Oh my. I just read that the Dutch Accell group filed for bankruptcy after an already approved sellout to the Singaporean Dutech group (which btw also owns the makers of our bicycles, the Oldenburg-based vsf Fahrradmanufaktur). The reasons given are stagnating sales after the end of Corona, which didn’t seem to be expected in some management circles.
The sad thing about that is not only that we lose some big names of the bicycle industry like Raleigh, Lapierre, Haibike, GHOST, WINORA, Batavus, SPARTA, or KOGA, but also that now – after the damage done by a war to Iran started by Israel and the US, we face ever-rising oil prices, and as such, we could expect that more e-cars, but also more e- and manual bicycles *will* be sold in the not too distant future. After all, an e-bike is way more energy-efficient than even normal bicycles, or walking, or e-cars, according to a study from velotech.de (this article is in German, but the graphic should show you their results).
Sometimes banks, and “the market” just seem to have bad timing. Too bad for all of us.
In case you’d like to hear BikeRadar’s Simon & Warren discuss about this on Youtube, here’s a link. And yes, maybe these miscalculations did happen because they expected more e-bike (really called “Pedelec”) sales, and why might people not want them? Well, maybe because they’re all proprietary? So the battery of bike A wouldn’t fit into bike B and so on? Plus because they’re expensive? Plus because the more hightech you build into a bicycle, the more can fail? I just read about an increase of interest in human-powered bicycles, with integrated hubs, and/or less tech… also in most cases these are much lighter, like your typical road race bikes for instance… just think about possible power outages – what would you do with your heavyweight pedelec? All these things might be considered before people spend much of their money… and yes, maybe the (“new”) Chinese brands like XDS, Winspace & Co will win, because they simply offer more for peoples’ hard earned cash…
Anyway, and like always, thanks for reading.