In the second semester of 2018, the Brazilian urban landscape started to change with Yellow and Grin, the first mobility startups to enter the market, adding more bikes and electric scooters to the streets. But it was only in 2019 that the service started to be truly popular among Brazilians and the market became attractive to international groups, such as Lime from the US that started to operate in Brazil in July.
Although not only new companies started to understand differently the Brazilian market potential in 2019, startups that already were in the country since 2018 also began to structuring its business in Brazil.
The first company merge that happened this year was between Yellow and Grin that now are together under the new brand Grow in January and just a few months after the company launched a partnership with the Colombian delivery app Rappi, allowing users to get a scooter by using Rappi’s app. “In the first semester of 2019, we put a lot of growing efforts. In the second semester, we needed to put our house in order,” explained Marcelo Loureiro, Grow’s VP in Brazil in an interview for the Brazilian media outlet Estadão.
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In 2020, the challenge is even bigger: to deal with the current barriers to keep growing, such as the reduction of the electric scooters costs since during rush hours it could be as expensive as an Uber ride.
According to Estadão, the plan to achieve this is to start a scooter local production, Scoo already has its own production in Brazil, the center is located in the city of Jundiaí. Grow is also just about to open its fabric center in Manaus, this will demand a BRL 25 million investment. This is directly related to the worldwide main challenge of mobility startups to reach sustainable growth, generating real revenue.
What we can already know for sure that in 2020 we can expect to hear more about efforts focused on regional strategies, more dialogue with local authorities to avoid new problems, and cheaper operations. If the companies will succeed in all these topics, we cannot predict, but in a way or another, we can see a lot of good news coming.
