Amer Sports today announced their intention to sell the Mavic and Enve brands giving Regent, a US based private equity firm, an exclusivity period within which to negotiate and agree a deal.
Amer state: “Amer Sports has reported its Cycling business as discontinued operations for full year 2018.” and that Mavic represents only 3% of sales.
The Enve brand was bought in 2016 for US$50m and is included in the sale.
Mavic+Enve is seen to be non-core to Amer Sport’s future growth plans. Remember also that Amer Sports itself was recently bought and my understanding is that this deal concluded Feb/March 2019 (TBC) following a period of negotiations and agreement over about 6 months.
Source: Amer
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It’s interesting. These two brands should have been silly easy to grow and do well with. Seems to clearly be a case of just not understanding how to manage them.
I think it would be hard to grow either. Not impossible, but realistically where would they go? Mavic can’t go low end because they are the everyman “high end” wheel. People replace almost identical wheels from their OEM bike with Mavic – that’s their position in the market. They aren’t luxury and neither are they cheap. Trying to move either way wouldn’t go well since one would dilute the brand and one would likely fail. Enve have nowhere to go, they are a luxury item. The people that want them and can afford them will buy them, of only as a night stand for their Garmin Marq. Those who can’t afford them are the reason those who can will buy them.
Wheels are a commodity these days, the tech is pretty well done and it costs a pretty penny to do anything new and special – usually in a wind tunnel. The Enve name is worth something. It’s a recognisable brand and the wheels look sexy. Mavic are just Mavic, they will carry on at revenue plus inflation for all of time. The markets want growth though, and that’s challenging here.
That said, there’s nothing stopping someone mounting a brake disk to the carbon wheel rather than the hub. Do this from the outside edge and you not only get stiffer braking but the carbon could mask the calliper from the wind for a double whammy. Now I think about it wheels are way too traditional and there’s a ton of growth potential for someone with imagination…
also, isn’t it weird how close the spokes always are to the hub. With carbon and a 12mm thru we could move the bearings out a few inches without a real penalty. This would probably have more benefit than an aero rim too if done right.
While high flange hubs do have a better bracing angle, there’s little to no room left to increase the drive side rear flange w/o cassette interference. (As we move the start of the spoke’s departure from the cassette later and later (higher) we decrease the clearance of the spokes @ the large cog, the only solution would be to move the flange inboard, which is worse.)
And rear drive side bracing angle is already by far the weak link in wheel design. Increasing NDS flange has been played with, but in general it’s chasing the wrong problem.
Because of this you’ll still find high-flange hubs in track use, where there is no such interference issue, but not i