Taiwan+1 and the kids bike market in new issue of Cycling Industry News

The new issue of Cycling Industry News (Issue #03 2024) is now live online, tackling some of the burning issues of today and peeking ahead at the direction of everything from supply chains around Taiwan, the kids bike market, landmark pro-cycling legislation and more:

• Taiwan + 1: We look into the cycling industry’s manufacturing hotbed in Asia and see how supply chains are shifting
• Kids bikes: It’s not a market having its finest hour in the UK and Germany right now, but is that an existential problem for the cycling industry?
• Gtechniq: How this science-led product line has a three-fold opportunity for cycle dealers
• Market Data: Grit your teeth for some difficult truths about the current state of the market
• Mobility specialist Tern talks urban cycling and swapping traditional gender roles in marketing imagery
• Outgoing CIE boss Kevin Mayne discusses the landmark European Cycling Declaration
• And much more.

Subscribers will receive their copies shortly. Don’t subscribe but want a copy? Sign up online here.

FROM THE EDITOR:

CHANGES in the supply chain have lately tended to mean disruption and sleepless nights for many execs in the trade, but one of the latest trends – being experienced both within and without the cycling industry – is the bolstering of the supply chain in the Far East with territories, particularly Vietnam, expanding their manufacturing capabilities.

Dubbed ‘Taiwan+1’ by one wag, Taiwanese producers are setting up factories in other Southeast Asian countries. Why? A variety of reasons – reportedly cheaper labour and land, and also little in the way of levies (page 16). The upshot is, that this trend lends some extra stability to this crucial conduit of the global bicycle industry supply chain. That is – likely – good news for distributors, importers and shops, as well as consumers. It doesn’t quite ‘put to bed’ fears of what might happen if geopolitical tensions boil over in the region, but it does offer it a cup of Horlicks and some soothing music, to extend that metaphor to destruction.

One of the points made in that article on page 16 is that there’s an efficiency and sustainability angle too. Taiwan+1’s production cluster is being built from scratch, with new state-of-the-art factories set up in close proximity, enabling an exciting range of possibilities for technology too. This new state of affairs might make it a little more complex to accurately assess the state of global bike exports, with Taiwan-owned Vietnam-based factories set to change the current status quo, and we’ll have to see if that might confuse and confound any potential trade protection authorities in the mid-term future.

All this takes place against a backdrop of near and on-shoring. You might reasonably argue that the near-shoring discussion never really got going in the cycling industry and based on the trend of Taiwan+1, that probably isn’t about the change anytime soon. However not all bikes are made in Asia and recently stats from Spain, for example, showed that more bikes are being produced in the territory despite the industry downturn (indeed, CONEBI recently pointed out that investment in European bicycle production capacity is on a high). While consumer spending remains neutered (the betting certainty is on 2025 being a true change in fortunes, apparently), the industry has not stood still, with plenty of work going on to set the stage for brighter times ahead.