Germany follows typical e-bike trend

In both 2014 and 2015, we saw fantastic bicycle sales for the German market but they were somewhat less productive in 2016. Thanks to a newly-released report, we can see that there was an overall decline of nearly 7% when it came to bicycles and e-bikes; just over four million units were sold.

However, the e-bike proved to be the shining light for Germany just as we have seen for many other countries. For e-bikes, sales and exports actually grew by double-digit percentages. Siegfried Neuberger, Managing Director of the ZIV, said “2016 was a difficult year for the German bicycle industry. The industry is heavily dependent on the weather conditions during the bicycle season. Unfortunately these were unfavourable in the first half of the year. Most of the business which was lost between January and July, could not be regained in the second half of the year. Therefore we are convinced that the industry can be satisfied with the final result. We should not forget that the market was excellent for the industry in 2014 and 2015 so we are comparing 2016 sales with very high levels. All together we are very confident about the future,”

Just last year at the Eurobike event, ZIV actually predicted a decline of between six and eight percent for the German market but what about the prices? Following in the footsteps of the Netherlands, overall volumes seem to be decreasing while turnover and sales prices are doing the opposite. Last year, turnover increased by 7% to €2.6 billion despite the same percentage decrease in market volume. According to the ZIV, there are two main reasons for this - increased demand for higher-quality models and higher average prices. In total, 13% more e-bikes were sold in 2016 at 605,000. For the pricing, this increased by 15% to nearly €650.

With all of this information in mind, we can see that e-bikes now account for 15% of the German bicycle market and this is only expected to rise. In the coming years, ZIV expect this to increase to 20% and it could even reach 30% in the long-term. In addition to this, there was also a small increase for the speed e-bike market. Of course, this is still small at around 1% of all sales but it did pick up in 2016.

In terms of exports, Germany performed quite well in 2016 and saw the second year of growth in a row. In the past two years, exports have grown by 37% and 66% respectively and this figure now sits at 233,000 units. For regular bikes, the downward trend is sadly continuing with a 10% drop in sales to 370,000. Now, just over 3.4 million bikes are sold per year and these effects were seen most severely in trekking, city/urban, MTBs, and youth bikes. For touring bikes, Holland bikes, and many others, there was very little change.