Canyon lowers prices of its bikes in the UK

The Koblenz-based company is breaking with the inflationary trend in the bike world and lowering the price of many of its models. It remains to be seen whether this decision by Canyon is due to better conditions for distribution in Great Britain or whether it is the beginning of a change of trend in a market that has been on a roller coaster ride in recent years.

Canyon, first brand to lower prices, Is this the beginning of the end of the cycling bubble?

After a year in which global inflation, blamed on the war in Ukraine, has marked the world economy, it seems that the situation is beginning to normalise. One of the sectors that has been most affected by the generalised increase in costs has been the cycling industry, above all, having to manage the situation generated during and after the pandemic when the great demand for bikes was combined with the lack of supplies to manufacture them and the bottlenecks in the supply network coming from the East.

In this paradigm, the rising prices of bikes, one of them Canyon itself, where the prices of some models increased by up to 12% in one year, led to a market slowdown that has left many brands with full warehouses and with difficulty in selling their products.

It is usual in these cases for the situation to normalise little by little, but we have rarely seen prices reduced, something that Canyon has just surprised us with in its UK distribution channel, where the price of some models such as the Aeroad, Grail or Ultimate has been significantly and definitively reduced, beyond the usual one-off offers.

Canyon attributes this reduction to the better conditions for bike imports in Great Britain at the moment, with reference to the current exchange rate of the pound and the lower shipping and customs costs.

In addition to the cost reductions, of which the brand has not offered any further details, Canyon points to the confidence of its customers in its bikes, maintaining steady growth and reaching sales figures close to those of before the pandemic, a recovery that is expected to be completed in 2023.

It remains to be seen whether Canyon will be able to apply this policy to markets within the European Union, but it could indicate a change in the trend of unstoppable growth in bike prices which has made some models almost unattainable and led to a slowdown in sales over the last year when many brands were still struggling to release previous years' ranges.

It is also important to see if any other brand is able or is forced by overstock to apply a similar measure, exploiting what many have described as the bike bubble in clear allusion to the significant price increases that have been observed in recent years.

In any case, Canyon's situation can hardly be extrapolated to other brands because the factory-direct sales model, without intermediate dealers, means that the German company's business conditions and margins are different from those of other brands.