In a few hours, along the fringes and in hotspot areas of many cities where it hasn’t been granted deployment quotas, tightly sealed trucks quietly roll by—packed with hundreds or even thousands of HelloBike shared bikes. Wrapped in the night, these heavy trucks make frequent stops; each time they pull over, a few workers jump down and quickly stack a batch of bikes by the roadside.
This is how one HelloBike insider described the scene: "Driving while dodging pedestrians, then dumping bikes like crazy along the route." As for why it’s done late every Friday night: "Because the weekend is next, and regulators don’t have time to check."
Once the weekend is over, the bikes surge into the city center like a tide. In cities where HelloBike originally didn’t have any deployment quota, large numbers of blue shared bikes start showing up—ridden in from the outskirts into downtown.
Inside HelloBike, this phenomenon is called "infiltration"—and whenever this kind of covert deployment in one of these cities tops the 100,000-bike level, the company will usually hold a low-key celebration, calling it a "surprise city launch." According to people familiar with the matter, HelloBike was previously summoned by regulators after photos from one such celebration leaked out.
In the internet industry’s history of expansion, HelloBike once rode this "infiltration" strategy to the extreme, storming into the top tier of the sector as a comeback challenger. Today, though, it is also pushing HelloBike toward an ever more dangerous cliff edge.
Long-term reliance on excessive deployment has not only created regulatory trouble. As the merger with Youon grows closer, HelloBike is also being driven into a corner by KPI-fueled growth anxiety—watching competition, regulation, finances, and safety spin out of control at an accelerating pace. Most importantly, behind all of this, HelloBike still hasn’t clearly found what its path forward is supposed to be.
All for the Financial Numbers
Hello, a mobility platform that already spans HelloBike, autonomous driving, shared rentals, finance, and other diverse businesses—why did it get to this point? The reason may have something to do with its IPO plans.
Starting in 2023, rumors that Hello was about to go public surfaced from time to time. According to a former employee, the talk of an IPO within the company mainly came from investment institutions. "It’s a way to force management to make decisions, because investors have run out of patience," he said. "But in the end, Yang Lei and the core management team withstood the pressure and believed this wasn’t the best time to go public."
Still, Yang Lei and Hello ultimately have to face the question of going public.
In March last year, the listed bike-sharing company Youon announced that the company and its actual controlling shareholder had achieved a change of control through a share transfer. After that, Youon’s controlling shareholder was changed to Shanghai Hamao (Hello’s main operating entity), and the actual controller was also changed to Hello founder Yang Lei.
This was seen by the market as Hello’s attempt at a backdoor listing. But Youon stated in its announcement that the equity transfer did not involve any asset injection, and that there was no plan for Hello to restructure for a listing within the next 12 months——meaning that, at least within a year, Hello and Youon would not consolidate their financial statements.
According to several industry insiders, the 12-month window was reserved both to complete a series of follow-on capital maneuvers and, more importantly, to buy time for Hello to secure a higher valuation and prepare for an IPO. Before the deadline for consolidation at the time of listing, Hello needs to prove to investors that it is capable of sustained high growth.
Since completing its last major funding round in 2018, Hello has not received any new capital injections for years. Yet bike sharing is a high-input, low-return business, and the segment’s limited cash-generating capacity and weak long-term sustainability are steadily wearing down the capital market’s patience.
"The closer it gets to financial disclosure, the more anxious the company becomes—but it doesn’t have much time left to solve the problem at its root," an analyst said. Those playbooks that have already been used and have proven effective in the short term now seem to be among the few remaining ways out.
One Hello employee said that starting this year, "Hello has required each business unit to deliver 15%—20% annual revenue growth, but the business is already saturated. It’s not like the days of unchecked, breakneck expansion."
We understand that Hello is currently requiring multiple internal business lines to turn net profit positive within 3–6 months. "Otherwise, the entire business will face layoffs and downsizing—or even be shut down outright."
According to people familiar with the matter, Hello has multiple sets of internal data—one reported to regulators, one to the media, one to shareholders, and one to investors—and they don’t match. "The version shown to the boss is relatively the most truthful."
A more immediate result of financial pressure has been layoffs and business pullbacks.
According to a former employee, the company likes to trial new businesses in a relatively aggressive way; once the revenue results fall short of expectations, layoffs happen almost immediately. "When I left, my employee ID number was 20,000, and the actual headcount was 5,000. Later hires who got laid off had employee ID numbers in the 40,000s, but the headcount was still 5,000."
