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I think it's an indication of the size of the country you inhabit. My sister lives in the US and thinks nothing of driving 7-8 hours and I have a Dutch friend who thinks driving somewhere over an hour away is a major mission.
LOL have you seen the size of Canada?
I don't think the average Euro can comprehend just how big Canada is unless they've been here and done some driving around.
Obviously it's huge. I mean I do still remember @TEAMROBOT explaining how it took him almost an hour to get to the first trail before he moved. To us that's incomprehensible, I don't want to move half an hour away from where u live because I would have less starting-from-home riding than I do here 😂
If anyone wants to connect the dots on who makes what and where this is a good site to waste some time in. Funny thing at least some of the POC helmets and TLD helmets are made by the same place.
https://www.importyeti.com/
Well I guess they had someone for finance. Not blaming this person.
Organisational failure is rarely one persons fault. But those at the top bear the responsibility of organisations that fail.
Oh not everyone needs to drive an hour to ride...just that due to the size of this place driving an hour is the norm for lots of stuff.
I roll out my garage and it's 5 minutes of riding urbran paths and I am at base of Fromme. Or 15 minutes gets me to the western side of Seymour. Having two of the three North Shore mountains a small pedal away is pretty sweet and I can't really fathom where I'd think of moving to that has it any better.
I felt like quoting this in the super small chance this person finds this thread. I've been in C-Suite roles, said the "right" things, and nobody wanted to listen. It can be very abrasive to raise your hand and say "no", especially if you are a bit younger than the others around you. I imagine its doubly hard as a woman. Its really not fair to blame someone without knowing all the details, as implied earlier. If I did so, I apologize.
This is a bit of a thread derail, but learning how to communicate things to leaders that they may not want to hear is a bit of an art, especially at a younger age...
This is 10X the case in a closely held company if the controlling person/family is hellbent on going in some particular direction despite the financial warming signs. RAD/Rocky certainly has the structure where this could have happened.
Their ebike drive units sound like they work well, but for a $100m company to develop something this complicated seems fraught. How the heck to do you scale enough to amortize the R&D in any reasonable way? Quick mental math is just a hell naw. I figure they bet the farm on deals such as the partnership for city bikes that fell through, and that is what doomed the company. Maybe they planned on growing RM organically to cover the ebike investment, but this seems crazy looking from the outside.
I'd like to think the IP for their ebike drive units has substantial value, but there's already too many players in that bubbled-out space, so that's dubious. This proprietary tech may be a lead weight that makes coming out of bankruptcy with Rocky intact more difficult. Then again, if you can just write off all the R&D, maybe it's a good buy for some company that wants to/can afford to chase bubbles. SRAM? Though who knows what kind of financial shape they're in at the moment. No one in bikes is doing great right now.
Merry Christmas y'all, especially Rocky employees. Whatever happens, we're pulling for you.
100% agree on the difficulty of getting small company owners to change course if they don't want to.
Interestingly Davinci (the other big Quebec mtb bike company & they must know a lot about what each other are doing because of cultural proximity) has a city bike line that claims to have produced 90,000 regular and e-bikes since 2007 & an also an e-cargo bike: https://www.devinci.com/en/urban_mobility_solutions/
RM must have been watching for a long time and hoping to get into that market also, but had really bad timing
To Rocky's credit, it's hard for a lowly CFO to manage up with CEO's of firms large and small. I'm catching up on this thread after being off for a while, and my jaw is on the floor reading that KTM has 265,000 motorcycles sitting in inventory!!!
"It was revealed during the company’s current insolvency hearings that it is sitting on a whole year’s worth of inventory... almost all of this turmoil can be pinned on billionaire company CEO and corporate holdings company namesake Stefan Pierer. Management pushed KTM into overproduction for several months, despite plummeting sales."
Obviously KTM's management liked looking at the graphs that went up more than they liked looking at the graphs that went down.
