Giant
Merida enters India sans road bicycle
Perhaps due to bicycle industry commotion about how China’s emerging middle-class will secure growth for every brand under the sun, India is often overlooked. 25 years after its first export, Merida, Taiwan’s second-largest bicycle manufacturer, is finally dipping a cautious tyre – but not a skinny one – into the Indian market.
Marginal gains | Giant Bicycle’s China yield play
From rather humble beginnings as a maker of bicycle products for other brands, to becoming the world’s largest manufacturer of bicycles, Giant Manufacturing Co Ltd has pioneered global brand development in the bicycle industry. From the outside, it might appear that Giant has done it all, and has it all.
Taiwan’s quality strategy | why your $3,000 bicycle comes from China
Any attentive cyclist riding Melbourne’s Beach Road regularly in recent years would have noticed two things; there are a lot more people cycling, and; there are a lot more people cycling on nice bikes. It would appear that, in order for leisure riders to truly express themselves as cyclists, a quality composite bicycle is de … Continue reading
Vertical limit | surviving compression fatigue
Consumers of cycling products have been taken for quite a ride during the last two decades. Bicycle brands, their distributors and retailers, demonstrated a remarkable endurance and capacity to sustain a profitable, trust-based supply chain model that ultimately could not resist a swell in capitalistic desire urged forward by the confluence of global trade re-structuring … Continue reading
Vertical limit | 10 years on, the first cracks appear
Year 2001. Taiwanese OEM production hummed along, retail prices were buoyant, and cycling was enjoying an upswing in popularity across the Asia-Pacific region. However, as the new millennium’s first decade matured, so too did a trio of inter-related trends that would upset the bicycle industry’s delicate ecosystem and threaten to explode into a full-blown zero-sum … Continue reading
Vertical limit | bicycle industry supply chains
2011 is a fine time to be a consumer of cycling equipment. Brands and their downstream re-sellers are clambering over each other to cut through the noise created from market re-structuring. Many players in the bicycle industry have been left stranded as they’ve failed to adapt to a new competitive normality. The only trick left … Continue reading
Vertical limit | blissful detachment: export utopia
1991. Shimano STI was introduced, Miguel Indurain’s five-year Tour de France dominance began, teens moshed to ‘Nevermind’, and the World Wide Web officially launched to the public. Bicycles were purchased in bike shops and carbon fiber frames were often of dubious quality. But thanks to a surge in exports from the US and Europe, at … Continue reading
Road cycling INDIA | watch out world; this is serious
In this continuation of yesterday’s post, Cycling iQ holds a Q&A with Vivek Radhakrishnan, co-creator of Bangalore-based KYNKYNY Wheelsports cycling team, about the road cycling scene in India.
UCC bicycles | The Avanti connection
Yesterday, Cycling iQ explored the development of emerging bicycle brand UCC in its home territory of China. Though UCC produces 50,000 self-branded bicycles each year, another 400,000 units are produced in its factories for other well-known bicycle brands. The most enduring relationship of this kind is with Australasian brand, Avanti. Welcome to the world of … Continue reading
UCC bicycles | not another giant
Siloed in the NE Asia market (with Indonesia an exception), UCC might well be the biggest bicycle brand you never heard of. Since inception five years ago, Universal Cycle Corporation’s year-on-year growth is modest in the context only a Chinese start-up in a country with 8-10% annual economic growth could truly relate to. So why isn’t … Continue reading
