{"id":26706,"date":"2018-12-24T05:22:07","date_gmt":"2018-12-24T05:22:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=26706"},"modified":"2018-12-24T05:22:07","modified_gmt":"2018-12-24T05:22:07","slug":"bike-sharing-startup-ofo-went-global-now-it-may-go-bust","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=26706","title":{"rendered":"Bike-sharing startup Ofo went global. Now it may go bust"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"zn-body__paragraph speakable\"><cite class=\"el-editorial-source\">Hong Kong  (CNN Business)<\/cite>Not so long ago, Chinese bike-sharing firm Ofo was flush with cash and hailed as a game-changing tech startup. Today, it&#8217;s struggling to stay afloat.<\/p>\n<div class=\"zn-body__paragraph speakable\">Backed by billions of dollars from high-profile investors like Alibaba (<a href=\"https:\/\/money.cnn.com\/quote\/quote.html?symb=BABA\" target=\"_blank\">BABA<\/a>), Ofo helped pioneer the dockless bike-sharing phenomenon that swept across Chinese cities in recent years. The bikes can be locked and unlocked anywhere via a smartphone app, which means users don&#8217;t have to return them to designated stations.<\/div>\n<div class=\"zn-body__paragraph speakable\">Ofo fended off dozens of copycat rivals, but it now risks becoming the latest casualty of a cut-throat industry. Hordes of angry customers gathered outside its headquarters in Beijing this week to demand refunds. The company and its founder have been put on a government black list for failing to pay debts.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hong Kong (CNN Business)Not so long ago, Chinese bike-sharing firm Ofo was flush with cash and hailed as a game-changing tech startup. Today, it&#8217;s struggling to stay afloat.Backed by billions of dollars from high-profile investors like Alibaba (BABA), Ofo helped pioneer the dockless bike-sharing phenomenon that swept across Chinese cities in recent years. The bikes&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":26707,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26706","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26706","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26706"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26706\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/26707"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26706"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26706"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26706"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}