Lithuania’s Modus Group plans to spend 110 million euros making CityBee one of the largest car-sharing companies in Europe. The company has announced an international tender to purchase over 5,000 new cars, roughly five times the number of vehicles in the company’s current fleet.
“We intend to select the best tender offers and sign agreements with the winners in February 2019. We plan to acquire all 5,360 vehicles during 2019. They’ll expand CityBee’s portfolio of services, adding cars that are better for longer trips, electric cars, which are popular in cities, and vans and commercial vehicles,” CityBee CEO Aurimas Čiagus said in a statement.
According to EU-Startups.com, an online publication with a focus on start-ups in Europe, CityBee’s customers made more than 1.2 million trips in 2018, while research from Berg Insight suggests that by 2022 nearly 61 million people around the world will be using car sharing services.
As well as increasing the size of the CityBee fleet, Modus Group’s investment it will also support the company’s expansion of its carsharing services into the Latvian and Estonian markets, expected to happen in the spring of 2019. CityBee has been in operation for six years in Lithuania and introduced its services to drivers in Poland in the autumn of 2018.
The very first CityBee vehicles to be introduced in Latvia and Estonia will be for moving household goods and the transportation of large cargo. The service is anticipated to launch with a fleet of 50 commercial vehicles in each country’s capital. This number will gradually increase, states Mr Čiagus.
“While carrying out business in these countries, we saw the opportunity for a carsharing service as well. Even though the service is still pretty new in Latvia and Estonia, we know there are quite a few carsharing players in the market (one launched services less than a year ago in Latvia; one provides a carsharing service for electric cars in Estonia). The fact that their popularity among local drivers is growing rapidly gives us extra confidence,” said Liudas Liutkevičius, chairman of the Modus Group board.
“The CityBee carsharing service with its commercial vehicles is crucial both for individual clients and small-sized businesses in different sectors. To meet increased demand in the market or in the event of a company car’s repair, small-scale entrepreneurs can conveniently pick up a CityBee car using their mobile application. We have successfully tested such a development strategy in Poland: we already provide a carsharing service in ten cities and manage a fleet of 150 commercial vehicles there,” added Mr Čiagus.
“The number of drivers sharing cars in Europe has grown eight times over the last decade – a number which speaks for itself. It is a definite stimulus to scale up the carsharing service and to meet changing consumer needs,” he continued.
Once the purchase of the new vehicles is complete, CityBee will become one of the largest providers of car-sharing services in Europe, alongside giants like DriveNow, which is owned by BMW and has 6,000 cars.
“Carsharing is a future sustainable businesses, and we intend to develop it to the highest standards,” concluded Mr Liutkevičius.
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