August import data showed Electric bikes remaining flat at -1% over July, while the average month over month variation since 2019 was 7.6%, and a standard deviation of 20%. Those figures are simply to point out that a small fluctuation in the fat of 1% is in itself unusual. This is further punctuated by the dramatic drop off in traditional bicycles where we are seeing a drop of 49.95% over July. Naturally, this required some investigation. I double checked there was not an issue with the data export, then started looking for which brands may be most highly correlated with this drop off.
These three brands topped the charts by volume, with Huffy by far leading the way. Of course, there are a lot of other brands moving, but they net out to nearly 0 compared to the shift seen from Huffy. Dynacraft showed up only in July, then dropped off. There are some heuristic improvements we can make to fine tune the model in order to identify brands more specifically. However, this data still serves as a valuable indicator of movements in the US bicycle market. An additional interesting trend seen when finding this data is from the three largest brands by retail value, Giant, Trek, and Specialized.
It is important to note the scale that we are comparing, where huffy imported 100,000+ bikes in a month, these three are showing much lower, at less than 5,000. Again, the specific number is not precise, due to the nature of the method used for gathering the data. Clearly, however, Specialized has had many more imports though Q2, while trek has either flown under the radar, or imported very little this year. NOTE: Electra does not show up in the data as a sub brand of Trek.
Electric Bike ratio
Due to the drop in imports of traditional bikes, the ratio of ebikes jumped, but still tracks at a rolling average of 20% of unit imports. The trend of 50,000 units per month has held pretty stable, and is the same rate of imports in 2022. The stability of these imports may reflect a general bullishness on the ebike category.
| Month | Electric | Traditional | Electric Import Share |
| Jan 2023 | 50,560 | 179,678 | 22.0% |
| Feb 2023 | 46,132 | 205,907 | 18.3% |
| Mar 2023 | 35,999 | 195,368 | 15.6% |
| Apr 2023 | 37,656 | 216,028 | 14.8% |
| May 2023 | 31,613 | 272,576 | 10.4% |
| Jun 2023 | 52,733 | 253,823 | 17.2% |
| Jul 2023 | 56,053 | 311,869 | 15.2% |
| Aug 2023 | 55,290 | 156,106 | 26.2% |
