Why doesn’t the stock exchange like the sharing economy, from Uber to Airbnb? – Corriere.it

I share therefore I am. Perhaps. It has been 23 years since the publication of The Age of Access, the book in which the economist Jeremy Rifkin anticipated an economic paradigm shift with the decline of property capitalism to the full advantage of a capitalism of access: In an On networks, it is easier for access to physical or intellectual property to be negotiated than for the ownership itself to be traded.

Let me be clear: however lucid Rifkin himself had not anticipated the future. He was thinking aboutoutsourcing of multinationals, now in sharp decline thanks to the rebalancing of backshoring. He anticipated the knowledge economy. But he hadn’t understood, for example, that his intuition of him was so profound as to find a radical application within the past few years also in the physical world of hotels, mobility, money. How could he: in 2000 there were no iPhones and smartphones. The enabling technology for what we call today had not yet been thought of sharing economy and that worked for a while: assets became a burden on balance sheets.

Throughout history, rent has always won over income, as Thomas Piketty argued in his books. But what if the annuity comes even without having to bear the costs? Here then is that Airbnb she has become more powerful than Hilton without owning a single room. Uber has become the largest and most valued fleet in the world without owning a car. Why waste money and money buying things when you can use other people’s things on the net?

It actually worked. Until the pandemic of 2020. Today finance, despite the services having restarted, seems to have returned to milder advice on the valorisation of non-assets. Lightweight, sure. But with lightness sometimes we take flight, losing the ability to keep our feet on the ground. Is the Parisian revolt against electric scooters just the tip of the iceberg?

We know there is sharing and sharing economy. Let’s start with the one who knocks on the door even if never twice: the Glovo-economy. The pandemic has provided an even greater boost to this offshoot of the sharing economy. Uber eat, Deliveroo, Glovo itself are based on the same business model: I don’t need bicycles and scooters (or even employees) if an army of ants connected to a platform can run under their own power from A to B to transport food in record time. Raise your hand if you don’t rely on these services during the season of restaurants closed due to Covid-19.

So all right? No: Deliveroo listed post-pandemic during 2021. But shares have gone from £3.86 at their peak post-IPO valuation to 92 pence these days. From Hero to zero joked someone on the stock market. Glovo, which in the same period had talked about listing on the stock exchange, learned the lesson of Deliveroo and the IPO scheduled between 2022 and 2023 never arrived. The Spanish group was acquired by the German giant Delivery Hero. The service works. But the problems with trade unions and the regulation of the sector have made themselves felt. Now a distant memory also the Gorillas bubble that promised the whole world at the door in ten minutes.

Then there is the actual sharing economy, that of young people who will no longer take a driving license and of the car which is no longer a status symbol. There are Fiat 500s around the city anyway. The first to be left empty by the virus. Here too, a distinction must be made: for Uber there was also the effect of the bad boy Travis Kalanick who, with his sub-culture of the difficulty of being a disruptor without being a *****, was pushed away (insults and ill-treatment for drivers, total lack of respect for women in the company, etc). But the cure of the prodigy Dara Khosrowshahi, ex Expedia, did not convince Wall Street: Uber lost 50 percent of its value in 2021 and returned just above the minimum values ​​it had touched during the first phase of the pandemic when cars and drivers were locked inside. The market is doing badly for everyone, but here are the promises that have failed.

Lhe thrust of the conquest of the Far West – that is, of a world without rules and without regulators – was lost, even if in many countries the service has found its equilibrium. Airbnb is the litmus test: the share in the last three months has reached historic lows to now go back up to 113 dollars, at a value that is halved compared to 2020 and in any case never touched even during the lockdown. Here too the customers have returned. Exuberant ratings don’t. The emptiness in budgets seems to be falling within the laws of gravity.

On the other hand, the company that most of all represented office sharing during the lockdown, the same one that managed to introduce a new way of saying in the international lexicon (You are on mute), i.e. Zoom, is worth 70 dollars. During the pandemic it had exceeded 500. That means about 15 percent of the maximum value. Not yet a new economy bubble report. But certainly not even as a new access capitalism.

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