Admittedly, Wayne Ting didn't dare to hope for success in Le Havre.

Maybe it wasn't important to him at first.

The CEO of the American company Lime did not see the small port town on the French Atlantic coast with its 136,000 inhabitants as a hotspot for his e-scooters.

Now, however, he is sitting in the sun in Berlin and unexpectedly goes into raptures.

“In Le Havre, people booked more trips than in any other city in the first few weeks,” he reports.

Corinna Budras

Business correspondent in Berlin.

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For him it was "shocking", and of course he means the kind of positive shock waves that spread when the expectation is surprisingly exceeded.

The small French provincial town is not an isolated case.

In Germany you could join: Solingen, Oldenburg, Neckarsulm, Lünen and many more.

The lime scooters have already spread in so many small towns that the image of the casual city dweller who drives from party to party with a fluttering shirt is beginning to crumble.

It can be replaced by the average person who quickly has to cover a few kilometers without looking for a parking space.

He does that in Oldenburg too.

Wayne Ting is not alone in this experience.

"The providers started out in the big cities because of the greater potential, but now several rental companies are expanding more into medium-sized cities," says Daniel Schellong, an expert in micromobility at the Boston Consulting Group.

There, too, money can be made with an intelligent setup.

Fewer competitors in the province

The e-scooters from the Berlin rental company Tier are already rolling in 60 German cities, including Herford, which has a population of 67,000.

"In these cities there is of course less competition than in the big cities," says a spokesman.

Instead of the six or seven providers in some cases, one only has to expect competition from one or a maximum of two providers in these markets.

This has also been recognized by the American provider Bird: "The potential of micromobility in small and medium-sized towns is underestimated," says Matthias Wanko, who is responsible for town twinning in German-speaking countries.

In the smaller cities in particular, the company observed a significantly higher intensity of use with longer and longer journeys than in the metropolises.

That is why Bird has expanded its range to include a good 25 cities with between 40,000 and 100,000 inhabitants.

Not all providers are pursuing this strategy by any means.

The Swedish rental company Voi, for example, practices a kind of satellite model: In the vicinity of a large city like Nuremberg, the company is also represented in commuter cities like Erlangen and Fürth.

In the long term, the e-scooters should also drive away from such metropolitan regions.

Aggressive expansion plans tend to be more likely to be found with larger providers.

Lime, for example, started with an enormously large fleet in Germany right from the start.

The lenders do not necessarily cover the entire city area during the expansion.

Sometimes it is also about strategically occupying the cities with a small fleet.

In this way, the rental companies can gain experience with the local conditions and still expand the offer at a later point in time - especially if new competitors emerge on site.

Germany has everything you need

For Lime, Germany is now the second most important market for “micromobility” in the world, right after the United States.

What this means is the type of transport that is supposed to help stop climate change: small, light and, above all, electrified vehicles as an uncomplicated alternative to the steel giant car.

In Germany there is everything that is important for success, the American Ting lists: lots of people (and thus potential customers), a good infrastructure and many bike paths that can be used safely - even without the comforting crumple zone of a car.

Nevertheless, he has not yet come to the end of continuously expanding the business: In addition to conquering the small town, Ting also wants to do this by expanding the offer: "We have not yet fully reached our goal of offering a complete alternative for a car", says Ting. That is why his companies are working on making other means of transport available in addition to e-bikes and e-scooters. He can't reveal which ones yet.

To do this, however, the services must also become cheaper. So far, even a short journey has often cost more than a public transport ticket. This is why providers like Lime are now offering packages: Scooters can then be rented for a day, a week or even a month. This is then similar to the subscription models from the streaming sector. This also has the advantage that people keep getting on an e-scooter. Not just in the metropolises.