Hello Vital MTB Visitor,
We’re conducting a survey and would appreciate your input. Your answers will help Vital and the MTB industry better understand what riders like you want. Survey results will be used to recognize top brands. Make your voice heard!
Five lucky people will be selected at random to win a Vital MTB t-shirt.
Thanks in advance,
The Vital MTB Crew
Pretty positive Alchemy is gone as well.
We could further categorize the list by "companies gone" vs "companies who have gone through some kind of restructuring (but exist)"
IE, TGR ended up restructuring (but is still around; not going away).
Archer Components is gone.
Looks like we can add OnlyMotion to the list. The ones who made the wireless dropper conversion kit. They cancelled their Kickstarter shortly after announcing it. I bet this company spent a fair chunk of money on R&D and advertising but unfortunately the timing was bad.
ARI just reporting that they got hundreds of bikes stolen... not the best timing for sure.
One of the bids that contained some former staff was turned down. Will be interesting to see the outcome. Kinda hope it doesn't go back to the original owner and one of the local Shore based options get's it (no diss to the crew in QC, just that Rocky's soul is the Shore).
I won't say names at this time but there's one distro in the mix who, if nobody on the shore gets it, I hope wins. There's another distributor in the running who, having worked with them for years doing orders, booking, warranty, inputting, etc..... I really fucking hope doesn't win (but probably has the biggest VK pockets out of everybody and is my guess for getting the W). Of those who've made it to the last stage, there's the possibility of a bright future with companies I trust to connect with the legacy and 'spirit' of Rocky Mountain more than others.
Has any brand emerged from bankruptcy and been successful? One of the only brands I've seen have a real resurgence frankly, is Marin. They make good stuff now, that is well priced and supported.
Sidenote - I'm suprised Leo would try to resurrect Pole. Just find new partners, and start something new with whatever you learned. Otherwise, what's going to be different this time around?
What exactly did Leo learn though? He was a prick to his own customers who had problems, and a prick to half the other people, and couldn't glue a frame together without it disassembling mid ride.
Ok so Rocky doesn't go on the list, but GT surely does? Yes it didn't "fail" and the parent company is solvent, but it's closed indefinitely currently.
Is the distributor that is not in favor Quebec based? And starts with O?
Thule is making some changes in Colorado
Thule to lay off 22 workers in Colorado | Bicycle Retailer and Industry News
AKA the amazon method, or any large chain/retailer later referred to as a "monopoly" - they either succeed and take down a bunch of smaller companies (or buy them out), or they fail....and sometimes still take a bunch of smaller companies with them.
I've blasting all my SoCal shop connections with a pic of a guy that came into my friends shop with one of the bikes.. Hopefully, they get caught..
This whole thing is sus... as the kids say. Ari is in Utah. The land of drama and MomTalk. Whole truck full of bikes... Gone... On a mission trip to MEXICO!!!
only way this could be more believable, if there was 3 honda civics, with Spoon engines, Motec System exhaust and Green neon underglow seen racing away from the scene.
No one likes the tuna here asshole
@jeff.brines somewhere in this thread you did a deeper dive on Fox Factory. Any further thoughts with the latest guidance? Implications for the broader industry?
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/fox-factory-price-target-lowered-to-24-from-40-at-truist-1034581519
https://www.tipranks.com/news/the-fly/fox-factory-price-target-lowered-to-25-from-32-at-baird
https://www.tipranks.com/news/the-fly/fox-factory-price-target-lowered-to-34-from-40-at-stifel
Layoffs at the German office as well https://www.facebook.com/rheinpfalzpirmasens/posts/ein-teil-der-belegschaft-erhielt-bereits-die-k%C3%BCndigung/1243070617824700/
Yeah, well I do
I am interested if there will start being product abandon at port. If you start looking at over 100% tariffs it maybe more affordable to abandon the product and find another supplier rather then pay the import tax, or buy your own product at auction at a later date.... Not sure how abandon product would be dealt with.
In a lot of cases that would mean burning relationships with your supply chain which is not something I think a lot of companies would seriously consider doing voluntarily.
You usually pay for product Freight on Board from the factory. When your cans land stateside you deal with your customs payments…. Speaking from personal experience, abandoned international orders create a problem for your your trading company, your customs broker and their relationship at the port. Your factory got paid back in Shenzen, or wherever.
