Its been well documented that bike manufacturers have been a bit of a tough spot post pandemic and with current economic conditions. However it feels like its coming to a bit of a crunch in the past week or two. YT restructuring to stay afloat. Now Intense are halting all Non-US sales and distribution. Are we going to see more companies teetering on the edge?
YT is the result of heavy PE investment which bought-in at the peak and financed that on low interest rates, introducing a new CEO which led to a massive reshape of the business model, over-ordering based upon pressure from PE to fulfil your revenue commitments, over-optimistic sales projections, far too many SKUs and their near-constant sales leading to buyers waiting on a deal rather than snapping up your in-stock bikes.
Hopefully YT can get back to where they were when times were good, but they have lost a lot of rider goodwill over the past few years and with a staggeringly wide range of SKUs and models/revisions to existing lines being released seemingly every other month, people were just not buying bikes in the volumes they had predicted.
I liken recent-years YT to TaylorMade in golf. Great products, but they cannibalise their own market by releasing products every five minutes. You go buy that shiny new TM driver and by the time you've walked out the shop, the new model just got launched that fixes all the problems with the old model.
Saw that issue with YT. A bunch of my extended riding group all bought into YT at some point, all of them felt like they got burned - and yes, that is subjective as you still have a great bike. But when you've saved up for the model you want only to find out that it went on sale a couple of weeks after you bought at full price, or the new/updated model comes out shortly afterwards, you start to question your decision and the word gets around.
And the recent shambles where YT clearly knew what was about to happen, but didn't stop them dropping deal after deal that they wouldn't be able to honour, is going to really hurt them long-term. Sure, people will still buy the new Decoy as eMTBs are the one part of the market where sales are still strong, but people aren't buying new analogue bikes and YT are going to have some reputational issues to repair.
FWIW A lot of companies are still struggling but most of them are dealing with PE wanting to get their cash out and forcing their acquisitions to make dumb business decisions to honour their commitments. The boom during Covid caught everyone out and while nobody really came out of it well - and there is always the question of what, if any, decisions were the 'right' decisions during that time - some fared better than others.
I suppose Intense are a little less of a surprise, its been a long time since I've seen an Intense frame on the trails. they are a bit niche this side of the pond. I remember back when it felt like every other DH bike you'd see was an M1. What happened to them over the last 2 decades? just lost relevance? I always remember them being a bit steeply priced for what they offered, always seemed like there was better valued options for the price bracket.
Intense's woes are mostly based around poor management decisions and their total lack of market penetration into Europe. Very few people care about or have any connection with the brand outside of the US and pushing their products into a market where they were not able to support the consumer properly was always going to end poorly for them.
Likely went the way of EU distributors having large amounts of unsold stock and Intense weren't seeing the returns they had forecast. Intense need that cash flow and cutting off a market that wasn't performing should help them to figure out their US problems.
- he was getting mega air on the A470 line.
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