Why does every bike comes with Shimano components?

[Timpo]

It doesn't matter if you're buying a $99 bike from Walmart, or buying a premium brand $10,000+ road bike.
They all come with Shimano components.

Yes, I know there are other brands like Hope, Clarks, TRP, SRAM, Magura, Box, etc..

But I'm sure we can all agree that 99% of bicycles are equipped with Shimano components.

Have you guys ever wondered about that? I'm just wondering why that is..

 

[Nova Haibike]

It wasn't always that way. Back in the day Shimano was not the leader. The best bikes had Campagnolo, and the good Japanese components came from SunTour. Shimano did produce a lot of interesting designs, some which were successful (cassette freehubs), and some which were failures (Biopace chainrings). The technology that pushed them to the forefront was indexed shifting. Once they had introduced the Dura Ace 7400 group in 1984 with S.I.S., everyone else scrambled to introduce their own indexing system. But Campy and most especially SunTour were in catch-up mode, while Shimano went on to bring index shifting to where it could be on every bike...and the rest is history.

 

[PDoz]

There's lots of sram components amongst the bikes in my shed, although probably slughtly more shimano, I just think the shimano is more obvious visually. Chances are it has to do with whatever deals the brands can negotiate at the time ( with a little room for marketing) , interestingly I have bikes with mixed sram and shimano components, but you don't immediately recognise sram as a brand because they fly under several names ( sram / avid / rockshox etc) , plus sometimes you have weird combinations but the shimano label stcks out?

Eg I barely noticed I had Sram gears on my norco optic until I went looking
Sram brakes on my norco oldbike, sram avid branded on my specialized oldbike and giant ebike ( but shimano on my giant trance so presumably giant has no brand loyalty )
Combinations ate not unusual, eg the cranks on my giant full e pro are fsa, the sprockets were fsa, but the front deralier was shimano xt with an slx shifter. I hadn't even noticed the fsa gears until they broke - I'd just assumed that an xt deralier meant shimano gears - marketing? Buyer stupidity?

 

[Drew]

Shimano did produce a lot of interesting designs, some which were successful (cassette freehubs), and some which were failures (Biopace chainrings).

Oh, man. I had an early Trek 800 mountain bike with the Biopace chainrings! It seemed like a cool idea at the time.