Haibike. Ghost. Lapierre. Raleigh. Winora. Batavus. Sparta. Koga. Babboe. Carqon. XLC.
If you’ve been riding for any length of time, you’ve owned something on that list, been served by a shop that stocked it, or lusted after a bike in its catalogue. They are all owned by one company — the Dutch group Accell — and as of yesterday, that company is in insolvency proceedings.
Accell announced on 5 August that it had started insolvency proceedings, having been granted a “suspension of payments” under Dutch law after concluding it could no longer meet its financial obligations. CEO Jonas Nilsson said every realistic option for the future of the business had been “tirelessly explored” without producing a solution that would allow the group to continue in its current form.
Suspension of payments is not the same as liquidation. It’s closer in spirit to administration than to a shutter coming down: a court-supervised breathing space intended to give a business time to restructure. Brands can and do come out of the other side, frequently under new ownership. But it does mean a court process now determines whether Accell is restructured, broken up and sold in pieces, or wound down.
In a statement, Accell CEO Jonas Nilsson said, “This is a deeply sad and frustrating situation given all the hard work and everything we have achieved, with the support of shareholders and lenders, to restructure Accell’ operations and finances. It is an especially difficult moment for our employees, creditors, customers, suppliers, and partners. Every realistic option for the future of the business has been tirelessly explored, and none have resulted in a solution to continue the Group in its current form.
Our immediate focus is to support an orderly process, provide clarity wherever possible, and work with the relevant court-appointed administrators to preserve viable activities and employment where circumstances allow.”
The UK arm has moved towards administration
Closer to home, the picture is just as serious. Accell UK & Ireland — the Nottingham-based company most British shops deal with, and which was itself called Raleigh UK Ltd until it was renamed in February 2025 — has, according to reports, filed a notice of intention to appoint administrators. The notice was lodged through law firm Kirkland & Ellis International and reported by TheBusinessDesk on 5 August.
A notice of intention (NOI) is not the same as an appointment. It buys a company a short window of legal protection from creditor action — around ten business days — while restructuring, a sale or full administration are weighed up. At the time of writing, that notice had not yet appeared on the company’s public record at Companies House, where the entity (registered number 00139076, incorporated as The Raleigh Cycle Co. all the way back in 1915) was still listed as active. That lag is normal: there is usually a short delay before an NOI posts to the register, and the status would only change to “in administration” if and when administrators are formally appointed. We’ll be watching the filing history for that next step.
That will not come as a total shock to anyone who’s been paying attention. Accell put the UK business through a formal restructuring consultation in late 2023, closing the UK parts and accessories operation, outsourcing warehousing and confirming redundancies at Raleigh’s Eastwood head office, a site the company had described as outdated and inflexible. Raleigh stopped building frames in the UK more than twenty years ago; what remained in Nottinghamshire was sales, marketing, service and finance.
How a €1.56 billion bet went wrong
The short version: private equity bought the top of the market.
In 2022, a consortium led by KKR took Accell private in a deal valuing it at €1.56 billion, on the assumption that pandemic-era demand for bikes and e-bikes represented a new baseline rather than a spike. It didn’t. The European bike industry tipped almost immediately from shortage into glut. Accell was left holding enormous inventory — a peak of around 340,000 finished bikes in late 2023 — and discounting hard to move it, which is precisely the combination that destroys cash: money locked up in stock, thinner margin on every sale, and interest payments that don’t care either way.
The 2023 accounts told the story plainly: revenue down to €1.294 billion and a net loss of €390 million, including €344 million of one-off charges covering obsolete stock, restructuring and the recall of Babboe cargo bikes.
Two restructurings followed. In October 2024, creditors agreed to cut Accell’s debt from around €1.4 billion to €800 million. In February 2026, a second deal in little over a year saw KKR hand control to the group’s supersenior lenders in exchange for fresh funding — a restructuring explicitly designed to avoid insolvency. KKR’s losses on the venture have been put at over €1 billion.
Then, in July, it looked as though there was a way out. Singapore-based DuTech Group had agreed to buy Accell, and competition authorities in Germany, Austria and Poland had signed off. All that was apparently outstanding was the formal completion. It didn’t happen. Neither Accell nor DuTech has explained why.
What happens to the bikes
Nobody knows yet, and anyone telling you otherwise is guessing.
The realistic outcomes range from a rescue of the group broadly intact, through a break-up in which individual brands find individual buyers, to some brands simply being retired. Portfolios like this rarely die all at once — names with equity and a functioning dealer network tend to get picked up.
For riders, the immediate practical questions are warranty and spares. If you own a recent Haibike, Ghost or Lapierre, or a Raleigh e-bike, your warranty sits with a legal entity that is currently in a formal insolvency process, and the UK entity is heading towards administration. That doesn’t void anything overnight, but it does make it worth talking to your dealer sooner rather than later, and worth sourcing any proprietary spares you know you’ll need while stock is still on shelves.
For shops, the exposure is sharper: unsecured creditors in an administration rarely do well, and anyone holding credit notes, warranty claims or pre-orders with Accell UK will want to be talking to their accountant this week.
We’ll update this story as the process develops.