It’s not like you can drive down to the boat and load up the 40’ i.c. on your personal hotshot trucking rig- there is a whole world of longshoremen, brokerage agents and customs collectors that hold your product in bond until you pay up and have documents with a customs stamp.
Once again, from personal experience, under previous administrations, if you ghost your order after it lands, say wait a few you weeks, eventually you can can head down to the customs house to plead in person to try to make a deal…
That is all predicated on normal port volume. Forecast right now is for arrivals to be massively 2020-style down over the next few months, so ports and customs agents will have considerably more land dockside to sit on abandoned orders.
My bad.
This isn’t company guidance. It’s sell-side research. All the big banks have research teams that cover a sizable group of publicly traded equities. These reports are primarily intended for top institutional and mid-tier clients, so you can’t just search for them online. I used to have access in a previous role, and these notes can definitely move a stock.
They typically include a rating (buy, hold, or sell) and a price target, usually for a 12-month horizon.
In this case, the banks clearly don’t like the future for Fox from a stock performance standpoint, which lines up with everything discussed earlier in this thread. I don't see anything here that surprises or shocks me. Occasionally, analysts have some kind of edge worth paying attention to, like a unique supply chain check or early demand insight. But without seeing the note firsthand, we can’t know if that’s the case here. This looks more like a reflection of already-known factors such as consumer softness and tariffs, not some hidden signal about quarterly performance.
Bottom line: This is similar to me giving my take on the stock, just from someone who spends every day modeling companies and tracking a group of similar names. It’s not coming from the company. It’s external analysis.
I think the layoffs from the German office were due to Fox moving the German distribution and support to the distributor Cosmic Sports which was announced recently.
It's an interesting move considering that about a decade ago Fox actually bought out their German distributor so they could take over the distribution themselves: https://www.bike-eu.com/2819/fox-inc-acquires-german-distributor-toxoholics
This type of move seems to be counter to what most brands are doing these days - taking distribution in-house. The German market is HUGE (about the size of the US market) so it's a bit of a curious move that fox is shifting back to a distributor (although Cosmic Sports is considered one of the best). Especially because, as I loosely understand it, German laws require companies to buy out distribution rights from their prior distributors.
Saving money. Not doing distribution yourself means you dont need to take care of anything from hiring, real estate to marketing. They will save a ton on not doing that.
Also i doubt that for Fox Europe is that big market - Fox is very expensive in Europe compared to Rock Shox which is pretty opposite how it is in US and you can see it on what ppl ride.
The other sngle on moving back to distribution is derisking and cashflow.
When you act as distributor yourself, you're responsible for the "sell in" at transactional level, and with shops going under worldwide, forecasting gets harder. Go to a 3rd party distributor and while you may give away some margin, you can more accurately annualise the figures, as you build that into minimal stocking commitments/obligations in the distribution contract.
Equally, quarterly order volume/revenue targets (with a top up clause on failure to meet annualised equivalent by end of fiscal year) are easy to build into the agreement.
In a softening & very volatile market, with no clear path out or recovery timeline, I'd say a reduction on GM to add in forecastability, derisking and cashflow stability is probably a very smart move by Fox.
Not bike based but very similar issues that are being faced.
Big tech jesus fan! Louis Rossmann's take (1:25:00) is great because he doesn't hold back and he's a relatively small shop.
The uncertainty is the real kicker. Big manufactures like Specialized, Trek announce a 10% increase while small ones like RAAW said they will absorb that number. There is no consistency and other manufactures hanging by a string (financially speaking) are shitting bricks.
Interesting to watch how companies are applying the tariffs to their product lines.
Don't forget the NOS systems.
On the subject of the Ari theft, I saw an article on BikeRumor that offered more detail than the other articles I'd seen. I'd assumed the trucker stopped for lunch and someone snatched the trailer, or emptied it out, but it was actually a more sophisticated operation where the thieves impersonated a real trucking company, and picked up the container at the port as if it was just a regular day on the job: https://bikerumor.com/ari-bikes-truck-theft/
I had recently seen an article about companies using that excess space at the port that you mentioned to set up sort of tariff free waiting stations, where you can basically rent a spot to park your container before it goes through customs, in hopes of the tariffs being reduced significantly in the near future. The downside is obviously that you could end up boosting your costs even further due the rent payments, and still end up paying the tariff, but if I was swimming in inventory I'd be pretty tempted.
I should add that I've never dealt personally with large scale importation, so I may have missed a detail or two, but that was the gist of it.
Post a reply to: The Bikeconomics (Mega)Thread