 2019,' projected.

China's online bicycle-rental sector hit the road in 2016 when Mobike, Ofo, Qingju, Xiaoming, and Xiangqi took the market by storm, riding the coattails of subsidies and investment. The ranks of users swelled over sevenfold annually the following year, according to the blue paper.

User growth crashed to 14.6 percent in 2018 as the training wheels of subsidies and investment alone proved insufficient to uphold the pace of growth and administrative costs soared. Ofo and Xiaoming eventually went bust and Meituan Dianping took over the handlebars of a wobbling Mobike.

Big Data and AI platforms are two of the major directions in upgrading for bike-sharers, who will have to invest more in future in managing their operations, preserving the orderly use of their velocipedes, and on smart device research and development.

Those companies still peddling along have discarded irrational preferential policies and raised prices to trim losses and attain reasonable growth.

Editor: Ben Armour