At the end of last year, Hello carried out another round of layoffs across multiple business lines, including the PR team. After being called out by the "3.15" TV program, insiders saw the move as especially ironic. Before that, however, Hello’s executive team had repeatedly stressed internally how important marketing and advertising were: "We had several meetings, and the core takeaway was that PR and GR didn’t matter—only marketing and growth mattered. Do PR with a branding mindset, and make PR generate revenue."
One former employee also mentioned that at Hello’s 2024 employee banquet, CEO Yang Lei publicly said he "didn’t like veteran employees," implying that employees who had been there longer or were a bit older "weren’t hustling hard enough" and "weren’t urgent about driving business growth." In this person’s view, the recent string of controversies reflects a certain "impatience" in Hello’s operations—an excessive focus on near-term costs and profits.
To hit KPIs, every region and every business line has to find incremental growth and bring in more revenue.
In January 2026, Hello began raising prices in Shanghai. The base fare became 2 yuan for 60 minutes, with overtime charged at 0.1 yuan per minute, making short trips noticeably more expensive than Meituan and Qingju Bike. While official customer service said the change was to "ensure sustainable vehicle operations and maintenance," people familiar with the matter said that before the price hike Hello had repeatedly asked competitors to "coordinate" and raise prices together—indeed, incidents of users’ rides being interfered with and bikes being impounded occurred frequently during that period.
Each time it raises prices, Hello’s first choice is cities with higher business value and larger scale. And because shared bikes are an important part of urban mobility, once prices are adjusted, users in big cities are more sensitive. For Hello, the safest situation is when the pressure is shared by several companies—i.e., "coordinated price hikes."
A Vicious Regulatory Cycle
Not long ago, photos circulated from a Hello employees’ get-together showing multiple people riding Hello shared bikes while stepping on rival brands’ bikes beneath their feet. Hello then rushed out a statement announcing that it was cutting ties with those involved.
People familiar with the matter said the employees involved came from Hellobike’s Northern Region—the very region that was responsible for Hellobike being summoned for a regulatory meeting earlier this year.
In April 2026, Hellobike was summoned by the Beijing Municipal Transportation Law Enforcement Corps after it illegally deployed an excessive number of unregistered bikes in Beijing and refused to rectify the issue. In accordance with the law, the Corps imposed an administrative penalty on Hellobike and reduced its allowed operating scale. Similar scenes had also occurred in Tianjin.
An insider disclosed that the reason for this penalty was Hellobike’s excessive deployment in Beijing: "It exceeded the original quota by a lot, and the regulators discovered cases where one QR code was used for multiple bikes." Hellobike was then summoned for talks, "but our people refused to admit fault and even aggressively talked back to the enforcement officers, demanding that they give us more quota."
"As an employee, it’s hard for me to understand why the regional head would make such a decision," the insider said.
Despite triggering a series of controversies, the Northern Region’s deployments this year far exceeded its quota, and its KPIs were therefore over-fulfilled.
After the incident in which employees were filmed stepping on competitors’ bikes, although Hellobike said publicly that it had carried out a serious internal rectification, the person in charge of Hellobike’s Northern Region was not punished. He was reassigned to another region in recent days, "still in a general manager position."
Over-deployment has become a growth tactic that Hellobike is increasingly reliant on.
According to the insider, it isn’t only the cities that were called out by name—in almost every region nationwide, Hellobike engages in "over-deployment."
To bypass regulation, a gray mechanism has been operating in the shadows: the most basic tactic is "plate cloning"—using a QR code that has already been filed on the plates of multiple bikes, so that no matter how many bikes the staff responsible for scan-based checks scan, the system may show that the bike has already been registered.
According to an internal employee, in some cities Hellobike’s e-assist bikes were even rushed onto the streets before they had time to get license plates. "If the government doesn’t give a quota, traffic authorities won’t allow the bikes to be plated. Without plates, the bikes can’t be put on the road. So in the end, Hellobike chooses a way to bypass both regulators and directly ‘surprise-launch a new city.’"
If quotas are difficult to secure in certain city areas, Hellobike often tries to reach an agreement with a district or subdistrict in the city: it finds ways to meet that district’s investment-attraction needs in exchange for additional deployment eligibility outside the formal rules.
The source familiar with the matter said that one year, Hellobike was summoned by the government in a top-tier city for over-deployment, and its bikes were also ordered to be forcibly collected. However, the company’s operations staff chose to hand out cash at deployment locations to encourage users to keep riding the bikes into other areas—and large batches of bikes quickly disappeared.
