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Eek.
Ahh shit
Darnm, is now good time to sell some 717's on hope XC's 😉
I thought cycling was having a boom time at the minute ?
Blimey, not good. Here's hoping that they can find a good solution.
Bloody hell, I'd not heard anything about that coming
Damn I love Mavic
I thought cycling was having a boom time at the minute ?
Cycling might be but that doesn't translate into sales of £1000+ wheelsets.
Mavic have fallen into that trap of having a massive and confusing range which costs shedloads of money to develop and keep (although part of that is just the market chopping and changing things every couple of years, especially with MTB). And then the stuff that doesn't sell needs getting rid of at massive discount (loss).
a massive and confusing range which costs shedloads of money to develop and keep...And then the stuff that doesn’t sell needs getting rid of at massive discount (loss).
Much like Salomon.
Who own Mavic.
Who own Mavic.
Who used to own Mavic
Christ on a bike !!
True, Simon. My mistake.
When you think about it, they used to be the go to wheel. If you wanted the best you bought crossmax or ksyrium, it's not been that way for a good few years now.
2unfit2ride
Subscriber
Darnm, is now good time to sell some 717’s on hope XC’s 😉
We have a couple of pairs of 717/719's on Pro 2's.
Both over 10 years old and as straight as the day they were built.
Which might have been the problem.
Why replace something that just works?
We ALL used to buy Mavic rims...who does these days? It’s DT, Stans, Enve, H-Plus Son, Light Bicycle, Nextie, but never Mavic.
Who used to own Mavic
Who both used to be owned by the same parent company. (More recently?)
Can't say I'm suprised, not seeing anyone buy Mavic on MTB or Road anymore.
Their recent stuff is always being sold off on CRC at half price, and their rims have dropped off the face of the earth. OEM presence has fallen off a cliff too. No big surprise, but sad to see.
On the MTB front they were just so slow to innovate, Stans wiped the floor with them for a long time while they were still selling 719s and sticking with UST and the like, and when they finally moved past that and got a decent (but bewildering) range for this decade it was DT's turn to beat them with a stick. A shame, but you can only run on goodwill and reputation for so long.
It's true with rims as well, D521 was THE go to rim for quite a while. Probably more like a Stans Flow these days.
Also Deemax was the wheel of choice for most world cup riders for years, can't think of any team using them now.
I think they were slow to the party when it came to wider rims. UST didn't sell so well either as tubeless ready rims and tyres became far more reliable.
That’s a shame as the best complete wheelset I‘be rode/own is a carbon hubbed slr wheelset from 2007 ish, ust tubeless as well as ceramic coated, very light and stiff they were a perfect match for my scandium salsa Juan solo single speed and they had that all important single red spoke.
A real shame, I used to love Mavic but I like to build my own wheels rather than buy into one of their systems. Their offer has just seemed far too complicated with masses of proprietary bits on custom this and that and from the outside it just looks like a nightmare if I ever wanted to buy a spare wotsit. I'm not even hard on wheels and I look at them as expensive trinkets.
Do they still own ENVE?
Both disappointing and sad.
The background needs full investigation and disclosure; let's hope the French unions get their wish.
I have a pair of their Zxellium road shoes which are great; also two of their Cosmic helmets in their signature yellow.
Timing is interesting as the past 6 weeks have been a mini-boom for every bike shop - both physical and on-line; bikes and accessories sold out almost everywhere.
The 121 and 217 rims were the go to when I started mountain biking. How things have changed, the last Mavic rim I bought was a 719 in 2010, since then I’ve had a succession of Stans. As people have said above, they seemed to be very slow to adopt new ideas/ innovate (which is ironic given how innovative they were in the ‘90s and ‘00s - UST, wheelsets etc).
As above, they lost their core market. I've not even thought about buying a Mavic wheel or rim for years and they used to be the absolute go-to in the 90s and 00s. I have and still do own some excellent clothing of theirs though, it doesn't wear out! 🤔
Gutted.
Love my Mavic wheels, have them on all my bikes.
Wow, that's a real shame but then I'm a bit of a lurker sat in that space between latest fad & retro.
It's right though my 90s bike is on 217s and 517.
They just dont seem to have kept up.
"Employees have been worried for a long time; for years we’ve been looking for investment. What we need is a serious buyer who wants to stay in the Annecy basin," Meunier said.
