Category: Ebikes

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What is a bike shop anyway?

One area of the bicycle industry that has remained quietly murky is how many bike shops there are in the United States. This seems simple enough to do. I can write some bots to pull retailer lists from brand websites and aggregate them together. But here is when we start running into the edge cases. 

  1. What if they are a service only shop? 
  1. Or a non-profit dealing with training? Is that still a bike shop? 
  1. Why are there random other businesses on these dealer lists? Auto and moto dealerships; general stores; snow sports, etc. 

We start to run into probabilities, and edge cases more than we would like. What we can do is augment this collection approach with a consumer centric one. Here, we ask the question, “where could I purchase, rent, or repair a bicycle?”. Then the breadth of possibilities opens. 

This article will be an initial attempt to unify the language of the bicycle industry around the types of businesses that consumers interact with to define the broader bicycle market. Below is a flow diagram detailing how to define each type of bicycle business. Below that we will analyze how many locations there are in the US and Canada fitting into these classifications. 

How many shops are there?

There is a lot in flux as to the count of retail locations. Nonetheless, the following is the result of our initial categorization efforts for the entire list of retail locations. Depending on your perspective on the industry, you might be surprised about the size of mass market, or the size of traditional bike shops.

Nonetheless, it is clear that consumers view both styles of purchasing equally when it comes to bicycle purchases. Looking at rest of market data from Circana, it seems that children’s bikes are much stronger in these mass market locations, due to their much lower prices.

Within the Bike Shop category, traditional independent bike stores dominate the location share. Although there was a sizable amount of acquisition of retail locations by brands before and during the pandemic, they still only account for a small share of total locations.

The big difference with Canada is an increase in outdoor retailers. This makes sense as we move to higher latitudes, there is a shorter cycling season and more need to blend categories.

Making the point more dramatically is Norway, where two thirds of retail locations are Multi-Sport. You can see my recent blog post about estimating the size of the Norwegian market here.

A bonus for you nerds who read to the bottom: did you notice how the roughly 18,000 locations is roughly the square root of the ~330 million Americans in the US?

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USA Ebike Imports 2024 H1

There are a lot of headwinds in the cycling industry as of late, including decreases in ebike retail sales in the US and Europe. Then came the realization that tariffs were going to expire mid way through June 2024. For many at the retail level, this came as a surprise. But if you worked in supply chain, this was much more predictable. We can see the first evidence of this. While 2024 saw ebike imports lower than the last two years, May and June shot up considerably.

US ebike imports trailed 2023 for the first 4 months of 2024, before jumping ahead of the prior two years in May and June.

It is pretty impressive how these shipments stacked up just prior to the implementation of the tariff. Well, it’s not quite as clear cut a success as it might seem. Even though a lot of shipments arrived prior to June 14th, the volume of units did not drop off there after. My guess, is its frankly hard to time sea shipments perfectly, and some missed the window to get those ebikes into the US prior to the expiration of the tariff exclusion.

Could it be a trend of increased imports?

We have seen some slowing in the decline of imports in Europe, and some positive news from brands. However, the reality is that a lot of businesses are still struggling with cash flow constraints, and are more likely to plan conservatively on imports for the remainder of 2024. My guess is we will see imports at an elevated level in July, but regress to prior years before falling off more sharply toward the end of the year. We’ll see over the coming months how this prediction plays out.

There is a lot of upside for those brands who are seeing growth and strong financials in 2024 to seize on the opportunity to lean in while other brands struggle to avoid stock outs.

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Adult eBike Share – USA 2024

Following my recent post on ebike sales unit share across various countries, I dug into why the US might be trailing so much behind other nations in ebike sales. Looking at the data, one major contributing factor jumps out: nearly 2/3 of us bike sales units are children’s bikes! In Europe it is only 20% according to CONEBI.

If we remove children’s bikes from the conversation, the charts look a bit different. Below are estimates compiled from Bicycle Market Research’s investigation into ebike imports, publicly documented sales estimates, and import data from the USITC DataWeb.

The sudden jump in import ratio in 2023 and 2024 likely comes down to category mix at brands. When sales began to decline and inventory piled up in 2022 and 2023, brands had to make choices as to which categories to cut how much. Naturally, they looked at which categories are growing and used those as safer bets to place, leading to more ebikes being imported.

This data puts the US ebike share around 4 years behind Europe. That’s much closer than the 8 years behind that including children’s bikes implies. Using data like this, we can better estimate the rate at which categories shift from traditional to electric. As Europe continues, we should expect its share growth to flatten. Looking at the 4 percentage point growth from 2017 through 2020, it then decreases to ~ 2.5% in each of the next 4 years. What percentage point growth do you think we can expect over the next 4 years?