In late August 2024, Shanghai’s Minhang police and Hello jointly launched a public-welfare awareness campaign themed around cracking down on online rumors. When users scanned a code to unlock a Hello bike, an anti-rumor audio message recorded by the police would automatically play. According to data Hello released at the time, the anti-rumor audio was played about 2.4 million times per day.
If you go by Hello’s deployment quota of roughly 300,000 bikes in Shanghai, that would mean each Hello bike was ridden about eight times a day—according to people in the industry, that figure was significantly higher than the local daily average per bike. "In a first-tier city like Shanghai, given the current total volume of bikes deployed, it’s relatively reasonable for a bike to be ridden three or four times a day."
Hello’s official narrative also conflicted with another set of data.
In April 2025, the Shanghai Urban-Rural Construction and Transportation Development Research Institute released the 2024 Shanghai Comprehensive Transportation Development Analysis Report. The report said that in 2024, Shanghai’s shared bikes logged an average of 2.784 million rides per day for the year. Although the statistical period was longer—and off-season averages could pull down the annual daily figure—in the view of someone who previously worked in the shared-bike industry, "Hello’s deployment numbers still sound way too exaggerated."
In the eyes of an informed source, the "2.4 million times" figure circulated externally was in fact a blunder made out of recklessness: "The team was in too much of a hurry—too eager to show results to management, whether in terms of government PR or hitting performance targets."
If a reasonable total bike quota for a large city is 1 million, and each company deploys bikes in line with its allocated share, operations can be run at peak efficiency.
Once one company over-deploys, other competitors are pushed into a dilemma—the order has already been broken. If they don’t follow suit and over-deploy, their market share will shrink; if they do, it means higher costs, lower efficiency, and regulatory penalties.
In fact, in the view of insiders, the essence of Hello’s approach was to use aggressive deployment to pressure regulators: "Hello’s bikes are everywhere in the city. It’s a headache for the government either way—whether to impound them or not. After months of back-and-forth, it becomes a fait accompli, and in the end, even if they don’t agree, they have to agree."
"My feeling is that after ten years, Hello is still stuck in the chaos of its early startup days. While other companies in the industry have been exploring how to coexist with the market and regulators, Hello has been standing still," said a former employee who worked at Hello for many years. "No matter how regulatory approaches evolve, Hello seems to have only one idea: how to stay out of regulators’ line of sight."
But "staying out of sight" comes at a price.
According to a dataset we obtained, the manufacturing, operations, and maintenance costs for a single shared bike come to roughly several thousand yuan. That means every time Hello over-deploys another 100,000 bikes, it takes on an additional cost burden of well over 100 million yuan. And by industry estimates, in Beijing and Shanghai alone, "Hello’s annual over-deployment adds up to several hundred thousand bikes."
The more bikes there are, the fewer orders each bike gets on average. In a major city, it’s reasonable for a bike to be ridden three to four times a day; over-deployment means a longer payback period for each bike.
Regulatory penalties triggered by over-deployment make the cycle even harder to break. According to an insider at Hello, the company has differing views internally on the regulatory pressure caused by excessive deployment. Some believe the impact of regulation isn’t significant; others have realized that "once penalties land, you can’t bid for tenders in other cities."
Over-deployment requires spending more money, creating funding pressure; once that pressure is passed down, the company needs more bikes and more rides to hit KPIs; then even more bikes get rolled out, pushing costs up further.
It’s a self-reinforcing vicious cycle.
Cutthroat Competition
However, when street-level over-deployment still isn’t enough to support KPI targets, Hello’s competitive tactics begin to escalate step by step.
An employee in the bike-sharing industry said that Shanghai alone now has more than a hundred vehicle impound lots. Many claim they are commissioned by traffic management authorities and are specifically used to store and manage those illegally deployed vehicles that exceed quota limits.
But given the sheer number, it’s not easy to tell which impound lots are properly qualified. For a time, the person mentioned above noticed that both their company’s bikes and a rival’s bikes were repeatedly hauled away in large numbers by an impound company that claimed to be commissioned by traffic authorities, and then held in a parking lot. After employees from the two companies teamed up privately to investigate, they discovered that the lessee behind that parking lot was, in fact, a Hello employee in the area.
Over the past two years, impounding has evolved from a normal practice of city management into a black-and-grey "industry chain."
Impounding competitors’ vehicles not only reduces the number they can deploy, but can also generate direct profit—for an impounded company to redeem a bike, it must pay a "fine" ranging from several dozen to more than a hundred yuan per bike.
