On Thursday Ford came to an acquisition agreement to buy San Francisco based scooter sharing company Spin. Though Ford didn’t unveil the financial details, but as per report on Wednesday by Axion quote the figure as $40 million.
To further strengthen its business of transportation and mobility other than car sellings, Ford took the step to capture the market that is rising quickly.
A number of new scooter businesses recently got popularity, Bird and Lime is one of the names. In addition to ride sharing business, the scooter business is also being seen as new way of transportation overcoming the problem of families owing multiple cars leaving insufficient space in their garages for another one.
With no requirement to park scooters at designated place, renting out such scooters is the Spin’s business. This feature of non requiring to park at designated place gave an edge to dockless scooter over other similar services of bike sharing. Detroit, California, Long Beach, Denver and Florida are among 13 cities and Troy University in Alabama, one of college locations where Spin is operating its scooter sharing business currently. In University of California, San Diego and University of Kentucky, Spin operates through bike sharing services. Spin is also setting up to expand its operations to several other locations which include North Carolina, Washington, D.C., Maryland and Texas.
Investment in mobility companies by Ford’s Smart Mobilty division has been increasing in numbers. Autonomic, a software developing company involve in making software use to organize transportation network and connect vehicles.
For Micro Mobilty businesses, city authorities are applying limit of certain number of scooter by a single company, places to park the rides and permit to operate such business. For these reasons, unlike ride sharing business, Spin and other similar businesses growth directions are much diverse.
Ford is aiming business expansion to 100 cities by the year and a half well above from Spin’s, currently operating in 13 cities.