Regular Bikes Had Worst Sales Year Yet, E-Bikes To Be The Turnaround

For the bike industry, 2023 was a year best forgotten. In 2020, thanks to the pandemic, most brands sold out of their entire season’s stock by July, which meant placing panicked orders for more product. In many instances, brands placed orders several times the size of their traditional sales projections. The brands that were able to restock the quickest were the biggest winners and those that were at the back of the queue found themselves glutted with stock when all the pandemic purchasing dried up.

The drying up began in 2022, but with so many people having purchased bikes and e-bikes in 2020 and 2021, demand has yet to return. In an analysis piece on the industry website Bicycle Retailer and Industry News, Rick Vosper showed that e-bikes are poised to save the bike industry from what would otherwise be an industry-wide depression.

After brands placed huge orders to refill their depleted stock in 2020 and 2021, the glut of inventory caused imports of pedal-only bikes to shrink by 31 percent in 2022. That’s a huge drop, but it was followed by an even bigger drop of 41 percent in 2022. The 5.4 million regular bikes imported in 2023 represents the lowest number of imported bikes since 1981, when our country was digging out of the late-1970s recession.

E-bike sales, by comparison, have been on a very different trajectory. In 2016, e-bikes represented only 2 percent of the bikes imported to the U.S. In 2023, e-bikes made up 18 percent of the total number of bikes brought into the country. Even though e-bike imports fell by almost 1 million units in 2023—a 10 percent fall relative to 2022—they were still 15 points higher than the imports for 2021.