After one year of building up their mobility services business, BMW and Daimler have decided to sell off five sectors. Due to stalled profits across the board in these areas, BMW and Daimler have put the following enterprises up for sale: ChargeNow (charging services), ReachNow, (multimodal transport service), FreeNow (ride-hailing service), ParkNow (parking service), and ShareNow (car-sharing services) which includes DriveNow and Car2Go.
BMW and Daimler decided to strike a deal with Mobimeo, who will be in charge of the business pertaining to B2b and B2G. Mobimeo is a subsidiary of Deutsche Bahn and is in charge of running Deutsche Bahn’s rail service headed in Germany.
Uber has an interest in acquiring the ownership and taking over FreeNow, their ride-hailing and micro-mobility-sharing service. Manager Magazin, a German publication, states Uber hopes to buy the subsidiary mobility service FreeNow and has extended an offer of over one million dollars. This offer is intriguing to Daimler, who is ready to sell Uber their FreeNow subsidiary. However, they cannot move forward with a deal because BMW has not reached a decision yet.
FreeNow, formerly under the name myTaxi, offers rental cars and cab services for prominent cities. Since May of this year, FreeNow has given customers an option for e-scooters. In their third quarter of 2020, FreeNow introduced e-bikes and car-sharing to their portfolio. The combined subsidiary car-sharing services Car2Go and DriveNow, which jointly are known as ShareNow, arenot affected by the Daimler and BMW deal with Deutsche Bahn. Park2Go, though, is rumoured to have interested buyers for their parking app.
Some of BMW and Daimler’s businesses are under a joint subsidiary named Moovel. The B2G and B2B service previously owned by BMW and Daimler is planning to sell theirs, as well as Moovel’s share to Deutsche Bahn. The rest of the business Moovel accounts for will be focusing on MaaS through the ReachNow app that gives customers one place for mobility options.
Deutsche Bahn has plans to strengthen their knowledge in tech to implement public transport apps that will be customer friendly and provide one place for several functions to occur including the ability to buy tickets, route information, and bike-sharing. DB board member for Passenger Transport Berthold Huber said that the expectation of integrated services for bikes, trains, buses, and car-sharing is gradually increasing with customers. They want it all to be accessible in one easy to maneuver app.
Huber says Deutsche Bahn and their partners are working on getting to this point for their customers, with Deutsche Bahn driving this ideal hard for integration throughout all of the technology used.
Ola Kallenius, head of Daimler, attests the Coronavirus to deficiencies with their mobility services, saying that the service should be able to be financially stable on its own. Unfortunately for the two carmakers, large investments lead to unprofitable gains. Major deficits were the main reason as to why they are selling their mobility service. The head of the Daimler Works Council, Michael Brecht told Reuters in an interview that he suggested selling the services as he saw the decline in sales and the rise in electromobility that is catching steam.