My guess is that the owners saw this as a good time to move manufacturing to Asia. The Mavic brand is probably worth a decent amount, but being tethered to manufacturing in France is probably not sustainable. IIRC, RockShox were pretty much dead before SRAM took over and moved production to Asia. Marzocchi are another example - used to be an industry leader but just got left behind.
Got d521 ceramics on the cargo bike.
I have a ksyrium equipe rear wheel for the turbo bike
And a pair of broken crossmax that look pimping but are of course broken.
But everything else across the board is Stan's or wierdly wtb who seem to clean up in the OEM market mid range.
But I have not bought a Mavic wheel or rim since the disaster that was those crossmax, terrible design of a hub.
And a youth rebuilding kryisium elites means I know it's not just restricted to one or two of their designs , just over complicated.
Of the modern range I'll miss their neutral service cars and bikes....
When they started selling camera drones I thought they were losing their way.
Sounds like some corporate shenanigans going on.
I'm also of the deeply confusing range of products didn't help view.
That said we've had two lots of Mavic Crossmax XL's which have been excellent wheels. A unique approach to hubs and spokes, but at least you can get spare parts easily (RaceFace, I'm looking at you) and they are simple to work on.
Marzocchi are another example – used to be an industry leader but just got left behind.
They suffered exactly the same fate of having a vast and bewildering product range which sucked up huge amounts of money.
Z1. Brilliant fork, complete game changer from all the elastomer stuff that came before it. Unique, identifiable.
Then came a whole host of Z2, 3, 4 and 5 with various sub-options (BAM, LT, SL...) and it cost them.
Same with Mavic, you had the Helium (first factory wheelset, unique, lightweight, identifiable) and the CrossMax (same) and then it fell into a costly rabbit hole of sub sub sub genres and model ranges.
You could get parts but they were pricey, I cracked a hub straight pull hub and the cost of replacement pretty much wrote off the wheelset.
Wow - thats sad cos so often once a company had got the receivers in, it either folds or gets slpit up by venture capitalists.
Mavic make the best bibshorts - their Ksyrium pro with the yellow pad for all day comfort. I will be future proofing my cupboard and getting a couple of pairs in stock.
I am a big fan of their Ksyrium wheels. I bought a pair of SLs almost new from somebody on CC in about 2010 and had about nine years of reliable use out of them, they are stiff and light and engineered in an interesting way that's different from other wheels. Last year I decided to re-rim the rear wheel and found it almost impossible to get a rim. In the end I found an Elite rim at a bike shop in France, which is the same extrusion but different paint. I got spokes easily enough and when I tackled the rebuild I was really impressed by the spoke system and the ease of building. I also like the freehub design, which is simple and needs regular maintenance. It will be a shame if somebody ditches Mavic's unique engineering and turns it into another Far-East manufactured brand.
Note it says in the article that they only have 200 odd employees.
That says to me that they, "mavic" themselves cannot be actually doing the manufacturing.
I'm not surprised, but interested people don't think their wheelset are upto much - I run two sets of mavic wheel from the past two years and they are excellent.
Haven't looked at Mavic wheels for ages. I do have a nice Mavic cycling top, and my Mavic shoes are going strong after 8 years but then, that doesn't keep them afloat.
Who's going to hoover them up - Mike Ashley, Chain Reaction or Planet X?
Mavic were always the rim of choice back in the late eighties/ early nineties when I got into mtb. Remember going to Martyn Ashfield cycles in risca to get Bill to hand build me a wheelset for my clockwork with xt hubs and mavic rims. They’re still in the shed (with hardLy any braking surface and a few odd spokes loose) on a hack bike.
snotrag
I’m not surprised, but interested people don’t think their wheelset are upto much – I run two sets of mavic wheel from the past two years and they are excellent.
They had a period of awful hubs, which was compunded by poor upport and spares availability.
They did sot out the hubs, the ITS4 ones were good, my last set of 26" wheels were the white Crossmax, and they were excellent wheels in terms of durability, but I had countless people ask me if the hubs had fallen apart. The other issue was width - they were narrow at a time when tubeless tyres were getting wider - a 2.35 Magic Mary or Hans Dampf would roll and burp a lot on them. And getting spokes was always an isue. THe yellow Crossmax Enduro that followed were just as narrow (and had the weird notion of a even narrower rear) with the same spoke issues.
They seemed to resolve all of this recently, but all of the above counted against them reputation wise.
Does receivership actually imply the business is in trouble e.g. losing sales?
