The US cycling industry faces “devastating consequences” from tariffs and wider business uncertainty, with little hope of a recovery before the end of the decade, the boss of lobby group PeopleForBikes said this week at the world’s largest cycling trade show.
Jenn Dice, chief executive of the US group told journalists at Eurobike in Frankfurt, “We’re pretty sober about the next four to five years.” PeopleForBikes predicts stagnation in US bicycle sales until 2029 with “plenty of headwinds”, she added. “Many of our CEOs say in their many decades of experience, they’ve never experienced a time like today.”
The industry was already contending with four years of falling sales after a major boom during the pandemic, when the US came to be seen as a key growth market because of its size and lower levels of bike ownership.
“Back then, we were envious that we were not present in the US, but now we are actually very happy about this”, said Jonas Nilsson, CEO of Europe’s largest bike maker Accell Group, which owns brands including Koga, Raleigh and Babboe.
Others such as German direct-to-consumer brand Canyon Bicycles and British folding bike maker Brompton have scaled back plans to expand in the US. “There is just too much uncertainty in that market,” Brompton chief executive Will Butler-Adams told the Financial Times. He has shelved plans to open two flagship stores in the US. “If tariffs can change from one month to the next, this is not the time to sign a five-year lease on a new shop with 12 staff.”
Some 12.5mn bikes are sold in the US each year. About 90 per cent of them are imported, mostly from Asia. While the US has not decided final tariff levels for many countries, general economic uncertainty and consumer caution has hit demand, Dice said. “A lot of Americans love bikes, but they are not replacing them at the clip that we were hoping for.”
Canyon, one of Europe’s largest bike brands and sponsor of star cyclist Mathieu van der Poel, was already “seeing demand in the US is slowing down”, chief executive Nicolas de Ros Wallace told the Financial Times. “We have reviewed our growth plans [in the US],” he said, adding that one way the company was responding was by trying to shift sales elsewhere. “We looked into our orders and have moved some product that was destined for the US to other regions.”
While the US market is in a slump, the situation in Europe is more varied. Burkhard Stork, the boss of cycling industry association ZIV, said that bike sales in Europe’s biggest economy Germany were up 5 per cent over the first five months of 2025 compared with the same period last year. “We are confident that we are now really seeing light at the end of the tunnel,” he said.
Butler-Adams described 2025 as “a transition year” for Europe, that would, he hoped, be followed by an upswing in 2026. “I am pretty sure that this is not a false dawn,” he said, pointing to falling inventory levels and steady demand in Europe.
Brompton is on track to increase revenue by about 10 per cent this year and for an improvement in profits, which were all but wiped out last year. Butler-Adams said that a 20-inch model launched last year already accounted for 20 per cent of revenues and that higher-price electric bikes were selling much better than the company had hoped.
Nilsson is not as upbeat. While sales of new bikes have stabilised and the inventory glut — which built up because the industry expected the pandemic sales boom to last — has been largely resolved, overall demand in Europe remains sluggish. “For us, Germany is still the lowlight,” he said, adding that sales in the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg had picked up more strongly.
For Accell, he said, the best performing part of the business had been its spare parts division XLC, which accounted for about a third of total group sales of €1.29bn in 2023, the latest year for which audited results are available. “People avoid buying a new bike but need to get their old ones serviced,” said Nilsson, adding that bikes bought during the pandemic boom increasingly need maintenance as they age. “After a few years, tyres, chains and saddles need to be replaced.”
Canyon boss De Ros Wallace said his business “will move cautiously” over the next few years after its losses widened to €38mn last year. Its main shareholder Groupe Bruxelles Lambert, which bought a majority stake in 2020 in a deal valuing Canyon at €800mn, last year wrote down its shareholding by 43 per cent.
He added that the 2024 loss had partly been caused by “sacrifices” Canyon had made, offering discounted prices to clear a glut of unsold bikes, as well as by a costly recall of faulty e-bike batteries.
“Looking forward, we won’t chase revenue but will focus on profitable growth,” he said, adding that after €792mn of sales in 2024, the figure was expected to be flat in 2025, having doubled since GBL took its stake. From 2026, Canyon is aiming for “low single-digit growth”, compared with about 20 per cent annual growth before the crisis hit.
Alex Thusbass, CEO of German e-Bike maker Hepha that was founded in 2021, said that the industry’s problems were “entirely self-inflicted” by “foolish overproduction” during the boom years that resulted in a glut of unsold bikes and the need for costly discounts.
“We were lucky and never ended up with too much stock,” Thusbass said, adding that he believed the long-term outlook for electric bikes in Europe was bright. A new lightweight but powerful Hepha bike won a Eurobike prize for new products.
Thusbass worries however that the industry could be hit again by a supply and demand mismatch in the near future. “Inventories are falling, but suppliers currently aren’t increasing production,” he said, “We are already seeing the first signs of shortages. Years of overproduction could suddenly swing into a new period of too little production.”
