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Little bit of an aside, but I'm doing some homework on the players in Taiwan, China and Vietnam responsible for most of the "big guys" bikes (frames, primarily). I have a few sources that are helping, but if anyone in this thread has anything to offer - jeff.brines@gmail.com
I think it'd be really cool to shine a light on who is making what for who, even if it doesn't mean much on the surface.
If the semiconductor industry can be so precisely mapped by Dylan Patel and his team, I feel I can figure the bike thing out. The smoke and mirrors is silly. If Nvidia is okay with telling everyone TSMC makes their chips, why the secrecy?
Anyway - reach out if you actually know something!
Cheers!
An aside to an aside here. Japanese Moto companies produce their lower performance 'trail bikes' in Thailand and Brazil. I wonder when these places will start to produce MTB's?
There's already lots of entry level bikes such as hardtails, kids bikes, and commuters that are made in Malaysia and Bangladesh from larger players.
TSMC as a brand name has some cachet to it (they are the global market leaders, head and shoulders above everyone else in the technology that enables the chips they produce), we do not have anything equal in the bike world. Maybe if there was a company that offered a 2x improvement in material handling and qualities and thus enabled the same bikes with half the frame weight of what we have now. That would mean everybody serious would have to make bikes with them, not someone else.
At the end of the day bikes are regularly built in garages. Steel, aluminium, titanium or carbon. It's not really rocket science and you don't really need a factory to do it. Yes if you want to do big volumes, but the end product from the garage will at most be missing some refinement (molded chainstay protection and cable entry ports and stuff like that). But even that could be handled with enough time and money basically in the garage.
With semiconductors, if you put all the chip design capable companies in the fortune 500 list (bar Nvidia) together and they had something to offer to replace CUDA (Nvidias SW development secret sauce), without TSMC they could never compete with Nvidia products.
i'd be more worried if Cube ever decides to attack in the US. they seem to run a pretty lean business, they sell mostly all the bikes through pre-orders and you can't really order up more bikes during the season. therefore, each season they can start with new stock and never have old stock piling aroung like specialized or trek. and their bikes are good value parts wise, you need to deal with quality issues though
Do you know how long Insera has been doing Scott frames and do you know which ones?
The analogy isn't that the bike industry has a perfect analog to TSMC or that bikes themselves are like semiconductors, my analogy is that the manufacturing model (not method) is somewhat similar. In both industries you have a high number of companies that engineer products (all over the globe) and a high number of (Taiwan based) companies that manufacture products. Sometimes there are vertically integrated companies (like Intel) but, at scale, this isn't what we're seeing, in bikes, semiconductors or a bazillion other industries.
TSMC did not always have cache, nor was it considered remotely cool to manufacture your stuff elsewhere. The company started in 1987 and until the 2000s, or even 2010s wasn't really looked at with rose colored glasses. In fact, AMD's Jerry Sanders is well known for saying "Real men have fabs" in the 1990s as a jab to those companies who didn't have their own manufacturing. The Nvidias of the world did hide their manufacturers until ~2005-2006, due to the stigma driven by Jerry Sanders types. Does this not sound remotely familiar?
Now, to your point, TSMC + ASML are doing things that damn near defy physics, and there are probably only a few hundred people in the world that really understand what is happening (if that). In this vein, its absolutely nothing like bikes, but we all knew that. Side note, if any of this talk on semi manufacturing is remotely interesting to people, this is my favorite pod on the subject and probably worth a relisten. Alternatively, Dylan Patel's newsletter is all time, and the work he's done to "map" the semi industry absolutely incredible. His work gave me a sliver of inspiration.
The big point is I'd like to try and lift the veil to figure out who the players are, who makes what and for who, and what the veiled manufacturing side of the business is like. While I'm starting with frames, the idea is I try and map to other components as well, if possible. My guess is 80% of all manufacturing for bikes we care about is done by 20-30 companies in Asia, with the other 20% a cobbling together of much smaller vendors. I'm also guessing there has been a sea change with respect to how things work given the rise in interest rates and turmoil in the space, and it'd be really interesting to know what its like "at ground level". Finally, what is happening in Taiwan is much better signal to what we're going to see in the future. So yeah, for all these reasons I still think my idea holds water.
