The UK buyer needs to be looking at much lower spec bikes if they want to match 2016 type prices.
As someone that imports bike bits from mainly outside the EU, inflation & currency adjusted our bikes havent seen a massive increase in prices over 2016. We have dropped a number of the cheaper options, so the base price might be highter but it’s a different bike.
We do however expect to see a small increase in costs this year over inflation, maybe 5%-7% overall as the suppliers are increasing costs above inflation, but thats helped a little by the 0.7% reduction in duty and sustained slight improvement of the $. Air freight into the UK has skyrocketed as has load space on ships, but load space on ships costs peanuts anyway if you’re shipping stuff thats has a decent price/volume ratio (half decent bike stuff does), so 2 or 3 times peanuts is still peanuts. Whether we’ll see big increases in port fees is yet to be seen.
All that said, its a total nightmare trying to stay on top of the actual ordering of stuff now with some timelines from one major supplier of ours topping out over 500 days.
FIVE
HUNDRED
DAYS.
Thats nigh on impossible to manage 🙁