My riding buddies all love them, one guy has eight sets!
I've never been sure, used to build a fresh set of XC717s every spring (V-Brakes + Pentlands mud...) but was never attracted to their wheelsets, something about the hubs and freewheels put me off, and especially not now that you're forced to pay for a pair of Mavic tyres at the same time!
Reading some details elsewhere there are a lot of corporate shenanigans going on in the background.
Salomon off loaded them to a private equity/assets stripping firm who put them into receivership.
So unclear if Mavic themselves are financially sound. Their website has no news and is still open to take orders.
Not found any details of what’s happening to ENVE.
Mavic is a France-based bicycle parts manufacturer. Its name an acronym for Manufacture d'Articles Vélocipédiques Idoux et Chanel. It was founded by Charles Idoux and Lucien Chanel in Lyon, France in the late 1800s. Mavic produced the first aluminium rim in 1934, and the first disc wheel in 1973. Wikipedia
Customer service: 020 3510 0644
Headquarters: Annecy, France
Founded: 1889
Parent organizations: Salomon Group, Amer Sports
Interesting that a division of larger group can go bust. I would have thought just asset strip it and sell what is left is the usual business practice unless its a way of making a tax loss.
Wow – thats sad cos so often once a company had got the receivers in, it either folds or gets slpit up by venture capitalists.
I think they were already owned by venture capitalists. I think the venture capitalist model is to find a company with a strong brand name, borrow money to buy it, have the company take on debt to buy back shares and pay dividends, then declare bankruptcy, reorganize, and sell the slimmed down company. The venture capitalists make a nice profit out of it, suppliers get stiffed, and workers lose their pensions. In the U.S., bankruptcy doesn't mean shutting the company down, just a process to negotiate with creditors over repaying debt. Creditors are given a choice of pennies on the dollar or nothing, so they take pennies. In a case like this, the venture capitalists probably just want to keep the brand name and move production to Asia. Any factories or other assets in France won't be worth anything to them, so they'll hand those over to creditors and transfer the brand name to another one of their shell companies. Because they're bankrupt, employees will probably get nothing. The money will all be hidden behind shell companies somewhere, so zero chance that authorities will be able to force them to pay up.
Mavic is owned by Amers Sports not a VC - they also own Salomon, Arcteryx, Peak Performance, Suunto, Enve and others hardly the Sports Direct model
More detail here, seems like a huge mess.
Enve are owned by a Chinese conglomerate now, a fairly ignominious fate, hope they do better than Mavic.
Had a lot of respect for Mavic wheels, they designed and made all their own stuff, now only DT really remain as a large wheel manufacturer still doing everything in house and doing a large chunk of it in Europe.
Note it says in the article that they only have 200 odd employees.
That says to me that they, “mavic” themselves cannot be actually doing the manufacturing.
Dunno, how many people does it take to re-invent the wheel every few years? 10 in engineering, 10 in marketing, couple in HR? 180 building wheels? A machine building them, one person lacing them, one person doing final checks and QC? So 90 90 production lines, 10 minutes a wheel, 4300 wheels a day? How big is the market for >£300 wheels?
Even if it's half that, and half are working on the extrusion and milling hubs that's still a lot of wheels?
They do seem to be permanently 10 years behind though. They finally updated the Open-Pro to catch up with Velocity, H+Son and Stans offerings, just as the market for road rims shifted to deep profile disk brakes.
Shame if they go under. Their M231CD rims are true icons of our sport.
Mavic is owned by Amers Sports not a VC – they also own Salomon, Arcteryx, Peak Performance, Suunto, Enve and others hardly the Sports Direct model
From the link above:
In March 2019, Amer Sports reported its cycling divisions as ‘discontinued’, and announced the sale of Mavic to a US-based private equity firm, Regent. Enve stayed with Amer Sports, who were still in the process of transitioning under the umbrella of Anta Sports.
The whole thing just sounds like VCs shuffling pieces around to strip out any assets before declaring bankruptcy.
This is Regent's website:
REGENTLP.COM Who will support Le Tour...whenever the next one is?
A real shame, I'll hate to see them go. I have owned a lot of Mavic kit over the years from wheels to shoes. Was looking at some of there carbon road wheels but think I'll hold fire for now.