Given the number of vehicles impounded, the total amount of these redemption payments is substantial—according to the person cited above, even a mid-sized impound lot can easily hold several thousand bikes.
Based on photos of some impound lots that we obtained, tens of thousands of bicycles and e-bikes are repeatedly shoved, dragged, scooped up, and even crushed by flatbed loaders and excavators, until they are stacked into bike mountains on the smallest possible footprint—wheel jammed against wheel, handlebar twisted into handlebar. It’s the lowest-cost way to "manage" them, and it also frees up space for even more bikes that are about to be impounded.
"For a while, we noticed that the faster we went to redeem the bikes, the more they charged us," said Wang Bing (a pseudonym), a business staffer at a bike-sharing company. Later, the strategy he and his colleagues adopted was simply to stop redeeming the bikes altogether: "We treated it like we’d found a free parking lot. We have money, and we have time to wear them down. If they have no income coming in, the expensive monthly site lease alone will be enough to hurt them."
The tactic did work. After some time, he found those bikes had quietly been moved back to the streets and sidewalks.
More than one employee at rival companies said they had also considered copying Hellobike. But they didn’t, because "in the end, every company would be paying several hundred million yuan a year in redemption fees, and the industry as a whole would gain nothing from it."
And the outcome of doing this would be very likely to breed corruption.
In fact, what surprised Wang Bing was that there were quite a lot of Hellobike’s own bikes in the impound yard too. "Maybe they were worried that if it was only green and yellow bikes, it would look too fake."
A former Hellobike employee revealed that as to whether the company directly participated in the impounding operations behind the scenes, "it’s a muddled account—there’s hardly any direct evidence. You can only say it was a competitive tactic. But some employees really were using it to run gray-market schemes." That means someone could impound their own company’s bikes, then apply to the company for reimbursement in the name of "redeeming" them—pocketing the money personally.
When charging for impounded bikes still wasn’t enough to suppress competitors, rougher tactics emerged.
A former bike-sharing employee said that for a period of time, their bikes in certain areas would often suddenly become fewer—and not because they’d been ridden away. After investigating and tracing CCTV footage, he found the bikes ultimately turned up in the suburbs, in the mountains, and even in rivers.
Although during the most cutthroat period of competition in the bike-sharing industry, dispatch teams at every company tried to find ways to reduce competitors’ fleets in the literal, physical sense, multiple practitioners from different brands said, "Hellobike did it the most."
According to people familiar with the matter, for a time there was an internal Hellobike operation called the "Crossing-the-River Campaign": "it was about making every other company’s bikes undergo a ‘mass migration,’ moving them to places where users couldn’t ride them." Its scope covered several of the country’s most fiercely contested cities.
Sometimes a war of public opinion was also a method. Previously, a video circulated on public social platforms——two maintenance workers wearing another company’s uniforms were seen tossing several Hellobike bicycles into a river while hurling profanities at Hellobike into the camera.
Soon, the video began circulating across multiple platforms, and Hello employees also quickly issued a statement condemning the behavior shown in it. "We were originally prepared to own up to this, because it really was disgraceful. But after looking into the backgrounds of the two employees, we found that when the video was shot, neither of them had been on the job for even three days."
From over-investment to impounding vehicles, from wrecking vehicles to the "river-crossing campaign," Hello’s operating tactics reveal a clear, step-by-step trajectory——when it couldn’t win the market by playing by business rules, it turned to physical sabotage; when physical sabotage still wasn’t enough to suppress rivals, it slid further toward the edge of violence.
According to an informed source, Hello once ran a "Falcon Plan," compiling a list of around ten key people at competitors. "If you could ‘take out’ someone on the list, you could get a huge bonus."
The ways of "taking them out" included: poaching——getting the people on the list to resign or jump to Hello; and outright physical intimidation——including beatings.
Several HelloBike employees had even planned to "beat up" a key figure at a competitor. The source said, "They had it all mapped out——where the person lived, their daily routes, and how they were going to attack them." But the plan ultimately wasn’t carried out because the other side became alert.
As for the situations mentioned in this article, we sought verification from Hello. As of publication, we had not received a response.
The Cost of Safety
This year’s 3·15 program exposed that some of Hello’s offline rental outlets for electric two-wheelers had illegally removed speed limiters, raising top speed to 75 km/h——far above the national cap of 25 km/h. Its electric-vehicle rental business is one of Hello’s seven key business lines.
