If you go to a bike shop these days, you will find a lot of empty shelves and parking spaces: sold out.
Delivery times of three, four or six months.
There are many reasons for this development - interrupted supply chains, the Corona homeland pleasure bike, but also the general trend towards more bicycle use in everyday life.
Investors who want to benefit from this have so far been looking down the tube in Germany.
Daniel Mohr
Editor in the economy of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.
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The Mitteldeutsche Fahrradfabrik MIFA disappeared from the stock exchange after bankruptcy. Otherwise there is no German bicycle share. But the industry is also making itself scarce on the stock market in general. Accell is a publicly traded Dutch company whose share price has increased 70 percent since the beginning of the year. The Japanese supplier Shimano is also tradable on German stock exchanges. The share price has tended to rise over the past few years, but not by leaps and bounds, and this year it's been mixed.
But supplies for the stock exchange could soon come from Germany. At least the Dresden online retailer Bike24 is considering an IPO. Do not you know? This is no wonder, because the online provider of bicycles and bicycle accessories has so far invested less than one percent of its sales in marketing. However, Bike24 is known to many racing cyclists and DIY enthusiasts. Andrés Martin-Birner founded the company in 2002 with two friends in a 15 square meter room in Dresden.
Martin-Birner is a passionate racing cyclist and has been doing this in his hometown of Chemnitz for six years at competitive sport level.
After graduating from high school, he first learned to be a banker, then started to study business administration and law, but was distracted in the dot-com euphoria by founding a company in the automotive supply sector, which, supported by investors such as the Berlin venture capital company bmp, the Commerzbank and Holtzbrinck, was quite successful.
Almost like in the GDR
But Martin-Birner gave in to his passion, took the severance payment and founded Bike24. "We noticed that there were simply not many brands and products online," says Martin-Birner. "I almost felt like I did when I was a child in the GDR, when we had to drive without gears, even though these beautiful Italian gears could be seen in the Rose catalog."
Bike24 is profitable early on, grows and thrives. First with racing bikes and accessories. That aroused the interest of triathletes. Later there were also offers for mountain bikers, but also for multi-day tour cyclists. “That is the actual basis for success, because they also wanted to have adjacent areas, including sleeping bags and cookware,” says Martin-Birner. Last year the company made almost 200 million euros in sales, an operating profit of 26.7 million euros and employed a good 400 people, mainly in Dresden. Bike24 notices the rush of customers in Corona times, but has so far mastered the demand.
“We ordered early and had a higher inventory than a year ago,” says Martin-Birner.
More than 77,000 products from more than 800 brands are in the range, of which more than 90 percent are in stock.
Bike24 only makes 10 percent of its sales with complete bicycles, which people usually prefer to buy in stores.
The big business is done with spare parts and accessories, which Martin-Birner thinks is good.
"The customer buys a bike once, and then contact is usually lost. With accessories, customer contact is much livelier."
Pedals for 750 euros
Bike24 also stands out from the competition like Amazon or eBay by specializing in its range. Martin-Birner holds a bottle holder in the camera during a video call: 4 euros, from Taiwan. Available at Bike24. Then there is a bottle holder: 110 euros, made in Germany. Made of carbon. You can't find it anywhere else in the range. Second example: standard pedals versus the special model from Bike24 for 750 euros. Just the pedals, not the whole bike. Bike24 sells more than 100 of them each year.
In 2014 and again in 2019, the financial investor Riverside joined the company. From 2016, a commercial director, Timm Armbrust, joined the team. "We were then able to work through important milestones together," says Martin-Birner. With the money, the warehouse in Dresden could be fully automated and a shipping promise could be given. Last July, the website was translated into Spanish and a Spanish customer service was offered. “As a result, we made 90 to 150 percent more sales in the Spanish-speaking countries,” says Martin-Birner.
The expansion should continue. Various options are being examined, and an IPO is also possible. The money could be used to build a warehouse in Spain. The translation of the site into French and Italian is also being planned. The new managing director for online marketing comes from mobile.de. The company grew by 50 percent in 2020, and growth increased again in the first quarter of 2021. People's willingness to pay for bicycles is increasing. The trend towards e-bikes and thus significantly more expensive bicycles is fully intact, and the expansion of the bicycle infrastructure is a fixed political goal in Germany as well.
In cities in particular, more and more everyday tours are being made by bike. New cycle superhighways, the reallocation of road lanes into cycle paths and more parking spaces for bicycles are on the agenda in more and more cities. This also arouses the interest of investors. A bicycle share is certainly not a guarantee of price gains. But if the company and the shareholders actually decide to go public, that would be an asset to the list with all the car stocks.