As time goes on, the latest developments about ofo’s Little Yellow Bikes have seemingly not brought the anticipated news about refunding deposits that users have been waiting for. Instead, new legal enforcement news has once again touched the sensitive nerves of the customers. According to Tianyancha’s information, ofo’s links to Dongxia Datong (Beijing) Management Consulting Co., Ltd. and Beijing Bikeluoke Technology Co., Ltd. have seen new judicial enforcement records added. This time, the enforcement target involves more than 16.86 million yuan, stemming from a dispute case about a contracting contract, which is being executed by the People’s Court of Haidian District, Beijing.
For ofo, which has already been in dire straits, this new enforcement record doesn’t seem to have caused much commotion. Dongxia Datong (Beijing) Management Consulting Co., Ltd., as an affiliated enterprise of ofo, is already facing over 500 judicial disputes. Furthermore, the company has a history of being the subject of enforcement 350 times, with the total amount involved in executions reaching 1.377 billion yuan. What’s more severe is that the company currently has 285 consumption restrictions listed against it, and 43 records marked as untrustworthy entities subject to enforcement.
Despite ofo facing severe challenges, its founder Dai Wei has not given up on his entrepreneurial journey. Reports from last year mentioned that Dai Wei set out to start a business in America, intending to create a business model similar to that of Luckin Coffee. However, looking at the latest situation, it seems that Dai Wei’s entrepreneurial attempt has not achieved the desired result. Consequently, this has once again dealt a blow to the hopes of millions of ofo users who are expecting their deposits to be returned.
The information disclosed by Tianyancha further confirms that due to the dispute over the contracting contract, Dongxia Datong (Beijing) Management Consulting Co., Ltd. and Beijing Bikeluoke Technology Co., Ltd. need to assume an additional enforcement amount of over 16.86 million yuan. Radar Finance has learned that this case was initially registered in November 2019, with the People’s Court of Haidian District, Beijing opening the case file. The plaintiff involved is Kunshan Hui Valley International Trade Co., Ltd., while the defendants include Beijing Bikeluoke Technology Co., Ltd., Dongxia Datong (Beijing) Management Consulting Co., Ltd., as well as ofo’s founder, Dai Wei.
The public civil judgment reveals that the plaintiff, Kunshan Hui Valley Company, and the defendant, Dongxia Datong Company, signed four purchase orders in October 2017. According to the orders, Dongxia Datong Company was to purchase, produce, and pay for 30,000 3.2 version and 110,000 3.21S version shared bicycles, with a total contract amount of 52.2 million yuan. Although Hui Valley Company had completed the production and delivery of bicycles as required by the contract, Dongxia Datong Company still had an unpaid balance of 16.8673 million yuan. On June 28, 2018, Dongxia Datong Company submitted a repayment plan to Hui Valley Company, promising to pay the remaining 16.8673 million yuan order amount in six installments.
Dongxia Datong Company failed to abide by the rules of the “Repayment Plan” within the stipulated time to pay Hui Valley Company the payable amount, and even when Hui Valley Company filed a lawsuit, Dongxia Datong Company still had not repaid any debt. The plaintiff claims that Dai Wei is not only a shareholder of Dongxia Datong Company but also effectively controls the company, as well as controlling Bikeluoke Company. On one hand, through Dongxia Datong Company, Dai Wei signed the bicycle purchase contract with Hui Valley Company, owing a large amount of money, and on the other hand, he transferred the income from Dongxia Datong Company’s bicycle rental project to Bikeluoke Company, so that the profits directly entered Bikeluoke Company’s account.
The plaintiff claims that this practice of asset commingling significantly diminished the ability of Dongxia Dadao Company to fulfill its debts. According to Article 20, Paragraph 3 of the Company Law, if a shareholder abuses the company’s independent legal status and limited liability, evades debts, and thereby seriously harms the interests of the company’s creditors, the shareholder shall be jointly liable for the company’s debts. On this basis, the plaintiff believes that BYKE-LOCK Corporation and Dai Wei should be jointly liable for the unpaid debts of Dongxia Dadao Company.
In response to the plaintiff’s allegations, Dongxia Dadao Company rebutted, arguing that it does not agree with the plaintiff’s claims and indicated that the existing evidence is insufficient to prove how many bicycles Huigu Company actually delivered or confirm the execution of the contract. BYKE-LOCK Corporation argued that it is not relevant to the case and objected to the plaintiff’s request for it to bear joint liability. BYKE-LOCK Corporation responded as follows: first, it is not a party to the case contract; second, BYKE-LOCK Corporation is not a shareholder of Dongxia Dadao Company, and vice versa, thus lacking legal and factual basis.
