Following my recent post on ebike sales unit share across various countries, I dug into why the US might be trailing so much behind other nations in ebike sales. Looking at the data, one major contributing factor jumps out: nearly 2/3 of us bike sales units are children’s bikes! In Europe it is only 20% according to CONEBI.
If we remove children’s bikes from the conversation, the charts look a bit different. Below are estimates compiled from Bicycle Market Research’s investigation into ebike imports, publicly documented sales estimates, and import data from the USITC DataWeb.
The sudden jump in import ratio in 2023 and 2024 likely comes down to category mix at brands. When sales began to decline and inventory piled up in 2022 and 2023, brands had to make choices as to which categories to cut how much. Naturally, they looked at which categories are growing and used those as safer bets to place, leading to more ebikes being imported.
This data puts the US ebike share around 4 years behind Europe. That’s much closer than the 8 years behind that including children’s bikes implies. Using data like this, we can better estimate the rate at which categories shift from traditional to electric. As Europe continues, we should expect its share growth to flatten. Looking at the 4 percentage point growth from 2017 through 2020, it then decreases to ~ 2.5% in each of the next 4 years. What percentage point growth do you think we can expect over the next 4 years?