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Quick update for clarification. It does appear that DJI has officially spun off Avinox and Amflow as wholly owned subsidiaries. They are working hard to distance both brands from DJI while still owning them, which in my opinion is primarily for tariff reasons.
I don't read Mandarin so I had to use AI to help with the research, but here's what the Chinese corporate registry data shows: DJI senior management member Song Jianyu is the legal representative of the Amflow entity, which is held by a Hong Kong shell company called Worang Technology. If you guys want, I'll spend the $2.80 to pull the Hong Kong Companies Registry filing and prove the ownership link, but it's fairly obvious what's going on here. It's the same DJI team, and they all but certainly have the full backing of DJI's balance sheet in everything they are doing. Maybe they've pulled in a few minority investors, but I'm incredibly doubtful
I wouldn’t worry about e-bikes ending trail access with pretty rare exception of wilderness areas and trails that are entry points to them and hard to access trails that joeys can get themselves in trouble on but likely would never access if they had to muscle it there.
For the most part it will mean more users and more volounteers which equates to more access instead of less. Again i expect exceptions but for the most part i don’t think e bikes are bad for mtbers who like to pedal.
Funny that’s only release on PB I read. They certainly are standing out in the noise.
if you only look on the motor, yes. if you look at new motor and new batteries, it’s only 2 3rd parties who offer the complete package and both are highly boutique. so the amflow px is so far the only bike with the sl looks that offer the whole deal in carbon. and they are the only oem who offers bikes with the 2 removable batteries. all other oem basically offer m1 bikes with the updated motor and the old internal batteries (rotwild has their own battery).
One interesting move by Avinox is the cross compatibility they have built into the new and old systems..
Jeff, your breakdown seems to be getting noticed.. Seen it pop up on my FB feed a couple times..
Another great write up thanks! It's good to shine a light on just how big DJI is and the ability the skills/resources they have, considering their massive background in electronics and motors already....
I've been expecting for a while that an outside company was going to come in and cut the lunch of established bike companies - at the time I assumed it would be Bosch but now it 100% looks like DJI/Avinox. There is a huge number of new riders coming in without prejudice against e-bikes and electronics who are all over the latest tech, while so much of the established industry, media and shops have been resistant to change.
I also totally believe that Amflow is Fox's biggest customer
Now I do have concerns long term in regards to things like repairability, vendor lock-in and subscriptions - DJI and other similar companies are notorious for locking certain features behind a subscription, so whats to stop them doing the same in a couple of years? If everyone switches to Avinox motors they will be able to do whatever they want because what else are you going to ride if you don't like it?
Hey Jeff, finally read your DJI/Amflow/Avinox post. Great read, and some great research in there.
I think what blows me away the most is the 3-5 year outlook. Yes, of course 2026 looks very different for Trek, Specialized, and Giant because of the specs, the watts, the price, and the mega bike launch week that just happened. But even crazier than that is seeing DJI's HQ, reading their current revenue, and knowing that Xi Jinping and his friends are actively supporting capex for Chinese brands like DJI to the tune of billions and trillions.
3-5 years from now, I no longer feel like I have any crystal ball for the ebike market, the greater MTB market, or any of the legacy brands in the bike industry. The market could look real different by then. It feels like everything hinges behind decisions and innovations that will happen behind closed doors at DJI HQ (and at Avinox's geographically different but functionally identical HQ).
That the $5k Amflow might just nuke the e-bike market, I imagine I will be seeing those bikes everywhere by the end of this year. Crazy what state sponsored capitalism can produce. Private industry is only good if you're a dork trying to become a billionaire, if you want to do real numbers you need that central bank money.
I think post-covid the endemic companies need to be looking over their shoulder. My understanding is that as there was overstock in shops and distributers factories in Asia have been looking to do more of the sales in NA and Europe themselves.
DJI launched Avinox and Amflow and are doing numbers. If they can hit the price point due to economies of scale and are not worried about 1 or 2 poor quarters they will continue to be relevant. On the point of Amflow being Fox's number one customer, this would not shock me if we are talking specifically in the last year or so. Some bigger companies are still dealing with overstock and are ordering less bikes, Fox themselves has said that themselves in their earnings calls if i recall correctly. I'd imagine this isn't a concern for Amflow and they are trying to take market share- perhaps also more willing to ship bikes directly to customers in some global markets that other companies are not selling into.