Echo all those saying that they used to be the go=to for rims for a very long time. Last rims I bought was a set of 819's on Hope hubs as my first foray into tubeless back in 2012. The UST system was great until you couldn't get UST tyres anymore, tubeless ready tyres were hit-and-miss whether they needed a layer of tape or two to make them tight enough to seal. Haven't bought anything of theirs since those wheels were retired (smashed the rear up casing a stream jump), their insistence on using proprietary spokes and hubs for most stuff just put me off.
Hope they survive somehow.
We ALL used to buy Mavic rims…who does these days? It’s DT, Stans, Enve, H-Plus Son, Light Bicycle, Nextie, but never Mavic.
Silver Open Pros though... what with this news and Campy making almost exclusively awful-looking kit now, the best days for road bike aesthetics are looking more distant.
But yes, they've left the door open for a long time in a period where the market's been changing fast.
honourablegeorge
MemberTHe yellow Crossmax Enduro that followed were just as narrow (and had the weird notion of a even narrower rear) with the same spoke issues.
Not only that but weaker- it wasn't a new wheelset really, it was just an SX front and an ST rear. And it didn't work, so they ended up having to equip their pros with faked-up sets using a front rim on the rear, which looked close enough to the customer option but performed very differently.
That was 2014, pretty much the height of them losing the MTB market. There was a bunch of other shenanigans at the time, like dishonest rim weights (all of the UST rims were claimed weights without the eyelets, which were necessary to build the wheels)
To be fair all rim weights are without nipples that you need to build the wheel.
Yep, but with the Mavic USTs there was an extra screw-in grommet which you had to fit to the rim so you could fit a nipple. It was totally part of the rim
Well yeah it was more weight than just standard nipples but if they'd quoted weights with the grommets everyone would have said the wheels were too heavy. Kind of rock and a hard place situation.
Well yeah it was more weight than just standard nipples but if they’d quoted weights with the grommets everyone would have said the wheels were too heavy. Kind of rock and a hard place situation.
Well if everyone lied.......
If they were that uncompetitive (they are) then they should have engineered a better solution!
Note it says in the article that they only have 200 odd employees.That says to me that they, “mavic” themselves cannot be actually doing the manufacturing.
All automated. Same with Hope, that don't have that many staff but everything is made in house. Cyclist Magazine did a good article a while ago looking around the Mavic factory. It's all in-house (which is part of the appeal but also part of the cost) but you really don't need many staff to run a massive load of machinery that takes extruded aluminium in one end and throws out rims the other.
Wheelbuilding isn't too dissimilar - rims, hubs, spokes and nipples go into their respective slots, wheels come out the other end. I've seen the ones in the Hope factory. Hand finished but the machine does an incredible job of lacing it all up and getting the basic tension there.
If they were that uncompetitive (they are) then they should have engineered a better solution!
Other brands did, they bought in Tessa Tape..
Northwind
it was just an SX front and an ST rear.
Yeah, that was jt exactly. I had the SX which were falling behind width wise already.
I have a set of the yellow ones in the shed, come to think of it. Nedd to get some drilled rotor bolts out of them and sell them.
A new dawn, perhaps?
Back to wheels, rather than branching out so much. Seems wise to me.
Now, some trail rims in sunset and enduro/dh ones in yellow, please?
Bourellier don't appear to have any background in the bike industry; that's not necessarily a concern but I would feel more confident about Mavic's future if their new owner had some relevant sector experience.
Time will tell.
I must be the only one that hopes they stick to their guns now they're focussing on wheels and stick with narrower rims. I've found them stronger and less puncture prone, and they're lighter to boot.
I must be the only one that hopes they stick to their guns now they’re focussing on wheels and stick with narrower rims
They'll go out of business if they do.
Having recently had the opportunity to buy some new wheels at trade price, I decided against Mavic on the basis of their skinny rims, proprietary free hub design which is a mare to service and the probability of spares support for old models in a few years will be zilch - I wasn't spending £700 on some expensive garage ornaments.
I'll be looking at buying a couple of road rims over the next few months as my Stans Alpha ones are getting to close to the limit of the wear indicator. I'd love to buy a pair of Mavic rims as they're famed for their reliability but not only are they more expensive, they're narrower and heavier than their competitors. Shame.
Shame fox didn’t get hold of them could have done with modernising and fox make good kit of a bit pricey.
Having said that my last set of mavics were xm821 are something like that, laced by JE James using spaghetti for spokes.
Probably a relief that Fox didn't get their mitts on them. At least some of the workforce get to keep their jobs, if it were Fox taking over I'd guess both admin and manufacturing would be relocating overseas.