The ‘sharing’ economy is the economy of cooperative participation. According to a study carried out by PriceWaterhouseCoopers, the turnover that this generates could be worth €570 billion Euros by 2025 in term of transit volumes.
This figure increased by 77% between 2015 and 2014, which ensured revenues of €83 billion for platforms operating in this field on the old continent. The most developed regions in Europe, those in the North, such as Germany and Great Britain, have recorded more than 50 companies already operating on the market; Holland and Spain between 15 and 30, while Italy and Poland less than 25.
Although Italy has few companies already operating on the market within the Sharing Economy, a study conducted by Niccolò Cusano at Università degli Studi di Firenze reveals that it is among the first three countries in the world for the number of users and experts of this type of economy. The average users of these services are men in 56% of the cases, 74% are under the age of 44, and 53% are educated and residents of northern Italy.
But it does not end here. Sharing Mobility is becoming increasingly common within the Sharing Economy, as claimed by the National Observatory on Sharing Mobility, a body created in 2015 and promoted by the Ministry for Environmental Protection, and the Foundation for Sustainable Development. In the three year period 2015-2017, the total number of shared mobility services increased by 17% a year, with a 57% growth in the southern regions. Of the 357 shared mobility services, as many as 76% of the total is represented by bike sharing services, followed by car sharing at around 10%, while carpooling (e.g. Bla Bla Car, to be clear) is at 3%. Scooter sharing, on the other hand, is still a niche phenomenon, with only 3 active services at the end of last year.
Giants of the industry like Mobike, Obike, and Ofo offer bike sharing services, but also Italian startups like Shike, selected by the Hubble acceleration program, offer bike sharing without stations, which is much more convenient than the use of fixed stations which oblige users to return the bicycle to certain places. And it is precisely this convenience of services like these, called free floating, that have helped to increase the presence of shared bikes in Italy as well.