XDS, a major manufacture for a number of well known companies have also launched X-Labs. X-labs seems to be more focused on the road side but they do have some e-bike options as well. X-LAB: The Bike Brand No One Saw Coming, and the Secret Manufacturing Powerhouse Behind It
Lewis brakes is another company that seems to be at least taking some market share and growing their brand presence. Even if some people say they are just Trickstuff knock offs, Amazon's catalog proves that most consumers do not care about IP theft if the product works and saves them some cash.
Tl;DR: Avionx/DJI isn't the only player that will challenge current frame and component makers in the industry in the next 5-10 years.
Just started the latest Bikes and Big Ideas podcast with Chris Cocalis... Gives you a good idea about how connected Amflow and Avinox are within the first 10 minutes..
I'll have to ai a transcript of that... That podcast has good info in it... but I can't stand the editing that they use that removes the dead air time and the speaking cadence of the presenter. Also... I sorta can't stand Cocalis
Really enjoyed the DJI post, Jeff.
It's a bit of an odd comparison, but I think you're underselling Bosch as far as investment ability. You paint DJI as a company with the resources and culture to massively disrupt the industry and mainstream frame brands, but isn't Bosch financially in a position to do the same if they wanted? Yes, from a revenue standpoint DJI is larger than the entire MTB industry, but Bosch is like, 10 times bigger than DJI? Without looking too much into Bosch, your words on DJI's culture leads me to guess that there's massivel differences between the two, I suspect there's more on the table for comparison. Maybe Bosch sees the future in dishwashers and not this whole ebike thing.
Also, 30,000 Chen is a 10/10 nickname. Obviously some great minds over there.
Bosch is a genuine giant, comparable in scale to Caterpillar or Goldman Sachs. DJI, by contrast, is roughly 10-15% of Bosch's size on a revenue basis. The real difference, however, is breadth. DJI is narrowly focused to a degree that's hard to fully appreciate until you start poking around at what Bosch actually does: automotive systems, power tools, home appliances, factory automation, HVAC, security systems. It's a company that has to be everything to everyone, all at once.
Profitability compounds the contrast. DJI reportedly operates around 40% net margins, which if accurate is a truly remarkable number for any company of that scale. Bosch runs in the low single digits across its mobility division. That gap in financial firepower is important when you're placing strategic bets on new categories.
The eBike motor program genuinely matters to DJI in a way I'd wager it doesn't to Bosch (spread too thin). And culturally, DJI operates more like a Silicon Valley company than a century-old European conglomerate. The iteration speed is different, the organizational weight is different, and the willingness to take a focused swing is different. This is also squarely in DJI's wheelhouse: motors, batteries, and software working together. Bosch knows the space too, but the dynamic is a bit like Microsoft vs. Apple or BMW vs. Tesla. The surface differences look modest, but the compounding effect of culture and focus tends to produce wildly divergent outcomes over time.
None of this accounts for China's structural advantages in rare earth access and the deep intellectual capital they've built across the EV supply chain. That's a tailwind DJI carries into every hardware category it enters, if it has to do with motors+software+batteries.
Yeah, there is a big focus on the motor tech for obvious reasons, but battery tech is where the real future is, and china and its firms are all in on batteries. It's where you will get the greater range and lighter weight that the ebike market wants.
On a more macro scale, battery tech (energy storage) has quietly changed the world in the last 20 years, and will completely remake it in the next 20. When you look into the economies of scale of current day solar and battery tech, it truly puts into prospective how antiquated oil and gas are for energy usage. It truly is a 19th century technology when you could instead just harness the energy of that giant nuclear reactor in the sky.
On one side, I totally agree with this. China takes battery technology very seriously and produces some of the best, most cost-effective solutions in the world. They also have the supply chain to do most of it in-house, which is a massive structural advantage.
To your other point, I don't agree that we're on the cusp of some step-function breakthrough in electrification, and I say that as someone who drives an EV and loves electric motors. I've written about this before, but it comes down to two things: weight and rate of change.
Weight: A gallon of gasoline delivers roughly 14x more useful energy per kilogram than today's best lithium-ion cells, even after adjusting for the fact that electric motors are about 3x more efficient than internal combustion engines. Gasoline is just an absurdly energy-dense fuel.
Rate of change: Energy density improvements in lithium-ion batteries have slowed to about 3-4% per year, and the theoretical ceiling for the current architecture sits around 400 Wh/kg. We're already at 300. The gains from here are incremental, not transformational.
