A few days ago, we published a blog post on how Bluegogo, the bike sharing company once valued at US$150m, went into free fall after a bizarre incident.
Since then, we received a lot of enquiries from our readers. Many asked us “I have read a lot of news reports, why none of them mentioned about this incident?”
Well, the answer is very straightforward. No news outlet in China reported this. Remember, this is a very politically sensitive topic.
Hence English language media, which typically picks up news from Chinese media sources, missed the story completely.
Here is how the incident was reported in some Chinese media articles:
“Secondly, an aggressive marketing campaign Bluegogo did in June brought the company unrecoverable damages. In particular, investors and the market learnt something deep about this team, and completely lost faith in it.”
“Since June, because of a mistake in a marketing campaign, the few funding opportunities evaporated.”
“Even without the operational incident in June, Bluegogo would probably not have a bright future.”