Chinese bicycle brands had a seminal year in 2025. More Chinese brands began to appear in Western countries and they bagged major sponsorship deals. XDS teamed up with Astana, while IGSport joined Groupama–FDJ United. Meanwhile, Britain’s Harry Hudson won the Junior World Road title at the Rwanda UCI Worlds on a Quick Pro road bike.
But what’s behind the surge in Chinese cycling brands? One person who is well placed to explain their newfound success is British expat Joe Whittingham.
Whittingham started out reporting on Chinese bikes, components and kit in 2016 through his YouTube channel China Cycling. He then co-founded Panda Podium, a website that curates the best of China’s home-grown products for sale overseas, and sponsors Hudson.
So we sat down with Whittingham for his take on the rapid development of Chinese brands and where he sees the future of this rapidly growing market.
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BikeRadar: For a long time in the ‘West’, the perception of Chinese products and brands has been one of very low quality, both in manufacturing and design. How do you think today’s Chinese products and brand design compares to when you first started to report on the industry?
Joe: The difference between Chinese products and brands now and 10 years ago is night-and-day. But first, we have to define what we mean when we say 'Chinese bike'. If it's just something that's 'Made in China', then around half the pro peloton is riding Chinese bikes, as the mainstream western brands have been using China and its factories for production for many years.
However, when most people say 'Chinese bike', they mean a bike from a Chinese brand.
Western brands originally moved carbon fibre manufacturing to China, attracted by cheap labour and relatively lax environmental laws (carbon fibre production is a pretty messy business).
In the early days, Western faces were a common sight in the factories as they worked on setting up the production lines and training the local engineers. As more and more brands moved production to mainland China, the local expertise and supply chain grew rapidly.
It's not only the carbon fibre factories. It's the factories that make the moulds, the EPS inserts, the paint factories, the water-transfer decal factories and even the pre-preg carbon fibre itself.
Most high-end frames use Japanese Toray carbon fibre, but the raw carbon fibre is imported into China and turned into prepreg – a 'ready to bake' mixture of resin and carbon fibre in Chinese factories.
Why do you think Chinese brands got such a poor reputation early on?
In the early days, there was the odd hiccup. Western brands would prototype a product in their own lab in their head office. It would work no problem and pass all the testing.
However, due to small differences in the actual manufacturing, the ‘same’ products being produced out of Chinese factories would encounter issues.
Many product recalls can be traced to issues during the manufacturing process. A difference in temperature or humidity in the factory compared to the headquarters, or even just inexperienced staff, would lead to critical differences in the composite.
These are differences that are invisible to the naked eye and only rear their head when frames start cracking or failing in the field.
These examples were few and far between as most Western brands had 'boots on the ground' with employees overseeing the factory's production, but they definitely happened.
As the local expertise and experience grew, the Western brands enjoyed reaping the seeds of their hard work. The Chinese expertise and knowledge had grown to the point that many Western brands simply had to send a 3D drawing of a frame to the factory.
The details of the layup and the tooling were all being handled by the Chinese factories. Less back-and-forth communication, less expensive business class tickets to Asia, and fewer product recalls.
Some of the larger brands put protection in place. They had agreements with factories that, in return for training them on the knowledge to produce the frames, these factories would exclusively produce for that Western brand.
To this day, many of those agreements are still in place. But the key engineers who were trained at those factories have since left to start their own factories or brands.
These new brands and factories also started producing for Western brands, offering a full service from frame design through to delivery.
For smaller brands, they offered a catalogue of 'open mould' frames. These are frames that a factory would design and manufacture in-house, and smaller Western brands could order with their own paintjobs and logos applied. This removed the need for the Western brands to do their own R&D.
At the same time, these new factories started offering some of their products for sale directly to consumers.
The mainstream still viewed Chinese products as 'too risky'. This was perhaps partly due to earlier mishaps, but maybe also due to a constant propaganda campaign of the established brands or the elitist mindset of many road bike riders. They couldn't accept that someone on an $800 frame had gotten the same (or close) to the same quality as their $4,000 frame.
But at this point, the Chinese brands were still limited. They knew there was no way any Western consumer was going to pay over $1,000 for a Chinese frame or Chinese wheelset. This meant they were limited to producing relatively low-end frames.
So, China had a whole bunch of factories capable of making top-tier frames, but Western consumers weren't willing to pay anything but low prices because the Chinese brands were missing one thing: branding.
How do you think the balance has shifted when it comes to the balance of design and branding?
Many consumers will claim they don't care about branding: they want the fastest bike or the lightest bike, and they don't care what brand it's from – but for most people, that's just not true.
The clothes we wear, the car we drive and the bike we ride are all an expression of our personality.
So, what did riding a Chinese bike say about you? The same old-school mentality that means if your neighbour brought a new Audi, you had to buy a new Mercedes was alive and well.
But then a shift started to take place. Instead of consumers wanting to show how rich they were, some consumers wanted to start showing how smart they were.
If your neighbour brought an Audi, you didn't buy a Mercedes; you bought a Tesla. It showed that you were smart with your money. This was before Elon [Musk] went crazy and before EVs had to pay road tax, but you were getting supercar acceleration, not paying road tax, and you could take the kids to school.
The same consumer-thinking shift started to happen in bikes, too. Suddenly riding a pair of Farsports wheels, for example, showed you were smart with your money, and you understood bikes.
The smarter Chinese brands leaned into this. But it wasn't just marketing. This change in thinking meant that Western consumers were now willing to pay more for the Chinese brands.
