Gongxiang E-San put 300,000 umbrellas on the street — the street kept them

Riding the 2017 dockless-sharing boom, Shenzhen Yisan Technology — founded on 12 April 2017 by clothing-industry veteran Zhao Shuping — launched 共享e伞. The model was simple: umbrellas cost about 60 yuan each, users paid a 19-yuan deposit plus a top-up and rented at 0.5 yuan per half hour, and the company planned to recover costs mostly through advertising on the canopies, handles and bags. First umbrellas went out in Shenzhen on 16 May 2017.

Deployment outran control. By June the company had put close to 300,000 umbrellas — its own dashboard showed 270,000–280,000 — into 12 cities with 400,000 registered users, and the losses began. In Nanchang, 30,000 umbrellas placed near subway exits in mid-June were almost all gone within half a month; Shanghai deployments vanished at close to 100%. A 19-yuan deposit deterred nobody when the umbrella itself was worth far more than the forfeit.

Zhao's answer became the story: this was '藏伞于民' — hiding umbrellas among the people — and users taking them home was sharing working as intended, with a projected 30% loss rate acceptable. City management officers in some districts removed the rest for being tied to public fixtures. The angel round of May 2017 was 10 million yuan, largely the founder's own money; the planned 300–600 million yuan Series A never materialised, and the wave of umbrella-sharing ventures stalled by late 2017.