Sorry to beat the dead horse, but the "an hour is close?" comment was meant along the lines of how much of a handicap is it if you have to lose 2 hours of your time every time you want to test some things. Sure it's a different perception for us Europeans, in a little over an hour we Slovenians can cover most of the country and with that a lot of really diverse terrain, can ride in warm weather in the middle of the winter (down by the seaside), etc.
Maybe that's why there's hardly any products coming out from our neck of the woods then 😂
Except nobody was testing things in Ontario. Both their marketing and development departments were in bc. It seems only the corporate office and some distribution was Ontario based. (One would imagine product was received in B.C. and then warehoused either in B.C. or Ontario depending on intended delivery.
personally I’d say rocky did not invest enough in marketing and made some questionable design choices in recent years. As well as consolidating the model line. One of Rocky’s strengths thru the 2010s was having a diverse model line that often was outside what other big brands offered. (Thunderbolt, Sherpa, “B.C.” variants of models, being early in producing kid friendly models). Beyond their management mistakes I don’t think Canadian Santa Cruz was a winning formula.
Specifically, it’s because Rocky Mountain was purchased by Procycle in 1997.
Procycle was founded in Saint-Georges, QC, in 1977. In the 80s and 90s, Procycle had a full-sized factory and assembly line (manufactured and assembled over 8,000,000 bikes), until production was shipped over to Asia because of cost. They used to manufacture and assemble Peugeot bikes in North America.
Procycle became Rocky Mountain in 2018, and stopped producing all other brands it owned at that time (Miele - entry-level bikes of all kinds and Evox - Commuter style e-bikes).
North Vancouver was responsible for frame development, marketing and some sales/service, whereas most of everything else was based in the head office. All motor development is done from Saint-Georges.
Merci Alex!
I did some more digging into Rocky mountain and found this. This was June 2023
Bewegen was founded in 2015, and its e-bikes were designed and manufactured by Rocky Mountain (formerly Procycle), a company founded by businessman Raymond Dutil.
Collateral damage?
Bewegen's receivables amount to $37.3 million, of which $35 million concerns Gestion RAD and Industries RAD, companies in Mr. Dutil's holding company.
Rocky Mountain loses a customer in Bewegen and the holding company to which it belongs is sinking a lot of money into bankruptcy. It was not possible to reach the management to find out the impact of this debacle.
Peugeot bikes were massive at the time, really interesting that there is that much bicycle history in Saint-George over the years.
https://issuu.com/ebikes-international/docs/ebikes_fall_2022_flip/s/17769998
Quotes:
Founded in 2013 with a vision to bring cutting-edge options for active mobility, and sustainable transportation solutions to cities around the world, Bewegen is now the only Canadian bike-share company following the recent sale of PBSC Urban Solutions, owner of Montréal’s BIXI, to American giant Lyft.
Bewegen’s e-bikes feature their proprietary Dyname electric motor, a 48V high-efficiency lithium-ion battery with a range up to 60km (40 miles), GPS, digital screen to monitor speed, distance travelled, battery level and more.
Based in Saint-Georges, Québec, Bewegen Technologies is the brainchild of Raymond Dutil, who operated Procycle for 40 years and acquired Rocky Mountain Bicycles along the way.
The company worked with Michelle Dallaire to design and create e-bikes, which resulted in their proprietary Dyname motor and e-drive system — both the heart of Rocky’s Powerplay e-bikes and Bewegen’s e-bike share system as well.
Hey Jeff, I'm a lurker on this forum, but I wanted to chime in and say I also appreciate your insights in this thread, as well as others who contribute. Its an interesting topic and I love reading about it!
Thanks for the kind words. Sincerely appreciated.
I also wanted to thank everyone who has taken time to particpate in this thread. In a world full of internet dumpster fires, trolling, dunking and devolving online discussions, at minimum I've found the willingness of the collective to have a meaningful, fun, civil discussion to be worthwhile in and of itself, regardless of how right or wrong we all may be.
I don't know much, but I know the more this happens, the better off it appears we all are.
