US retail sales were up in July, but the sporting goods sector, including bicycles, was down, reports Jay Townley in his economic tracking report for the National Bicycle Dealers Association of America. US IBDs "appear to be struggling with pricing power, and their problems also appear to be self inflicted and unnecessarily weakening profits," concludes Townley in July's fact-packed but hard-hitting report, available as a PDF download within...

Mid-summer sees no rise in bike sales in US

In Townley’s RDC Analsysis for the month of July, US economic indicators are said to be positive but growth "will

be slow until the labor market improves next year."

Reporting that China makes 60 percent of the world’s bicycles (and 86 percent of the bikes sold in the US), Townley says China’s economy is "is surging past SARS. However, pegging of the yuan to the dollar is a hot trade issue."

The PDF below contains tons of mainstream economic indicators and a category-by-category breakdown of bikes sales via IBDs in July.

There’s also a comment piece – "Growing Cycling: Time To Change Your Strategy!" – from retail practices guru Jay Abraham, who will be the keynote speaker at the 2004 Bicycle Business Leadership Conference, February 5-8, 2004 in San Diego, California.

RDC JULY DOWNLOAD:

http://www.bikebiz.co.uk/…/RDCJuly.pdf

To find all the NBDA RDC PDFs carried on this site to date, type ‘NBDA’ into the search engine at the upper left of the screen.

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