REPORT: Inside Tianjin Golden Wheel’s bicycle mega factory
Reporting for CIN, Chris Keller Jackson gets an early look at a purpose-built ‘mega-factory’ for Tianjin Golden Wheel, 1,000 miles north of Shanghai. Golden Wheel is a huge player in the frame making and bike assembly business and recently struck a deal with small wheel and folding bike specialist Dahon…
You probably don’t know of a company called Tianjin Golden Wheel. You should, but it’s unlikely that any of the bike brands that have their frames made there, or have their bikes assembled by them would thank you for revealing the ‘dark secrets’ of the badge engineering that goes on in the Far East. This is not intended to be clickbait – this is the reality of a global bike trade.
Badge engineering should be no dark secret to the trade, the bike trade have been getting expert third parties to make their frames and assemble their bikes, sometimes for cost reasons, sometimes for efficiency and sometimes for quality reasons, for many a year. Golden Wheel goes back to 1987, (reality check – that is 38 years ago!) Many big-name brands just don’t have the capability to build their own bikes en masse. China and Taiwan are the masters of this, along with emerging countries such as Vietnam and Thailand. Far from denigrating this approach, we should be championing these businesses, for they are the best at what they do, for the markets they supply to, whether that is for cost, scale or quality.
Golden Wheel already make low cost through to ‘car priced’ bikes. They mass produce bikes, they weld aluminium into frames, they paint them and then add stocked parts to build up bikes to put into boxes. What makes this feature different is the very near future, with two investments at scale that are currently underway in the provinces of China. These are helping redefine mass manufacturing.
Dahon partnering with Golden Wheel
Dahon – who began producing bikes in 1982 – is a brand you will be familiar with, one of the venerable brands that have delivered successful small wheel and folding bikes to the UK market (shoutout to the UK small wheel pioneers – Moulton, Bickerton Portables and Andrew Ritchie). As the brand digs into eBikes they have developed a partnership with Golden Wheel to continue to deliver the quality products you’d expect from Dahon. I got a chance to see this facility in Tianjin, a province 1,000 miles North of Shanghai in May 2025, a month before we were told that it would be operational.
On 10 May 2025, this enormous space (40,000m2) is half filled with stock that needs relocating, and half cleared flooring with advanced automation, robotic tooling and infrastructure waiting to be bolted to the floor. I’m told that a month from now (which will have passed by the time you read this article), there will be formal production in this plant for Dahon. Given the pace and efficiency I have seen in China on this trip, I can believe this bold claim. Nothing to ‘see’ other than a glimpse of the future partnership and the incredible efforts made to progress this facility, some test apparatus in an onsite testing lab and piles of past production and spare parts stocked in neat rows – the brands of which I can’t tell you about. It is forecast that his facility will product up to 400,000 eBikes, domestic scooters and three wheelers (think TukTuk) for Dahon per year.
Why the reason for this partnership? Dahon has been at the pinnacle of folding bike and bike manufacture for 42 years and have recently launched a ‘Dahon 2.0’ campaign. This is a step change in technology, with this partnership with Golden Wheel forming a major part of this investment in the future. This change in focus comes with new models and promised improvements in folding technology resulting in improved ride stiffness and changes to frame structures in some of the range (Dahon call this Dahon-V). This all adds up to lighter and stiffer frames and better ride characteristics.
In addition to proposed changes to refine current models, new bikes will bolster the range including the impressive looking Vélodon C8 Di2 carbon fibre road bike, with an enhanced Eagle frame design, the sleek looking Télodon C8 AXS lightweight folding bike and the KFeather folding eBike, both with enhanced downtube rigidity and the proprietary Deltech frame tensioner. I’m looking forward to testing these.
Golden Wheel Mega Factory
We move on, get into a minivan and take a trip further into rural China. The cooperative partnership with Dahon was in an existing technology park and a repurposing of an existing building, but when we arrive at the next location, before us is what can only be described as a ‘Mega Factory’, purpose built with brand new road infrastructure to connect to its suppliers and the nearby Port of Tianjin. Here stands two very large multi-story purpose-built buildings joined by a connecting bridge. Pictures taken, I delve inside, and initially there is nothing here, except the occasional supporting pillar and impressively skimmed concrete floors. I didn’t bring my roller skates.
