Isn’t Kalkhoff Pon as well? Is Faraday pulling out of the US market like Focus and Kalkhoff, or is the brand gone worldwide?
My understanding is Faraday is gone. They only had brand awareness here in USA. Takes too much money to build a brand anywhere, let alone Europe. Kalkhoff had long brand awareness established in Europe, and was trying to dip it's toes in here, as many other EU brands are trying to do. Problem is they are all finding out 300 different brands here in US, with new labels coming everyday from China clones, the still very small market demand here is making it hypercompetitive and tough to scale, let alone make money.
There is a HUGE cluster of brands and models in the $3000 to $5000 price range due to the fact many oems are trying to make up on higher margin on each bike, since unit sales are still rather miniscule.
Let's say the US is maybe 200k to 300k units per year. That's nothing compared to Europe, and still very small versus regular bikes. 5 years ago it was around 150,000 units per year. While the growth may seem decent, again there is north of 300 brands , and probably over 1000 models.
That's not sustainable for any one brand to divvy up market share like that. So either you duke it out until brands fall away AND market grows to something meaningful, say at least 1 million units a year, or you pull out and maybe come back later.
With the above numbers, the shake out is inevitable here in the US. Pon made a mistake acquiring Faraday, but it does the overall market a favor, eliminating another brand. Consumer confusion abounds and even purchase decisions are deferred when you have this many brands in such a small unit sales environment. You don't know who will survive, and you guess the big names will, but Pon is big, yet look how they just ditched the American consumer. Same thing could happen with brands owned by Accell. If they don't sell enough Raleigh or I zips, they could drop those lines too. And if you have too many models, you spread resources too thin and don't make much per model. Or you waste money making a model that doesn't sell well , and have to drop it.
We are still very early days here in the US ebike market.
