BikeBiz Bicycle and cycling retail news

If you feel the story below about the bike trade's dearth of statistics is a bit depressing, here's a pretty picture that may cheer you up. Rad feminists and prudes should look away now...

The bike trade re-seller of PoS-it EPoS software collapsed late last week. The mainstream orginator of PoS-it has stepped in to support any of the 51 IBDs which were hooked up with the software by Mane.com Ltd. Meanwhile Mane's Neil Delafield is seeking to migrate Pos-it users over to Counterbalance, a new EPoS software package coded by Frank Stirling, a co-director, along with Delafield, of UK EPoS Ltd

As sales of its traditionally printed maps drop, the Ordnance Survey is trialling a map printing service from internet kiosks where users can print out just the section of mapping they need.

Taiwanese bike exports are down by 39 percent. Raleigh sold a lot less bikes in the first half of 2001 compared to the same period the previous year. These two new facts are from reliable sources; but we still operate in a statistical black hole. Which is a shame because when an industry pulls together some surprisingly good news can be the result: in France, a new study has found that far from being decimated by the supermarkets, IBDs account for 50 percent of the market, which is 20-30 percent higher than pessimists have believed for years…

Of course, the news that Alan Finden-Crofts and a team of former Derby Cycle Corporation managers had been successful in their bid for DCC assets had been known since before Interbike. But the deal has now passed all the legal hurdles. And Raleigh Cycle Ltd. has also just sold Winora-Staiger and Wiener Bike Parts of Germany