For investors backing the march of Mobike in cities across the world, the numbers look very appealing. The orange-wheeled cycles can be rented out for £1 for every 20 minutes, after being churned out by the company’s own Chinese factories at a cost of between £40 and £200 a bike – a small fraction of its rivals’ manufacturing costs, according to Mobike’s former UK general manager Steve Pyer.

Theoretically, this means a bike could pay for itself in 13 hours. In practice there are other substantial costs, such as relocation, servicing and replacing vandalised cycles. But those initial “unit economics” have made Mobike such an attractive business prospect that it has raised close to $1bn (£780m) in venture capital.

Similar financial backing has been given to Mobike’s rival Ofo, which is also now spreading worldwide. As with many tech businesses, conventional wisdom among investors is that dockless cycle hire is a winner-takes-all market: consumers gravitate towards the company with the most bikes and the cheapest prices, giving it the scale required to build more bikes and offer cheaper prices still, creating a virtuous cycle that eventually locks out competitors for good.

It is this rationale that has helped Uber raise more than $20bn and be valued at upwards of $50bn. In fact, the fear of missing out on “the next Uber” has been cited as a reason for investors being eager to jump on Mobike and other “micro-mobility” startups such as Bird, Lime and Jump.

A Bird rider tests out a Scooter in Santa Monica, California. Photograph: Dan Tuffs/The Guardian

This winner-takes-all dynamic has also prompted companies including Uber, Lyft and Google to take direct stakes in, or even ownership of, micro-mobility startups. The thinking is that because users don’t bother with multiple apps for ride-sharing, bike-hiring, or scooter-loaning, in the long run they will use one app for the general purpose of “getting around”.

“The Uber app already handles multiple kinds of rides,” noted analyst Ben Thompson of Stratechery. “It is a small step to handling multiple kinds of transportation – a smaller step than installing yet another app.” Indeed, such apps are not limited to transportation, but are also designed to build a customer base with which to branch out into other services, such as Uber has done with its food delivery service Uber Eats.

Creating such a mass market through bikes, rather than the fleets of cars and drivers, is a cheap, attractive proposition. The rich data garnered on movement and habits could also be monetised.

Other firms are finding their own business niche: Lime, which offers scooters and ebikes, has already expanded to Europe with a Paris launch, as has the scooter company Bird. It may not be long before Britain’s streets are home to a multitude of colourful micro-mobility machines.

Some western city authorities are concerned that unused bikes could be dumped en masse, like they have been in Chinese cities. Photograph: Bloomberg via Getty Images

But will bike sharing pay its way outside China? There are certainly doubts. Next Bike, which offers both docked and dockless schemes around the world, says costs in the west are not comparable due to the rates of theft and vandalism – something which appears to have stunned Mobike.

London’s Santander-branded docking cycle scheme requires substantial subsidy from Transport for London, even after receiving millions in sponsorship. Each journey is calculated by TfL to cost £1.79 and bring in only £1.13 – a loss to the taxpayer-funded body of 66p per ride. Next Bike says its revenues just exceed its costs once a scheme is operating, but it needed £900,000 in initial public support to set up its 500-bike Glasgow scheme. Operating profit for private firms may only show up in dense conurbations with very short trips.

Silicon Valley-style entryism into cities is likely to come under increased suspicion from local authorities, who have been stung by the “ask forgiveness rather than permission” approach of Uber, and are now angered by pavements cluttered with unused bikes and canals filled with scrap metal. Those images may not form part of the pitch to investors but for those who saw cycle-share schemes as a step toward green, sustainable transport, they are a bitter sight.