I'll even go visit. Field trip!
This would be so interesting. After your done can you unravel the ski/snowboard manufacturer web?
In the snow world (bikes are very similar) I always found it so odd that companies try so hard to keep the factory that builds their boards secret. Very few, from the big players to the small core brands, make their own hardgoods. And similar to bikes, there are 10-15 (hard to tell because they are so opaque) factories across the world that make the boards for almost everyone. Some of these factories make awesome stuff, some are pretty terrible. If as a company you were up front and told me you were made in one of the quality factories, that would actually entice me to buy from you. But since no one will spill the beans, you have to then be skeptical of everyone. This is especially true for smaller brands as they are more likely to come out of a lower quality factory. If a small company could say, hey we’re getting pressed in this high quality factory, they would help themselves greatly. But alas everyone goes so far as to almost pretend they make their own stuff.
The outliers in skiing are Moment and ON3P. Both companies make their skis in factories they own in the USA and are very open about their facilities.
To tie it back it to bikes with a concrete example. Transition as a brand designs cool bikes, but their QC has had issues at times. On the other end, the finish on something like a Raaw is fantastic.
Early this year I was considering buying a Privateer. Privateer’s communication was pretty lackluster. This got me a bit scared thinking about what would happen if I had an issue with my frame. If I knew the Privateer frame was built in the same factory as a Raaw, I would’ve been much less concerned. But, for all I know, it is built alongside Transition. This unknown led me to end up not buying from them. We all know Privateer doesn’t make their own frames, so why not tell us who does.
And not to be too hard on Transition, they appear to have great communication and customer support, so concerns about a QC issue are much less concerning because of higher confidence they’ll take care of it if something comes up.
TLDR:
Knowing the factory a bike comes out of would influence a lot of buyers decisions.
Great factory + Good communication = Buy
Great factory + Mediocre communication = Maybe
Mediocre factory + Good communication = Maybe
Mediocre factory + Mediocre communication = No
EDIT: Transparency can lift you up a level, but a lack of transparency does nothing.
on the frames vs completes topic, is that internal or external factors, or both? could that have been partially influenced by tariffs in the US? i seem to recall that frames and components are taxed at a lower rate than a complete bike.
This happened way before tariffs. Was driven by interest rate increases and heightened “credit risk” in the space.
noted, wasn't sure on the timing but the thought crossed my mind.
Factory is only part of the equation--most factories will build to the cost you want. Design/engineering can be brand specific, as are the QC steps that a vendor applies.
Just so we're all clear, I was never implying otherwise. This is why I was leaning into the semiconductor analogy. For instance, Specializes designs & engineers their bikes (Nvidia/Broadcom/etc), Merida manufactures the bike to their spec (TSMC, GlobalFoundries, Samsung, etc). Obviously, design/engineering is limited to the capabilities of the manufacturer, the same way Nvidia is limited to the capabilities of TSMC. It really is more of a partnership than some "input/output" vendor relationship.
This is very different than the white label frames (or catalogue frames) anyone can go buy and brand as their own. While I'm interested in what is out there in this vein, this isn't the "homework" I'm really doing here...
I’d say the opposite. A lot of ski companies brag when they are made by a good factory. Like RMU getting made by Blizzard. Generally speaking, you can just look at the country of origin and that will tell you, as there doesn’t seem to be the focus on one country for manufacturing.
For sure, you are not wrong. But again, I know a bit more about snow than bikes.
Both Atomic and Armada skis are pressed in the same factory. I’m not sure about now, but ~15 years ago each company sourced their own materials for their skis even though they were assembled on the same equipment. There was one particular season where Atomic’s warranty rate (~8%) was double Armada’s (~4%), and it was deduced that this was basically due to different materials (again, the skis were physically pressed on the same machines by the same people).
However, at that time it would still be a benefit to know that any ski came out of the Atomic factory (even the Atomics were still solid quality) as opposed to China (at the time Chinese ski factories were still learning). Anyone using the Atomic factory would benefit from announcing that. There are now great factories in China and mediocre factories in China. You would think it would behoove someone in a good Chinese factory to disclose this.
