Shared Power Bank Solution

Shared Charging Market and Merchant Models

iResearch puts China's shared power bank market above RMB 15 billion, with more than 5 million cabinets deployed. Jiedian, Energy Monster, Xiaodian, and Meituan hold most of the share. Restaurants—hotpot, tea drinks, and fast food—account for the largest slice, because guests stay long and need a charge. Malls, cinemas, hotels, and hospitals follow. Merchant deals take three forms. Revenue share: the merchant takes a cut of borrow-and-return turnover. Fixed rent: the merchant charges for the floor space the cabinet occupies. Free placement: the operator carries the full cost and lives on transaction volume.

Operators feel three pressures. Scattered sites: one operator's cabinets sit in hundreds of thousands of shops, so manual patrols and battery refills are expensive. Payments depend on the network: merchant Wi-Fi quality varies, and a failed borrow, return, or payment is felt immediately by the customer. Refill dispatch: work orders need to be generated from slot occupancy and how often batteries move. 4G cellular connectivity keeps borrow, return, and payment reliable, and live slot reports give refill dispatch something solid to plan on.

Each shared power bank cabinet uses 20–100 MB a month, spent mainly on borrow-and-return status, payment reconciliation, slot checks, and OTA updates. SimtoLink supplies 4G/LTE Cat.1 IoT SIMs, a data pool, and APIs into the operations platform for scattered sites in malls, restaurants, and hotels. Merchants often have Wi-Fi, but quality is uneven, so cellular connectivity is what keeps payment and borrow-and-return reliable. The link can also tie into a device management platform and a payment clearing system, closing the loop from cabinet to settlement.