HNY everyone! Cheers and thanks!
NY times article on tariffs, leads w/ bike company example
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/31/business/economy/trump-tariffs-china.html (the link was gifted to me, i don't have a sub and i think you have to have a sub to read?)
here's a snippet
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After President Donald J. Trump slapped tariffs on Chinese bicycles in 2018, Arnold Kamler, then the chief executive of the bike maker Kent International, saw a curious trend play out in the bicycle industry.
Chinese bicycle factories moved their final manufacturing and assembly operations out of China, setting up new facilities in Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia, Cambodia and India. Using parts mostly from China, those companies made bicycles that they could export directly to the United States — without paying the 25 percent tariff had the bike been shipped straight from China.
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Aren't the new proposed tariffs going to affect all countries as opposed to just China? I know our government are talking about how trade with the US will likely be affected.
My current understanding of the trump 2025 proposed tariff is 25% for Canada & Mexico for border issues and China get an additional % added on top of that 25%. That is for anything that is produced goods imported from those countries. But there is plenty more tariffs that already exist that the USA applies to various countries of origins imported goods.
https://wits.worldbank.org/CountryProfile/en/Country/USA/Year/2022/TradeFlow/Import/Partner/by-country
The AHS column is the average tariff and when click on a country you can see by imported goods categories.
China has currently a 10%+ tariff on clothing and footwear. Mexico and Canada have barely any import tariffs except on food. Italy and Germany currently have 10%+ tariff on footwear.
China has been doing the same thing in Mexico.. Assembly of Chinese parts to claim a Made in Mexico product.
I think the 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico might be to address 2 issues.. China using Mexico to avoid tariffs and US companies setting up shop in Canada and Mexico instead of keeping those jobs in the US..
Unfortunately, tariffs have not been an effective long-term solution and they won't make enough money to turn our economy around..
Your economy doesn't need to be turned around. It's the most successful in the world by an insane margin.
Americans are so much richer than the rest of the world it's nuts.
Your problems are lack of social policy, not lack of economic activity.
From The Economists reporting China themselves are getting annoyed at the offshoring of their companies to skirt tariffs as well, as it means no manufacturing jobs for the Chinese workers and instead the factory owners get richer by setting up new factories in Vietnam etc. They're predicting a mild crackdown on it in the new year due to Chinas struggling economy. The government has performance legitimacy, the people don't get a day which is validated by the country doing better every year, but now it's not doing better for the first time since the revolution.
For anyone who's curious, Mexico is the USA's #1 source for imports, followed closely by China and Canada, but it does import slightly more from Asia as a continent than from the America's, according to the United Nations COMTRADE database on international trade.
Interestingly, when you include exports, Canada is our number one trading partner (imports and exports combined), followed by Mexico, with China in third. This is the sort of stuff really matters when you talk about tariffs, because the people you're trying to stop buying from are also the same people you're trying to continue selling to. Total US imports are around $340 billion annually, and US exports are around $260 billion annually, in an economy of roughly $30 trillion (according to the US Census Bureau and the BEA). Actually, I was surprised when I looked up these numbers at how small a share of the total US economy came from imports and exports, at about 1% each.
My 403b make 28% last year
What’s that about our economy doing poorly?
Its interesting to note the tariff talk has died down over the last few weeks.
I can only assume they have done more modelling and realised people don't want to pay more for groceries, and acknowledge that it was a large part in the Democrats losing, and if they don't control groceries prices they'll suffer the same fate.
The tariff threat could be just a ploy for Trump's administration to get its way internationally with a stick based approach.
I still think they'll do something about solar panels that may trigger the trade war. The US has been left in the dust by China, and considering solar will power the world shortly, its a massive strategic blunder for their hegemony.
If he's already backflipping on election promises before even taking office... that must be some kind of record. And not even remotely surprising. But to already be in the "find out" stage is certainly something.
The "If those kids could read..." meme from King of the Hill seems pretty appropriate right now.
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