With pride, we are told that this is Golden Wheel’s new factory ‘Jinjiu (Tianjin) Technology Co., Ltd’, primarily for eBikes. It’s truly enormous inside too, 100,000m2 over 4 floors (to put that in context, it’s about 15 Football pitches in total!), with an airbridge between the two buildings. This will build frames and paint them in one side, automate the transfer of frames into the second side then build the frames into bikes – sounds simple. Far from it, this is something from the manufacturing future, complicated and dedicated.
Exploring further on the ground floor of the ‘Frame side’, there are a host of enormous stillages with installed robotic arms, shrink wrapped and ready to position. There is a lot of machinery to install, similar to the Dahon / Golden Wheel partnership I saw – but on a much bigger scale. Then something familiar but not seen in this trip. Side by side are three massive weaving looms, not the type you’d see in a Victorian Mill, all dusty with child labour fixing broken strands of cotton. Wider and deeper, this is the starting point for carbon weaving. I’m told that this factory is all about ultimate quality and that begins with the best Japanese fibres, and control of the weave, by weaving in house. Three looms means they can be self-sufficient, and weave different qualities and cloth patterns side by side. I’m not seeing any autoclaves (the pressure ovens used to ‘bake’ carbon fibre and resin into hard frames) but I’m told there will be plenty. I’m also told that when they are up to speed it is forecast to produce 5,000 carbon frames per month.
I also don’t see any of the jigs and formers used as moulds for carbon frames. Some jigs will be manufactured in house and some will be outsourced, depending upon the company the frame is being made for. For optimal carbon frame quality there will probably need to be a clean room environment, with forced negative air and a controlled atmosphere when laying up the material.
The frame side of the factory will also make alloy frames, far more at a staggering 70,000 per month. Most of the robots on the ground floor relate to tube butting and welding of aluminium. Even with a concentration of machinery in place on the ground floor, I suspect there is more machinery to arrive – this building and the floorspace is truly vast.
The upper floor of this ‘Frame side’ is populated by a maze of central mezzanine structures, pipework and internal walls, as a building within a building. This is the frame finishing area. This facility will utilise the latest ecological water-based paint techniques to prime and finish frames then put them into curing areas, QC and decal lines. Though the scale is massive, and the technology is impressive and highly automated, this is fairly straightforward, but on a larger scale. Next door is where the real ‘magic’ happens.
Frames are stored in Building One until ready for assembly, they are then transferred via the bridge using an AGV (Automated Guided Vehicle) to be placed at one of 14 production lines. As the frames enter Building 2, they pass through a sensor (most probably RFID, the same technology embedded in the sticker on your airline hold luggage) that identifies the product and its routing within assembly, downloads the parts needed (the Bill of Material) and automatically picks those parts from the Warehouse. These parts are then delivered from the Warehouse to the production line, ‘just-in-time’ for the bikes to be built. This is another facet of the efficient Toyota Production System (TPS) in use within China.
The team had built one production line to test the process, having installed the visual screens, indicators and infrastructure, it was easy to envision how this might look when there were dozens of workers building up bikes on this line, but there would be 14 different lines over two floors, each dedicated to a run of a product. There will be over 1,000 workers here. The lines have flexibility to change to the next model with little dwell time. This combination of automation, humans assembling bikes, controlled by screens and detailed work instructions is key to the efficient, quality controlled and reproducible production, to see it on this scale (even if most of it is currently empty) is impressive. I really hope I get to see it in full production over the next few years.
Of what they have built so far, the jewel in their crown sat right at the end of the one production line in place. I’m sure it was operational just for us to witness. There was a roller conveyor taking boxed sample eBikes, automatically wrapping them in banding tapes then delivering to a massive robot arm. This robot had a set of vacuum suckers as its ‘hand’, and picked and placed each box with a eBike inside onto a pallet. The cantilever strength in the arm, and the suction strength in the hand was very impressive. The ability to pick, flip and place boxed eBikes with such precision, and without human intervention is what automation and use of technology is about. No heavy manual handling, repeatable optically managed robot delivery to the pallet, then out of the door.
Tianjin Golden Wheel are placing a lot of trust in eBikes, for the domestic and export markets. This trust is underpinned by a belief in their strategic analysis of trends, and a sizeable investment in buildings, automation and technology. Perhaps this visit is two or three months premature, but to capture the ‘before’ to envisage the future, and potentially revisit the eventual reality is a tantalising glimpse into the future of Badge Engineering on such a massive scale.
