Will large scale bike manafacturing ever come back to the UK
I've been watching the documentaries 'Made in Britain' for the last couple of week on bbc 2 hosted by Evan Davis. Its a great program one episode he was in Beijing and said producing some products in the city is now more expensive than it would be to make it in the UK so production is moving to different cities in china. This could happen all over the far east. Do you think we might one day start seeing Made in Britain stickers again?
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why are you asking all these questions about bikes and parts being made in the UK - is it for a school project or something...?0
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We need manufacturing to get out of this financial mess. We can't leave it to the city boys gambling on the stock exchange.
No not a school project I'm 33. Just interested in frame-building and when i build one i would like to keep it British or at least European. Had the day so been annoying everybody on here! sorry Pseudonym.0 -
Good question, It would certainly be fantastic to be able to have a choice of British made "Carbon" frames. Who knows? its happening on the Call Centre front as the rising costs (wages, land, infrastructure etc) in the far off lands continues to rise apace Of course there are many British frame builders in other materials but I guess your qestion was leaning toward Carbon.
I heard some comments from kelly the other day on Eurosport that he seemed to think that other materials such as aluminium would be making a comeback in the next few years! or words to that effect. I didn't catch all he said. Good luck with the school project.
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No not just carbon. Just big scale manufacturing of the 70's Raleigh building in the UK again for example.0
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We should start a bike radar bike making business - every chip in a few quid and vote on the bike specs etc. Anyone with a forum posting above xx posts gets a discount.
No trolls - we dont need someone popping up shouting stick a dead rabbit on the wheels just to get an argument going.0 -
interesting point, but it will take wages equalising all over the world to get to the point where manufacturing returns here rather than just skipping around the world to the next cheap economy.
An exception to this though is the rising costs of transportation. if transportation costs more than the cheaper wages of people further afield then me may seen more local manufacturing. However as we don't have a lot of the raw materials then there will always be transport costs involved, either raw or post production.0 -
The brands that do exist in the UK set up an co operative bike company. Where they all supply the components the produce.0
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It would help to have a Government that were not just a SHOWER OF s***e.....nah that's not gonna happen!0
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rising costs of transportation
This could be a big factor. I read somewhere that it would now be cheaper to mine our own coal (which is one of the best in the world) than to buy it in. So short sighted of thatcher to close them all.0 -
Raleigh suffered enourmously when it was run by non-cycling types.0
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Cycle manufacturing falls somewhere in the 'mid' range of engineering and as such demands a combination of reasonably low costs and reasonably good skill levels. This is best found in mid-developed countries such as parts of Eastern Europe, South American, much of Asia, etc. The sweet spot was in Taiwan for years, although as that country goes up the value chain, much of the basic work is now off-shored to China and Vietnam.
There is certainly evidence of some manufacturing returning to Europe and the US due to higher transport costs, but this is more likely to be an impact on high weight/volume products - bikes aren't one of them.
To set up a large scale automated bike manufacturing plant you need a combination of lots of capital (there is a lot of plant required, especially for aluminium bikes, which means someone willing to invest long term. You also need a mix of high skill staff (not too expensive) for the skilled work, and lots of cheap staff for the lower skilled stuff (packing, etc). The reality is that you will find more of this in Asia than in Europe. And as for the labour side, if you did want to make bikes in Europe, a country like Poland or Czech Republic would be much more attractive.
It is possible to buy a European only bike - I have one, a city bike by Velorbis (Danish design, German frame and wheels, British Sturmey-Archer gears and Brooks Saddle, Dutch Schwalbe tyres), but very hard to get one from one country only, even Germany.
The reality is that with modern manufacture, 'locally made' becomes meaningless. Often a frame may be made from tubing manufactured in one country, welded in another, finished and painted in a third country, with the actual bike built in another place - and all with companies based off-shore. A classic example is the iPhone, which has 'Made in China' stamped on it, but apparently only about $5 of its value is Chinese - between all its Japanese, Taiwanese, US, German, Swedish and other components, and its US design, the final product is merely screwed together in a Chinese hellhole factory.0 -
I work for a services firm and we have a business in India. It provides service to the local market and to the international market. The Indian staff are paid in line with the professional market in India, that is, they are not exploited but when the do work for the UK or the States the margins for the company can be big.
One of the biggest risks identified for us is salary inflation in India because salaries are rising so quickly that at some point they will match the UK. Not sure what timescale we are talking about but there is every likeliehood it will happen. That may force us to look for an equivalent business elsewhere in order to maintain margins and service provision.
If you transfer that scenario to manufacturing then there is bound to be similar change in the future however where things will be manufactured will depend on the product and where the market is. As sustainability becomes every increasingly important then product miles will have ever greater bearing on this process. At the moment shipping stuff out of China to the far corners of the world is cost effective. Effentually it may not be.
The other influencing factor will be the source of the raw materials. It may become much cheaper to manufacture aluminium products neaer to the bauxite mines rather than ship it aropund the workld.
I'll have to sstop now because i can't see the wind I amtyping in. This forum software is rubbish.0 -
Continued from above:
So will large scale manufacture of bicycles return to the UK. I don't think so simply because the market is not big enough and we do not have the raw materials in the UK.
It is possible that mass assembly of bicyles could come back to the UK just as Nissan and Honda have assembly plants here.
When? Some time away after salary and other inflation has hit China hard and it can no longer be cheaper in a sustainable fashion. However with the current situation of cost inflation and salary deflation in the UK it may happen quicker that envisaged.0 -
mossychops wrote:We should start a bike radar bike making business - every chip in a few quid and vote on the bike specs etc. Anyone with a forum posting above xx posts gets a discount.
No trolls - we dont need someone popping up shouting stick a dead rabbit on the wheels just to get an argument going.
Just getting some extra posts in to help my count
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