From Road.cc
by GEORGE HILL
Let’s be honest here, the bike industry is in the toilet at the moment and has been for the last few years.
I was at my friend’s sculpture workshop the other day, and when I asked why he had a Reynolds sticker on a massive lathe machine, he told me it was because he was given it by a well-known frame builder who had gone out of business.
I also had a New Bike Day last week, which was amazing – but I managed to get the entire bike for the same price as I paid for the groupset alone, because they needed to clear all the unsold stock they hadn’t been able to shift last year. This is not some kind of cheapo knock-off from the Far East, this is a bike that scored 9/10 in a recent road.cc review.
These are anecdotes, but they are being backed up by the data. We covered a few weeks ago that UK bike sales are the lowest they’ve been since the 1970s, and that Giant’s profits are 60% down. It may well be that these are readjustments after the insanity of the pandemic, but it is an indictment of where the industry is and how the country looks at cycling as a whole.
Photo by Tom Austin on Unsplash