More detail here, seems like a huge mess.
https://cyclingtips.com/2020/05/mavic-is-in-receivership-but-who-owns-them-who-knows/
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.
Mavic is owned by Amers Sports
Sure about that?
https://cyclingtips.com/2020/05/mavic-is-in-receivership-but-who-owns-them-who-knows/
Edit - Great minds, etc!
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:
https://www.regentlp.com/portfolio
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?
https://m.pinkbike.com/news/mavic-saved-by-bourellier-group-focus-to-return-to-wheels.html
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.
