Cycling Industry News Market Data 2024: Bike workshop revenue

CIN regularly shares excerpts from its Market Data report (available to purchase in full here), featuring findings from the independent bike dealer and workshop sector. This time, we look at that lynchpin for the market – the workshop, where we asked “Has your annual bike workshop revenue increased or decreased?”

ANALYSIS: Sometimes data hits squarely where you expect it to, confirming your assumptions and here we can – largely – say that this is the case with the numbers gleaned from the workshop revenue question.

Yes, there has been more workshop business occurring in recent times. You know why, but we’ll go through the main theories: Cash strapped consumers are more likely to service their existing bikes than splash out on new bikes; Compounding that, consumers are more likely to already have a newish bike thanks to lockdown, and are again probably more likely to be servicing existing bikes than buying yet another new one; And then there’s inflation – more workshop revenue in the last 12 months? That’s also probably to be expected. But, it’s not a universal story, so let’s look closer at the numbers.

The majority of the nation’s cycle retailers saw workshop revenue growth in the last 12 months, with a whopping 42% reporting a 10-50% increase. A third (33%) had flat  year-on-year workshop revenues, and that’s a very clear message that workshops have been a vital revenue driver for independent bike shops, with three quarters of retailers seeing workshop revenues either flat or increasing. On the other hand, a smaller but perhaps still significant 17% saw revenue down 10-50%, which is enough to illustrate that even the workshop can’t make up for the dire economic situation the industry has been facing – and which we hope is almost over with.

We’ve spent quite a bit of time banging on about diversification of customer and income stream within these pages. Arguably, the workshop is the most obvious example of diversification for a shop selling bikes and P&A. But yes, the statistics support our preconceptions here: Workshops are clearly key to the bike retail mix (although not universally going great guns for everyone). It will be very interesting to see how workshop revenues change as 2024 progresses and – presumably – customers start to buy a few more bikes instead of servicing their old ones.

You can read more CIN Market Data excerpts regularly within the pages of Cycling Industry News Magazine (subscribe here). If you want to take part in the next report, put your hat in the ring by emailing the editor. If you want to comment on the findings, comments are welcome here.