Dai Wei, the founder of ofo, also opposed the plaintiff’s claims. Dai Wei’s defense stance is that he personally is not the appropriate subject of litigation in this case and is unrelated to it. Dongxia Dadao Company, as an independent legal entity, is the contract party with Huigu Company, and Dai Wei has no connection to this contract. Therefore, Dai Wei believes that it is a legal error to require him to bear joint liability.
The court ruled that the “Sales Order” signed by Huigu Company and Dongxia Dadao Company is valid and does not violate any national laws or regulatory prohibitions, and both parties have the responsibility to strictly fulfill their contractual obligations. Huigu Company has fulfilled its delivery obligations, while Dongxia Dadao Company has failed to pay for the goods, constituting a breach of contract. Therefore, the court finds the claim of Huigu Company for Dongxia Dadao Company to pay the remaining contract amount of 16.8673 million yuan plus the corresponding overdue payment interest losses to be fully reasonable and legally supported.
Considering BYKE-LOCK Corporation directly received the operating funds of Dongxia Dadao Company without a contractual basis and did not return the funds to Dongxia Dadao Company while it was in arrears with many debts, and the latter also did not ask the former to return these operating funds, such a situation is inconsistent with normal commercial trading practices. Under these circumstances, the court believes that there exists an improper transfer of benefits between Dongxia Dadao Company and BYKE-LOCK Corporation, the boundaries of property are unclear, and they have lost their independent personages.
The court held that Huigu Company’s claim for BYKE-LOCK Corporation to bear joint liability has merit and thus supported it. However, regarding the request for Dai Wei to bear joint liability for the debts of Dongxia Dadao Company, due to insufficient evidence to prove the commingling of his identity with the company’s, the claim was not supported. The court ruled as follows: Dongxia Dadao (Beijing) Management Consulting Co., Ltd. must pay Kunshan Huigu International Trade Co., Ltd. the 16.8673 million yuan due for goods and loss of overdue payment interest, and ensure that payment is completed within ten days after the judgment takes effect; Beijing BYKE-LOCK Technology Co., Ltd. shall bear joint liability for the aforementioned debts.
Amid the heavy pressure of executing such a high volume of information, OFO Company seems to have already adapted to frequent legal litigations. According to public data, Dongxia Datong (Beijing) Management Consulting Co., Ltd., since its establishment in 2016, has been involved in up to 563 legal litigations, with 509 cases as the defendant. The types of cases involved mainly include contract disputes, domestic non-foreign arbitration awards, service contract disputes, among others.
Dongxia Datong (Beijing) Management Consulting Co., Ltd. has been subjected to a total execution amount that has accumulated to 1.377 billion yuan, with related consumption restriction orders reaching 285, and has been listed as a dishonest executee 43 times. In 2019, Dongxia Datong faced an application for bankruptcy liquidation, but it was not accepted due to jurisdictional issues. The company’s legal representative has changed from Dai Wei to Chen Zhengjiang. According to the company’s announcement, this change aims to optimize office processes, improve work efficiency, and is not the “stepping down” as described by the outside world. Dai Wei remains the actual controller of the company, and this personnel change does not affect the company’s daily operations.
Dai Wei, the founder of the OFO bike-sharing brand, is hailed as the core soul of the brand. In 2009, Dai Wei was admitted to the Finance Department of Guanghua School of Management at Peking University. After graduation, unlike many classmates who chose to continue their studies or enter the workforce, Dai Wei decided to devote himself to teaching in Datong County, Qinghai, and engaged in educational volunteer service in Dongxia Town for a year.
In 2014, Dai Wei returned to Peking University to pursue a master’s degree. During this period, he tried interning at an investment company, but a passion for entrepreneurship always burned in his heart. Thus, after only two short weeks, Dai Wei decisively quit his internship and, along with four like-minded partners, embarked on the entrepreneurial journey. In July 2014, with the support of Peking University alumni, Dai Wei received 1 million yuan in startup capital.
By the end of that year, Dai Wei had already begun assembling a team, with the original product direction being mountain bike rental services in the Shenzhen area. However, the original funds quickly depleted. After careful review and market analysis, Dai Wei and his team realized that a successful product must closely meet the real needs of consumers. Therefore, they abandoned the original business model.
With the concept of shared economy and smart hardware, Dai Wei and his partners founded OFO shared bicycles. The establishment of OFO attracted numerous investors to compete for investment; as the data shows, OFO has accumulated 11 rounds of financing since its inception, with many investment giants such as ZhenFund, Matrix Partners, Shunwei Capital, Xiaomi Corporation, Alibaba Group, Ant Group, and Didi Chuxing having invested in OFO.
The tailwind of the sharing economy helped OFO rise rapidly. In December 2016, OFO announced that its daily order volume had surpassed the 1.5 million mark, becoming the first company in the bike-sharing industry with daily orders over one million. In March 2017, OFO achieved another milestone, with the daily order volume breaking 10 million. That same year, according to a report by a third-party data research institution, OFO led the Chinese bike-sharing market with a 51.2% market share, with its urban coverage and vehicle deployment being three times and 1.6 times, respectively, that of the second place in the market.
