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.
Explains the lack of a “Girls on Ghost" factory XC team…
Accell owns some of the most well-known names in Dutch cycling – Batavus and Sparta city bikes, Koga touring bikes, and the Babboe and Carqon cargo brands – as well as Raleigh, Lapierre, and the German marques Haibike, Winora, and Ghost. It employs around 3,700 people in 15 countries.
Four difficult yearsThe company was publicly listed in Amsterdam until private equity group bought it for €1.56 billion in 2022.
It has struggled ever since the covid pandemic. Demand for bikes surged during the pandemic but parts were hard to get, and by the time supply chains recovered Accell was left with a mountain of unsold stock. Revenues fell 22% in 2024 to just over €1 billion.
Nobody is safe from the black hole that exists at the core of the bike trade.
They were hit hard by the Babboe cargo bike recall too where it turned out that Babboe had been fraudulently managing their quality control and literally tens of thousands of cargo bikes (Babboe and sub-brands like Raleigh) needed recall and inspection. Cost them an absolute fortune although it also serves them right. It was the bike industry equivalent of the emissions scandal in the car world although outside of cargo bike circles, not a lot was ever said about it.
Raleigh, I have mixed feelings about. The fact that they were once one of the biggest names in bike manufacturing doesn’t necessarily buy them a get-out-of-jail-free card. Just shows that as with countless companies over the years they’ve failed to adapt and evolve and move with the times.
Feels slightly dirty to say this, but it’s Haibike I feel worst for. Yes 99% of the bikes were gopping but they stuck to their guns and have been a big part of getting e-bikes established (for better or worse). The rest of the brands I doubt I’ll notice vanishing
Sad times.
There are a few brands in the performance/leisure market there that are just a other brand. But in Raleigh and Batavus you’ve got two brands that if you cycled to work in the 60s 70s and 80s in the UK or the Netherlands you were probably riding one or lent yours again one in the shed.
Having said that does this Raleigh have anything to do with the Nottingham based Raleigh other than the name?
Is it actually bad sales or is it a case of borrowing a huge amount of money to buy companies and then not being able to service the debt?
Seems to be common whenever you mention private equity going under.
You mean like what happens just about any time private equity gets involved in buying some company that actually makes things? *cough* EA and the Saudi PIF…
Per the story
That just seems spectacularly bad business/failure of due diligence and business sense.
it was announced in January 2022. It should already have been obvious by then that there was trouble ahead. By August that year there was massive overstock in parts of the industry – I was buying clothing at huge discounts because (as I understand it) companies were receiving both the previous year’s stock (that had been held up in global shipping chaos) and the current year. There was a fire sale of Sportful, Pearl Izumi and others. The same was happening with bikes – stuff went from no discounts to big discounts very quickly as supply chains opened up again.
It seems kind of obvious that demand driven in no small part by a shitload of free time during lockdowns wouldn’t continue as the world returned to normal and that an awful lot of people who wanted bikes had just bought them. The final lockdown in the UK was in July 2021.
It’s literally just a brand name now isn’t it, I’m sure someone will buy the rights once the bones of Accell are left out to be picked over.
Can’t say I’m at all upset about Haibike TBH but I’m not an E-MTB Fanboi.
I think what is probably sadder is the impact to the wider Cargo bike market of (potentially) losing Batavus and Babboe. Both should be worth someone picking up, Right?
Also Koga as a touring bike brand; didn’t Mark Beaumont use Kogas for both of his round the World rides?
A friend/ acquaintance works for Haibike doing their graphics. She’s been there since finishing uni back in 2011….. It’s about time she changed jobs. Guess this might be the push she needed.
Babboe dropped a proverbial when their frames started falling and they didn’t want to warranty most of them. They deserve to go under just for that.
A lot of the other failures in the post-Covid era were due to shops running around begging any and all suppliers for stock and when 4 shops are phoning the same supplier going “have you got Bike X?", the supplier thought (wrongly) that it was 4 people asking for the bike, but it was actually one person asking 4 times.
So the demand was believed to be 4x higher than it actually was and by the time the supplies started coming through again, everyone who wanted a bike already had one hence loads of excess stock.
And in that tiny window where demand was perceived to be through the roof ad everyone thought “this is the new normal", KKR bought Accell at the top of the market; Accell included brands that were already failing, notably Raleigh, along with brands that were not mainstream, like Lapierre and Ghost. Then they threw money at it to keep it afloat and now it’s become one of the biggest private equity losses in the entire industry.
Raleigh’s fall from grace has been painful to see but they’re an irrelevance now.
“Is it actually bad sales or is it a case of borrowing a huge amount of money to buy companies and then not being able to service the debt?"It does seem to be a pattern that keeps repeating. Leveraged buyouts when times are good, then wrapping the company up when it falls on hard times. Someone must be making a lot of money here.
Again, this does seem like a failure to understand the customer. That’s natural behaviour that should be obvious to anyone familiar with the bike (or any other) industry. Have you got one of these? not in stock, but we’ll check with the supplier.
Raleigh has been all but dead for years, Haibike and Ghost never seemed to gain popularity outside mainland Europe but the Lapierre Spicy was THE UK trail bike back in the day, it’s quite a rags to riches to rags again story.
I saw the BBC news article about Raleigh but hadn’t clocked it was the full parent company.
Shit, no more Zesty, X-Control, Crosshill… Lapierre rarely if ever made a bad bike.
Other than the ones that kept snapping ….
Snappierre.
which ones were they? Genuine curiosity, they’re quite popular in these parts and I don’t know anyone who’s broke one. Our club’s notorious bike snapper bought a carbon X-Control, one of the few frames he hasn’t had replaced under guarantee.
My immediate thought was there goes my Van Nicholas Ti lifetime warranty which I’ve actually used 4 times for cracks appearing on 3 different models. However it appears that ship sailed in January when they sold Van Nic to an Italian company, hey ho. Hope the current gravel frame is better than earlier MTBs.
Damn. I just recently bought a Lapierre Overvolt AM ebike. Absolutely fantastic bike to ride, thankfully. And I assume the Bosch motor will get support. But it’s still naff that the manufacturer of a high ticket item you’ve bought goes under. And worse for the employees obviously. Just crap all round.
which ones were they?
No eyed deer.
Mate had one. I can picture it, but couldn’t tell you the model.
Wasn’t long after Crack’n’fail Cannondale.
We sold loads of Zestys BIT26″D. I don’t recall any frame failures.
The PE model is buy it, build value, sell it for way more. The real value is in the last bit, the exit event not the debt servicing.
The whole idea that insolvency somehow makes the investors rich is one of those odd internet myths/misunderstandings. I think broadly it’s because people distrust PE so they assume when an investment fails it’s a way of legging over the little guy to make more money.
The most everyday analogy I can think of is it would be like buying an investment property to sell on in a few years time. You spend time and money renovating and extending it then renting it out to pay the mortgage and when you can’t afford to fix the roof for the 10th time because it keeps leaking endlessly, you burn it down without paying the gas bill, except there’s no insurance and you’re left with a smoking heap of rubble.
Just had a look on the Raleigh website out of nosiness – limited range of kids bikes, some e-bikes, that’s it. No non-electrified adult bikes, no sign of the race team bikes of a few years ago. Unfortunately it feels like, like Peugeot, the name is all that’s really left and I’m saying that as one whose first bike was a Raleigh and who runs an elderly Pioneer.
What about the bit where they load the company up with debt and asset strip?