Or in bikes, knowing a frame came out of Merida might give me more confidence in it than if it came out of some start-up without a known history of high quality. It doesn’t guarantee anything, but it hedges your bets.
Transparency is its own currency. More transparency usually breeds confidence.
Even the Big S is pulling back... shuttering 2 locations in favor of HQ...
https://tinyurl.com/mvpvy66t
I have noticed that some smaller framebuilders who are branching out into batch production are more open about disclosing the factory where their frames are made. For instance, Wilde Bikes says right on the product page for their Dark Star hardtail that it's "made by the fine folks at ORA in Taiwan."
Maybe that's a carry-over from the world of custom production, where having a connection to the maker is part of the appeal?
That sucks, lots of good folks that could afford to live there and wanted to live there.
Crestline does as well...
https://crestlinebikes.com/shop/rs-spectre-edition-frameset/
specialized logic: closing offices in affordable regions to save money while maintaining their HQ in one of the highest COL regions of the nation.
when i heard about specialized auburn facility closing, i figured that since the demo is obviously baked and ready for production (based on WC bikes), stumpy15 is out and maybe enduro is done (no idea), that they prob figure they don't need an off-site suspension and long-travel bike development lab for half a decade or more. would have to believe their focus is going to be on motor/battery tech in the future.
That video is awesome...and ridiculous!
I'd wager a lot of it has to do with some finance nerd looking at things and going "we need to maximize the efficiency of our R&D spend". Two locations, two teams, even connected remotely isn't the same output, especially against a limited amount of fertile ground, as putting everyone under one roof. The fact that some will go elsewhere, is probably seen as a feature not a bug, considering what you are saying. Sad, but true.
Unrelated, I do feel Specialized has exhibited a high amount of financial acumen and pretty dang solid management, even (especially) when they screw up. They aren't scared to run experiments and make firm decisions from what they learn. While they may have single handedly cratered the trail bike market blowing out Stumpys in 2023-2024, someone knew they had to flip them or things would only get worse.
Sometimes I watch this scene and think this is Specialized's management team realizing the mountain bike market was about to tank in 2022, and they are talking about Specialized Stumpjumpers, not MBSs. 🤣 Those wondering, I'm just as fun on dates as you might think...
(Start at the 6:40 mark..or just watch the whole thing, great flick)
Kinda bike related, but looks like Woodward West is shutting down as of the end of the month..
From the second hand stories Ive heard they were also one of the major catalysts of the arms race for supplier capacity and over forecasting during the first signs of the covid boom. Bob M went to TW and doubled, then quadrupled forecasts to win priority over other bike brands. Other big brands had no choice but to fall in line if they wanted deliveries in any reasonable amount of time....so most of them increased by similarly staggering numbers. Delivery lead times of multiple years after that were the result.
Some of the quotes in this article about that did not age well: https://www.bicycleretailer.com/international/2021/03/07/specialized-an…
In the end, many suppliers were left holding the ball when forecasts were adjusted and orders canceled. This aggressiveness and irrational exuberance led to much worse impacts for their suppliers than for Spech having Stumpys flood the market for multiple years and taking a margin hit (and maybe tanking SJ15 sales).
Working at the mega ramp while Danny Way tried to lean double backies: https://i.imgur.com/gucKFXo.jpeg
Many celebrities come through WW, but there was only one that I cared enough about to ask for a photo, CESAR MILAN (the dog whisperer): https://i.imgur.com/i2lNtP6.jpeg
Good sir, your comments will not be tolerated. I'm going to have kindly ask that you give ShapeShifter and the K.I.S. steering damper the respect they deserve.
Seriously, couldn't agree more. You buy a YT or Canyon for the value proposition and absolutely nothing more. From a nonfinance guy, it seems like they simply forgot who they were. Never good to do that.
Cube is selling hybrids, ebikes, and some road bikes at my closest LBS in Canada. They are about as exciting as Canyon. Boomer cruisers or for the weird guy who wants a German full suspension bike on a deep discount, because no one bought it last year.
But hey, the Bicycle Product Suppliers Association (BPSA, part of People For Bikes) gave Bob M. a lifetime achievement award just a few years later, so it's all good.
Not that knocking on the Germans isn’t fun but isn’t that every bike brand right now.
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