However, this prominent startup history encountered a significant setback in 2018. In September, due to failure to make payments on time, Dai Wei’s ofo was sued by Phoenix Bicycles. Meanwhile, consumers discovered issues with induced spending when depositing and requesting refunds on the ofo App. Media reports indicated the refund period for ofo’s deposit extended from the initial 1-10 working days to 1-15 working days. Over time, the bike-sharing empire once established by Dai Wei fell into trouble, repeatedly listed as a judgement debtor. Dai Wei, who was once celebrated on the “Top 40 Under 40” business elites list in China, faced multiple consumer restrictions, and the issue of the millions of users’ deposit returns became a lingering problem.
Data revealed that, as of May 2020, over 16.5 million ofo bike-sharing users were queuing online to request deposit refunds. ofo offered two levels of deposit, 99 RMB and 199 RMB. Even calculating with the lowest deposit of 99 RMB, ofo still owed a total refund amount exceeding 1.6 billion RMB. Faced with such a massive demand for refunds, ofo adopted various strategies, including partnerships with online lending platforms, launching discount malls, implementing cashback activities, and inviting friends to help with the deposit refunds. However, these measures in fact did not solve the deposit refund issue fundamentally but instead led to widespread skepticism among user groups.
Years later, the hope of ofo users waiting for deposit refunds seems to be increasingly slim. The company’s official website is no longer accessible, and its official public account has also published articles unrelated to its main business, only to attract traffic. In some app stores, the ofo app is no longer visible. Attempts to log into ofo’s mini-program also encountered problems with receiving the verification code, resulting in login failures.
Following these issues, ofo’s founder Dai Wei embarked on a new business venture in the USA. Dai Wei founded a coffee brand called About Time Coffee in the USA. Since its landing in New York in February 2022, it has opened several chain stores in downtown Manhattan, and before this, Dai Wei also operated a business focused on power bank rentals in Seattle.
Although Dai Wei is not the CEO of About Time Coffee, and the current CEO Marian Chen stated that Dai Wei is only a minor shareholder and does not participate in the daily operations of the brand, reports say that Dai Wei played a significant role behind the new project, providing help with the financing process. According to Tianyancha information, several well-known investment institutions, including those that had invested in ofo, have participated in the angel round of financing for About Time Coffee.
About Time Coffee’s business model is similar to that of most beverage brands, offering espresso coffee, bubble drinks, sparkling water, as well as bread and other meals. The brand’s product prices are relatively affordable, priced between 2 to 4 dollars, which, compared to other brands like Starbucks that charge up to 5 dollars and above, makes About Time Coffee more accessible to the public.
In order to attract new customers, About Time Coffee once launched a new user benefit, where new registered users could receive five free drinks. However, despite the fresh attempts, Dai Wei was not able to revive his career through this initiative. Not long after the domestic media reported on Dai Wei’s coffee business progress, news emerged that the About Time Coffee project had encountered obstacles.
According to a report by Jiemian News, last May, they learned from multiple independent sources that Dai Wei’s new venture into the American coffee market, About Time Coffee, was facing operational difficulties, with a bottleneck in its funding chain, putting the whole project on the verge of stalling. Radar Finance noticed that About Time Coffee had also promoted itself on the Xiaohongshu platform, but the post with the highest interaction on the platform was its first post published in February of the previous year. Even so, the likes on this post by Dai Wei have not yet surpassed one hundred to this day. In the comments section of that post, there are still individual netizens demanding Dai Wei to return their deposits.
Since posting the last update on June 8 of last year, About Time Coffee’s account on Xiaohongshu has not released any new content. Meanwhile, according to media reports, About Time Coffee’s Instagram account has also not been updated since September 29 of last year. China Entrepreneur Magazine reported that as of mid-December last year, only one store of About Time Coffee on Madison Avenue in New York remained normally open, with the other four showing as “permanently closed”. China Entrepreneur Magazine also cited messages from people close to Dai Wei, saying that he has returned to Beijing.
Although Dai Wei’s multiple entrepreneurial attempts have all ended in failure, he remains very attentive to business trends. For example, when Keep went public, Dai Wei posted a congratulatory message in his circle of friends. When Nvidia announced what it called “the strongest AI chip,” the H200, Dai Wei also expressed strong excitement. Even the collaboration between Luckin Coffee and Kweichow Moutai made Dai Wei remark, “Wine plus coffee, that is great”.
However, compared to the specific progress of Dai Wei’s new business ventures, what users of ofo may be more concerned about is when they can get their deposits refunded. According to the current situation, whether the “legend of deposit returns” associated with Dai Wei will have a happy ending is unpredictable at this time.