There are promising next-generation technologies being explored, solid-state being the most talked about, but until they're manufactured commercially at scale, they're still closer to science experiments than solutions. Barring a genuine chemistry breakthrough, batteries will remain impractical for a large number of applications where energy density matters. The amount of useful energy packed into a single gallon of gasoline is just really hard to appreciate until you do the math.
Back to the (real) topic at hand, I wouldn't expect batteries for e bikes to be wildly different until post 2030, and even then, its a craps shoot as to if battery step change function is like fusion (always 10 years out) or the real deal.
As a data point of one, our house in rural CA is almost completely off grid. We just upgraded to new solar panels, single LiIon battery, and inverter, mostly from Midnite Solar. We can run the house for 2-3 days on a single day of sun, without much in the way of conservation. With two or three batteries that would be even more. With California utility rates, I expect the cost of the system to break even in less than 4 years. Plus, no outages.
That said, we just bought our first ever new car and went with a hybrid rather than electric, because the charging infrastructure and range just isn't there yet, especially in our rural area. Battery size and weight matters a lot less in a house than a car, and way less than on a bike.
Heads up - I'm headed to Sea Otter tomorrow and will visit with as many brands as will talk to me. Does anyone have any specific questions they'd like to see answered?
Rather than specific questions I think an off the record assessment of if the overall business is better, worse or the same as 2025 would be interesting. I suspect it's on no-ones interest to say it's worse though.
Is there any development happening for normal, not 32" bikes? Or are the current roll outs the end of the line if it's not electric?
I don't want to come off as angry or pretentious, but I find what's going on with Avinox and the Spesh "class 2" emtb disgusting. I'm curious how the people at traditional bike companies feel about what they're helping proliferate into our world for all of the people who created and maintain the trails (mostly volunteers like myself) to contend with. How conflicted are they? Between the general financial malaise in the industry, 32" wheels nobody truly seems excited about, and the unprincipled embrace of avivox/DJI/amflow, what is general morale like? Conversely, and assuming everyone there isn't also yelling at clouds, what are people actually optimistic and excited about?
Maybe more of a touchy-feely than economics question, but I've served nearly two dimes inside a large corporation, and morale affects talent retention and, eventually, the quality of the product.
Edit: Jeff, very poor of me not to first thank you for all the interesting knowledge you contribute and your willingness to ask our questions.
in between bombing the corkscrew over and over ask how many times they’ve bombed the corkscrew
So much this.
Plus, while I'm not fully up to speed on battery tech and don't know this for sure, I think the main benefit of solid state batteries isn't the energy density per Se but their safety. They are solid in the sense of not having a liquid electrolyte and thus can handle much higher rates of charge and discharge. And are safer under extreme cases (fire). All good things for cars, not much use for push bikes honestly.
As for reactors, it makes much more sense to utilise the ones here on the ground vs. the one in the sky. The energy density is not even close and humanity has always moved to more energy dense energy sources over time so it hardly makes sense to take a step back now.
The big advantage for ebikes as the solid state batteries start trickling down to ebikes is smaller batteries to get the watts hours we are used to. These will make 40lbs, full power ebikes a reality not far down the road..
I've always thought ebikes wete going to be interesting to follow as the electronics would be developing faster than the bikes themselves...
Not poor at all! I appreciate your willingness to raise your hand and contribute, and I'll most certainly keep this in mind as I visit with brands and I totally hear where you're coming from.
Side point, but I just learned a bit of history I found fitting with respect to where things might be headed. Back at the turn of the 20th century, automaking was essentially split in two. One company built the "rolling chassis" while another built the "coach" (the rest of the car). It didn't take long for those two things to converge. Remind you of anything?
History doesn't repeat but it does rhyme.
A fine Stephen King quote, have I detected a fellow Constant Reader? :-)
I see I got it wrong, solid state tech promises double the energy density. I take some of what I wrote above back.
That's ok.. I didn't realize we are talking about being able to cut the battery size almost in half at this point...
Motors will also start getting smaller in relation to power output... I've ofter wondered how big a TQ motor would have to be to get 100nm of torque out of it? Although, now the bar has been raised..
120nm, apparently 144mm dia, and 3.9kg: https://www.tq-group.com/en/products/tq-e-mobility/tq-hpr-120s/
bosch just posted a 400mio eur loss
Wow.. That's actually heavier than the Avinox... Didn't expect that..
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