Wheel manufacturer Mavic has been placed into receivership by a French Commercial Court in Grenoble.
Receivership is initiated by creditors or banks that believe a business cannot pay its debts however, unlike in administration, directors cannot place their own company into receivership. The brand will now be taken over by a receiver who will control the assets and work in the interest of the creditors to avoid the company entering into liquidation.
Mavic was founded in 1889 and employs around 250 people worldwide including 200 at its base in Annecy. Last July, Mavic was supposedly
sold from Amer Sports' portfolio to Regent, a US based private equity firm that also owns Diamondback, however according to reports in the French media, the sale did not go through as planned.
Gérard Meunier, secretary of the Social and Economic Committee (CSE), told
France3, "People came to Annecy in July 2019 to tell us that we were a sleeping gem, that they believed in Mavic. And since then, nothing. Not an investment, not an answer."
In the past week, it has emerged that, since February this year, Mavic has actually been owned by someone else entirely - M Sports International LLC, a Delaware based firm who have left almost no trace on the internet. Mavic’s President, Gary Bryant, resigned on the same day that M Sports took over and M Sports replaced him with a representative from a turnaround company called BySaving. It's worth saying that Regent still seem to believe they own Mavic, and they have the brand listed on their website portfolio.
The French courts have said: "A few days ago, staff representatives learned that, contrary to what had been publicly announced, Salomon had not sold their business to Regent LP but to M Sports, based in Delaware (USA), with no capital link with Regent!” In short, it's all looking like a bit of a mess.
Mavic's Social and Economic Committee is demanding accounts from Salomon (a skiing brand under the umbrella of Amer Sports, and a co-resident of Mavic’s Annecy factory) to clarify the details surrounding the sale. Meunier said, "[We want to know] under what conditions Salomon and the Amer Sports group sold Mavic? And who is behind this company M Sports and why it acquired Mavic?”
The company is now entering a six month observation period by the court. They will investigate the conditions under which Amer Sports sold Mavic and the details of M Sports and how it ended up acquiring Mavic.
Here's hoping they find a buyer and can be resurrected, and keep making great products.
Pitty cause I would happily buy their Day of The Dead rims if they were available for normal spokes.
www.bike-eu.com/home/nieuws/2016/01/ownership-of-dt-swiss-group-changed-10125443
Their financials are not public knowledge. I think what @headshot was referring to was their products being more desirable than Mavic's.
Mavic used to make the best rims - sensibly priced, extremely well made but fundamentally un-exciting. But thats what you want from a rim isn't it?
Should have brought rainbow ano back though. That would have sorted it Im sure.
Back in time you could get d’eMac with MP3 warranty , and they were really strong, with also a strong policy of warranty that made them the number one.
I have owned since a pair of crossmax , and there is constantly problems with the free hub. My point is that I don’t think I can say that mavic wheels got better over the last 10 years , while dt , hope , or this kind of brands did
I dont know what either companies end supply chain and manufacturing costs are, their marketing costs, overheads etc also, I guess that will be what will be being looked at now and the assets stripped.
Mavic have not kept up with the competition in MTB, no idea what it is like in road where the money is, but they used to be everywhere in the TDF etc.
very little to do with the product. Chief concern is that a ghost is driving the ship and slaves at the oars are about to starve if the ship runs aground unless Captain Jack can solve this mystery, free the crew from this spell & save the slaves
The problem could of course actually be financial funny business rather than a structural weakness in the company...
www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/guid/4E038408-7CD2-11EA-B298-E6606EABF547
Secondly, Mavic shouldn't be chastised for reflecting that they needed to find investment in order to change and improve, especially when they sought the help Amer Sports, a seemingly well respecting name in the industry. Santa Cruz did the same thing when they sold out to Pon Holdings did they not?
It's a bit of a leap to suggest that broken spokes and perceived quality of product led to the position we've read about above?
Yeah I had an issue with the front wheel as well few years ago and it was a pain dealing with them. To be aluminum Way to expensive and the propriety tools etc became a pain. On We are one now for two year of hard used and not one single issue with them, simply stellar.
They're charging a premium price for a product that no one but themselves regard as premium rightly or wrongly. The thing I really like is the sealed spoke bed and threaded nipples. Really a good idea.
Sadly they spent too long telling people what they wanted rather than making what people were buying.
Back in '95 it was Mavic or nothing. Now it's only just scraping into people's top ten in terms of what brand they want to buy.
DT also has two factories I seem to recall. The Swiss one serves the R&D, business and aftermarket manufacturing The Taiwanese one serves the OEM stuff. That's what someone told me anyway.
All this before I even talk about the tyres that they make and I know of no one that runs them (even if they come with the wheels for free). eBay would have loads of brand new sets when the crossmax xl and enduro did sell or came standard, everyone would change tyres.
I've got a pair of crossmax onone bike that have been nothing short of perfect for 5 years, have a set of deemax on my other bike, again, no problems whatsoever, they've never even needed trueing..
You get a spoke tool in the box with the wheels...
Well yes, but they don’t have to worry about sourcing expensive proprietary parts, like us peasents.
When I was 17 years old Mavic was very fast to support me (and thousands of others) with free rims. I remember (now fondly) Mavic sending me four Open4-CD rims...then wondering how in the hell my broke ass was going to make them into a wheel...since then, I have been very loyal to Mavic as a brand.
