Lime to pull its electric scooters out of 12 cities

In a statement headlined “The Path Forward at Lime” on the company’s news blog, Second Street, co-founder and CEO Brad Bao announced a few key strategic moves for 2020 that include closing shop in 12 global markets. According to Axios, via The Verge, the company is also laying off approximately 14% of its workforce. Bao says the moves come as the company has “shifted our primary focus to profitability” in order to become financially independent.

Along with Bird, Lime is one of the biggest shared-electric-scooter companies in the world. It has its product in more than 100 markets, but some places have not worked out. Bao says there are “select communities throughout the world where micromobility has evolved more slowly,” and thus, they are not making money in those places. As a result, Lime is pulling out of 12 cities, four of them in the United States: Atlanta, Phoenix, San Diego, and San Antonio. Lime also plans to leave Linz, Austria; Bogotá, Colombia; Buenos Aires, Argentina; Montevideo, Uruguay; Lima, Peru; Puerto Vallarta, Mexico; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; and São Paulo, Brazil.

Whether Lime might return to the cities is up in the air. Bao wrote, “we remain hopeful we can reintroduce Lime back into these communities when the time is right.” 

We’d guess that time would not be right until Lime is profitable.