This removed the previous restrictions on them, and they could finally start selling their own high-end models using high-end raw materials. Of course, not all the Chinese brands took this approach. Many brands just saw the mainstream adoption of Chinese brands as an excuse to raise their prices without improving their product at all.
While all this was happening, another ‘perfect storm’ brewed. Covid. This is another long story, but here's the short version.
Before Covid, many Chinese factories were happy just producing for Western brands. They paid their bills on time, and for the factories, it was a low-stress, reliable income.
Then Covid hit and demand for bikes in the West skyrocketed. Western brands were throwing money at the factories to increase production.
Production lines were added and new factories were built. Capacity in many factories doubled or tripled within the space of a year. Then, as quickly as the demand rose, it disappeared.
Western brands quickly realised they were overstocked and started cancelling orders. Factories that had spent millions developing new production lines found the whole factory empty.
At the same time that the market went downhill in the West (2023-2024) road cycling in China had its own boom. So, there was the perfect storm. The factories had this almost endless supply due to their increased production capacity, and an almost endless demand as a country of 1.4 billion people suddenly became obsessed with road bikes.
Many of the factories that had been too scared to start their own brands for fear of angering their Western customers found themselves with nothing to lose and everything to gain.
Their western customers were all cancelling orders anyway; there was nothing to lose from angering them. So, they started their own brands, and the local markets ate it up. Don't get me wrong, there's still huge demand for Western brands in China, but the low prices and the 'patriotic' edge of buying a local brand skyrocketed sales.
With that in mind, how do you see the situation today?
'Chinese bikes' is now a term that encompasses a huge range of products. Frames, for example, probably range from roughly $600 for a no-brand, open mould frame to more than $4,000 for something like the Incolor SSR, which is an aero frame that weighs just 750g, but tests faster than a Cervélo S5 in the Silverstone wind tunnel.
There really is something for everyone and every budget, but it can be a bit of a minefield for the uninitiated. That was the whole premise of Panda Podium: trying to simplify the process of buying directly from China.
Part of that is the testing and product vetting. A bunch of us in the office are avid cyclists. We train, race and have even Everested on the products we sell.
Every brand that wants us to sell its product has to first undergo strict testing. We visit their factories, inspect their production lines and give the bikes a good thrashing on the road.
There are plenty of products that we get sent that never make it to the website; rejected for bad quality, bad design or just blatantly copying existing products. The other aspect of simplifying the experience is the actual purchasing process itself.
Our team is able to offer advice on what's compatible, what's best for the roads you ride, or what length stem you should get to best replicate your current fit. By making Chinese brands more mainstream, more Chinese brands will emerge with more products and more choice for consumers.
The rise of the Chinese brands will hopefully also put pressure on Western brands to lower their prices. So, even if you don't plan on riding a Chinese bike, it's a win-win for everyone.
When it comes to the emergence of this new generation of bikes and components that are getting more exposure in the West, how long do you think it’ll be before we see the larger brands arriving in Western retailers under their own names?
I think Chinese brands are going more mainstream, but a part of that process is appearing in brick-and-mortar stores.
Many consumers don't have the time, patience or knowledge to build their own bike, so having the option to just walk into a bike shop and buy with local support is a prerequisite of becoming fully ‘mainstream’.
The biggest thing preventing this at the moment is profit margins. As most of the Chinese brands have built their reputation on being value-for-money brands, it means there simply isn't enough room for a decent profit margin for distributors and dealers.
There are a few solutions for this. Either the Chinese brands can open their own retail locations in the West (popular Chinese brand RockBros has already started doing this with stores in the USA and Germany).
Another approach is that Chinese brands will have to raise prices to the point that there's enough profit margin for offline stores. Finally, the brands can continue to operate as direct-to-consumer brands, but with warehouses and distribution in the West.
Canyon thrives with its direct-to-consumer model, and there's no reason a Chinese brand couldn't replicate that. It will be interesting to see which brand chooses which approach.
With the likes of X-Lab sponsoring a WorldTour team, not to mention Harry Hudson’s junior worlds win on a Quick Pro, do you think a Tour de France podium is within the reach of one of the brands coming out of China?
Is a Chinese bike good enough to win in the Tour de France? Of course. But winning Grand Tours is less about the performance of the bike and more about the economics of it all.
Sponsoring a men's WorldTour team is a huge investment. And unless you're sponsoring Jumbo or UAE, the chances of a victory are slim.
If I were a brand, I probably wouldn't sponsor a WorldTour team. I believe the average age for a viewer of the Tour is over 60. A consumer like that already has their brand loyalty. You're not going to change their mind.
But the younger generation is on social media. TikTok, Instagram, etc. You can sponsor a lot of influencers for €2 million.
Finally, do you think we’re now approaching an era of Chinese expertise stepping out of the shadowy world of being vendors for the larger, well-known brands and becoming not just a challenger technically but also a challenger in desirability?
Technically, no problem. They're already there. But for desirability, that's a tough one.
What we ride is still an expression of ourselves. For many consumers, the bike you ride is still in the realm of fashion.
I think you can look at the NBA for a good example. Chinese footwear brands like Li-Ning and Anta make great shoes and are spending hundreds of millions of dollars sponsoring athletes such as Dwyane Wade and Klay Thompson, but if you walk around the streets of America, you're not seeing anyone walking around in Li-Ning or Anta T-shirts. And for what it's worth, you see plenty of people wearing those T-shirts in China.
I think it might happen, but it will be a long-term change. Twenty to thirty years ago, many people thought of Skoda as an uncool brand. Now they're sponsoring the Tour, and people drive them with pride. So, give it a few decades and let's see.