According to an informed source, this business operates under a platform-based franchise model——Hello provides online traffic, the brand, and system support, while offline stores, vehicle procurement, and day-to-day operations are handled independently by third-party merchants. "People inside should all know about the speeding. It’s a core business that makes so much money, yet for a long time it’s relied on operating illegally and skirting the rules."
Before that, there was also a safety incident involving Hello’s autonomous driving. In June last year, near a crosswalk on Yanjiang Road in Zhuzhou, Hunan Province, a Robotaxi marked "Hello Autonomous Driving" suddenly deviated from its path while driving and struck two pedestrians who were crossing normally, leaving both seriously injured.
This was, to the best of what is publicly known, the first publicly reported Robotaxi crash in China that caused injuries. And it happened less than half a year after Hello rushed into the autonomous-driving race with RMB 3 billion in funding.
The incident did not come without warning. A week before the crash, residents in Zhuzhou had already posted on social media that a Hello self-driving vehicle they were riding in collided with a regular road vehicle during the trip, leaving "the door caved in." According to the passenger, after the collision the vehicle neither braked hard nor pulled over; instead, it kept going all the way to the destination.
After the accident, Hello suspended its autonomous-driving operations in Zhuzhou and Liyang. As of May 2026, Hello’s autonomous-driving service in Zhuzhou had still not resumed.
From having safety operators to having none, and from not carrying passengers to commercial passenger operations, every step requires massive amounts of road-testing data to support it. No company can skip that phase, and Hello was clearly no exception. Yet Hello’s timetable was exceptionally aggressive: mass production of its first L4 autonomous vehicle by June 2026, and deployment of more than 50,000 units by 2027. By comparison, Baidu’s Apollo Go had already reached 3.4 million fully driverless orders in a single quarter, spanning more than 20 cities worldwide; Pony.ai and WeRide had both expanded their fleets past the 1,000-vehicle mark, and neither had seen an injury-causing incident.
Some industry insiders noted that large-scale commercial Robotaxi rollout typically requires the safety assurance that comes from accumulating road-testing data over a huge number of miles. "Even if road-test data can be bought and technological breakthroughs can be achieved in a short time, it’s hard for Hello’s autonomous-driving business to have built up enough road-test mileage in the brief six months from its establishment to the accident," one person said.
More crucially, the issue may lie in certain "compromises" Hello made on hardware. A related supplier disclosed that, for cost reasons, Hello did not install enough sensors on the underside of its Robotaxis—something that could, in real-world driving, cause failures in detecting "obstacles" and other debris on the road surface.
On another product line, safety problems surfaced in a more concealed way.
In November 2025, hundreds of thousands of Hello e-bikes across the country suddenly "lost service"—"lifetime membership" features such as remote location tracking and checking the battery level stopped working. The reason was that the built-in 2G IoT SIM cards in Hello’s vehicles could no longer connect to the network as China phased out its 2G networks. Some models had no mechanical lock and relied entirely on Bluetooth unlocking, leaving the vehicles, for a time, effectively reduced to "scrap metal."
Hello’s financial business has also come under fire over user security concerns, and has gone through layoffs and a contraction of operations. According to an internal employee, by the end of last year, Hello’s Data & Technology department responsible for financial services carried out several rounds of layoffs toward year-end due to regulatory policies, with the layoff ratio very likely having reached 50%.
More recently, the financial business was also exposed for excessively high hidden fees, while customer service responded, "Report it however you want." As a cash cow, the financial business has been operating right up against the 36% interest-rate cap—any higher would be illegal—and Hello has not yet obtained the relevant financial licenses. There were also earlier reports that it was suspected of "violent debt collection"—some users alleged that after taking out a small loan on Hello and failing to repay on time, they received threatening calls from people claiming to be acting on behalf of the Hello platform. On platforms such as Black Cat Complaints, there have been quite a few complaints related to "Hello Zhenyouqian," many of which involve violent collection practices, harassing friends and family, accessing users’ contact lists, and threats and intimidation.
If you compare the three shared-bike giants side by side, Meituan and Didi have public financial data to reference—and their bike businesses both ran massive losses. This probably suggests that Hello’s profitability figures are not encouraging either.
The problem, however, is that Hello has yet to find a second growth curve beyond bikes. Meituan and Didi’s losses are "valuable"—the traffic brought in by shared bikes can feed into food delivery, local services and travel, ride-hailing, and other segments, so the losses are essentially customer-acquisition costs. But Hello’s overall revenue is overly dependent on the cash flow generated by its bike business, and for now it still lacks a better path to monetization elsewhere.
(Author | Yang Lin, Editor | Ma Jinnan, first published on the TMTPost App)
