The delivery bottlenecks in the bicycle trade are over, the warehouses are fuller than ever. At the same time, inflation is curbing demand. If you currently want to buy a bike, you can look forward to good offers.
The bicycle industry boomed in the Corona years. Sales figures and prices skyrocketed, sometimes resulting in long waiting times when buying a new bike. Those days are over. Meanwhile, manufacturers and sellers are in a difficult phase. There have never been more ups and downs than now, explains bicycle dealer Markus Bachnik from Maintal near Frankfurt. He runs the small bike shop Dillermut in the fourth generation.
During the pandemic, demand was at an all-time high, but supply was scarce due to supply chain problems. Things are different now: The warehouses are currently more than full, but people are holding back the money or prefer to invest in vacation trips, says Bachnik.
The orders are piling up
The result of the sluggish sales: sometimes high discounts. Larger dealers in particular can afford this – for example Frank Bering from Fahrrad Rückenwind in Friedberg. Containers with new bicycles are delivered to him almost every day. Orders from 2021, 2022 and 2023 are piling up in his yard, in his warehouse and in his sales rooms. He currently has around 1,500 bikes in stock, while the average during Corona was just 150.
Despite the high pressure to sell, Bering sees the whole thing as positive, especially for customers: as a retailer, he has to forego part of his margin, but customers can currently look forward to offers that have not existed for a long time and probably no longer exist become.
Sales driver pedelecs
Sales drivers at Bering are the pedelecs, i.e. bicycles with electric drives, which have caught up significantly in the past eight years. Sales in the bicycle industry have almost quadrupled in the past ten years thanks to the sales figures for high-priced bikes with electric motors and most recently reached 7.36 billion euros.
Pedelecs now have a market share of almost 50 percent. In 2022, too, sales of electrically powered bicycles increased by ten percent to 2.2 million, while total sales fell by around 100,000 bicycles.
Business bike leasing business
Business bike leasing is also keeping the demand for pedelecs at a high level: More and more large and small companies are offering this to their employees. A high-priced bike does not have to be paid for all at once, but employees finance it with a monthly leasing rate that is deducted from their gross salary.
And it is precisely this model that is currently saving the liquidity of many dealers: bicycle dealer Bachnik from Maintal states that 90 percent of all sales that he makes with pedelecs are through leasing contracts.
So the bike is still in demand, and thanks to the record offer, customers can look forward to one or two discounts. Even if the dealers’ profits decrease as a result: With bike leasing and repairs there are ways to survive in the bike market.