China's cities run on electric scooters, and most of them were heavy, slow and powered by lead-acid batteries. Niu, a Beijing startup, sold a lighter kind: designed like a gadget, powered by removable lithium batteries and linked to an app that showed battery life and location. When Niu listed on Nasdaq in October 2018, it was four years old and selling hundreds of thousands of scooters a year. It wanted to be the premium brand in a market full of cheap ones.

A Search Engineer's Scooter

Li Yinan, a former chief technology officer at Baidu, founded Niu in 2014 with Hu Yilin. Niu sold its first scooters online. It designed its own battery packs and software, and every scooter reported its data back to the company. The pitch to riders was style and convenience. The pitch to investors was a consumer brand with the data of a tech company.

Riding Out the Price War

Niu priced its American depositary shares at $9 each in October 2018. Sales grew in China, and Niu pushed into Europe and later the United States. Competition grew too, and prices fell. In 2026 Niu sold 434,687 units in the second quarter, up about 24 percent from a year earlier, but swung to a loss. It still trades on Nasdaq under NIU.

Cover: The Ox of St. Luke, Martin Schongauer. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for an ox (niu, Chinese for ox).