Shenzhen will adopt a public bidding procedure for shared bike operators to vie for the operation of the city’s 450,000 shared bikes, according to a bidding notice announced Monday.

It is expected that enterprises such as Meituan and Hello will apply for the bidding. The companies who win the bidding will be approved to operate the corresponding number of shared bikes for three years.

According to the bidding notice, the city will open 450,000 quotas for shared bikes, which is an increase of the current number of operating shared bikes, standing at 412,000.

Each district will be allocated with a specified number of shared bikes. Bao’an will have the largest quota of 100,900, followed by Longgang (94,300), Nanshan (62,600), Longhua (56,700) and Futian (51,800).

The city will put 80% of the bikes, or 360,000, into operation in the initial stage, and the remaining 90,000 bikes will be put into use when the market and operators comply with the required conditions.

The allocation of the number of bikes will be adjusted during the operation period. If a company fails the city’s examination, the bidding company will lose the shared bike quotas.

The use of shared bikes in Shenzhen had seen a rapid expansion followed by a cooling down since they entered Shenzhen in 2016.

In September 2017, Shenzhen recorded an average of 5.17 million uses of shared bikes per day, with 900,000 shared bikes operated by 10 companies running in the city. The shared bike usage has seen a decrease since 2018. The volume of the bikes stayed at 400,000 for the past two years, resulting in the operators shifting from competing in scale to instead increasing their service quality, operation, and maintenance.