Nothing to do at all with Mavic going from being THE mtb wheel/rim brand to something that nobody I know has any remote interest to own
Once upon a time Mavic sold a lot of product in the OEM market. They did so because lots of us old folks (back when we were young folks) associated Mavic with quality products. Then, they became stagnant. Their products had some classic failure modes.
Then, lots of people realized that they could get the "Commie Bastards" in China to build wheels for less. So bike companies created "wheel brands" and Mavic, having lost the brand premium it once commanded, lost the OEM business to low labor cost companies.
Mavic sales have plummeted from €130 million a year in 2015 to €70 million last year, which was a 20.5 per cent decline on 2018’s €88 million. In 2019 they had a net loss of €12.8 million. That is a recipe for going out of business.
The "capitalism created the internet, cell phones, etc" garbage is just icing on the cake!
The problem is that the article is flat out wrong. It is well known who bought Mavic. Mavic was sold to Regent LLP (Limited Liability Partnership) which created a new corporate entity, M Sports, to keep the liability of owning Mavic at arms length, so to speak. The purchase price was not made public. It is possible that all they did was agree to take over the liabilities.
Mavic was pouring money down the drain at an alarming rate of over €50,000 per employee per year. The only reason to do that is if you expect a future return on investment. Likely once they owned Mavic and could talk to potential future customers they discovered that it was as valuable as a business as John Nance Garner described being VP of the USA: "not worth a pitcher of warm piss." Very likely Regent has lost money on the deal.
I once worked for as an engineer for a small firm that was bought by a private equity firm. They thought we added value to their existing portfolio. Then, one of our sales people told a customer about an R&D project. That customer told another, who told another... Sales dried up. The new technology should have been sold years in the future. It was rushed to market. We spent $20m on warranty work for $16m in sales. The loss was about $400,000 per employee.
They paid for the loss as the purchase price of the patents, moved the people who were willing to move into one of the other companies, and closed up our company. The PE firm lost money on the deal, but kept alive some technology that they needed for their other businesses. I got a new job in a different industry.
Also, the Cell Phone was invented by a team of engineers working for Motorola, so, yes, it was invented by a capitalist firm who viewed it as a way to make money.
The following is from the Bike Europe web site about the sale:
After announcing its intention to sell its bicycle business as part of its group portfolio, stock-listed Amer Sports Oyj has now entered into an exclusive agreement with global private equity firm Regent, LP to sell Mavic S.A.S. The purchase price is not disclosed. Amer Sports second bicycle component brand Enve is not included in the sale.
You're arguing for me.
Also, cell phones were derived from government funded advancements for military communication.
Have a good day, I'll carry on being "childish".
Apparently developing products only exists in the capitalism vacuum too. I'm proud of the bootlicking effort though. It's pretty solid.
I wish you the best and rubber side down.
Lets hope something good comes from this, whatever the hell it is that's going on.
Peace
Nah double-wides and singlewides first those were too soft and dented just by looking at them. I loved my singlewides tho..they redesigned and made the new gen double and single tracks stiffer and cheaper. Hard to true but literally bullet proof. The next gen after that. The mtx were a mix between double track and double wide.
It took him quite a while to convince them to make them themselves, as a company they've always seemed resistant to change.
Sometimes you have to make/sell what people are asking for, not what you think they want!
Period they made the Crossmax SLR with one red spoke. As ridiculous as their own spokes were... that red spoke was worth everything! From 2007 it went downhill for them, and I think ZTR caused it. Nobody cares what material their rims were made of. Sections and weights were spot on. The moment arch EX and Flow EX were released it was Almost game over. I remember hoping they would release 25mm internal Crossmax SX. Then DT released their 1 series rims and it was the end. Only this year They made the 1030 series. It’s probably too late. We’ll see.
Before dt released the EX471 rim, the best alloy wheel was a mavic hoop laced to a dt hub. A 721/823 rim laced to a 340/440 hub was about the strongest wheel you could ask for at the time. Dt didn’t have to try very hard to take the alloy wheel market once they sorted out what aluminum to use. They used to be butter soft, and then Gwin happened to give them some of the best marketing a wheel company could ever ask for. The best thing that mavic has done in the last decade for innovation of their product, was to put a ratchet in some of their hubs. Which I’m pretty sure was all a round about deal thanks to being owned by Enve (Amer)
If they fold, I’ll miss the iconic image they brought to the industry. But I will certainly not miss having to call someone in a warehouse In Utah to get a replacement spoke for a customer, having to buy a pack of 5 overpriced spokes, and then waiting a month and half for them to show up, only to use proprietary tools to install said spoke.
That being said, all of their tech, tires and clothing could give a certain dog like component and suspension company group a leg up on Shimano and Sram if they sold off Easton and replaced it with mavic
1st that comes to my mind is Troy Brosnan, pretty sure there were many more relevant riders on Magic in recent years.
All I know is I'm glad I don't work in their accounting or legal departments right now.
mombatbicycles.com/MOMBAT/BikeHistoryPages/Mavic.html
What a confusing mess, I read the article twice and still don't completely understand what happened with the ownership change.
cyclingtips.com/2020/05/mavic-is-in-receivership-but-who-owns-them-who-knows
But that really sucks! Legendary wheels. Loved my ITS-4 Hubs too. Guess making everything propriety caught up though. Special tools and spokes for everything
Mercedes Benz of North America is incorporated in Delaware too, and last time I checked, Daimler-Benz was not American. So yeah, lets blame American capitalism.
Looking at you Sombrio, etc