Originally Posted by T-Mar

I believe the understanding among the majority of the long term Nishiki followers has been that the contracting was under the control of the licensee of the Nishiki brand, as opposed to Kawamura.

I say licensee because by the time that Giant got involved, it is unclear whether WCCSC was still directly involved. While they still may have owned the brand, it appears to have been licensed to the Nishiki Bicycle Company (USA) and Shields (Canada).

In 1976, Howie Cohen retired from WCCSC and handed things over to his brother, Leo Jr. and a group of investors. Currently, the earliest evidence we have of Giant manufactured Nishiki is 1978. It’s also the earliest known date for the Nishiki Bicycle Company, though there is evidence to support 1977 as Shields ‘ earliest involvement. Given that this is around or just a little over a year after Howie Cohen’s retirement seems just a little too coincidental.

I suspect that Howie’s retirement set off a chain of events driven by the profit oriented investors. The easiest way to ensure profit is to divest yourself of the risk associated with manufacturing is to simply license out the brand name. The differences between the Nishiki Bicycle Company models and the Shields Nishiki models clearly illustrate that each company had separate control over the specifications for their own models, indicating that some, if not all, of the manufacturing control was in the hands of the licensee. What we do know is that the Nishiki Bicycle was still solvent in 1981 but out of the picture in 1983. That puts their life span at four years, minimum. Five year terms seem to be a common lisence agreement period in the bicycle industry, so I suspect this was the case with Nishiki Bicycle Company. Whether Leo Jr, and the investors were also involved with the Nishiki Bicycle Company is unclear.

Undoubtedly, the reason behind the addition of Giant was purely economics. The bicycle boom basically collapsed in 1975, leaving lots of excess inventory. Going forward, everybody would be competing in a much smaller market. To stay competitive, costs would have to be closely maintained. Taiwanese companies like Giant had an advantage in that the rate of exchange between the New Taiwan and USA dollars was fixed. On the other hand, the Yen wasn’t fixed and the post 1975 trend was increasing the cost of Japanese manufacturing. So, I think it was a very easy decision to offload the high volume, entry level models to Giant, where there would be less volatility in the cost.

The move to Giant does not appear to have happened until after Howie Cohen stepped down. It is well known that Howie was extremely quality conscientious, placing it over cost and he would probably have been reluctant to source to somebody other than Kawamura, whom he had carefully cultivated. While the financial impetus would have been there as early as 1975, there is no evidence to support this happening, at that time. It is much easier to envision Giant being brought on board under the insistence of a group of profit driven investors or a licensee, and the timing would seem to substantiate this.

While Kawamura was probably not directly evolved in the decision to utilize Giant as a second source, there probably were some cases where Kawamura did subcontract manufacture, both to Giant and other manufacturers. The database clearly shows a handful of other sources, some known and some indeterminate. Some predate Giant’s involvement and others post date it. What does seem clear , is that these were not sustained long term offloads, but temporary ones. It would not be unusual for either company to occasionally get into a backlog and require some help, due to situations like strikes, natural disasters, machine breakage, materials shortages, etc.

Certainly, the circumstantial evidence supports this scenario. For instance, we’ve seen cases of the same model coming out of two different companies in the same year and have seen frames bearing Made by Kawamura decals but having a non-Kawamura serial number format.

The vast majority of Nishiki that crop up on this forum come from the USA. Relatively few are from other markets. In the case of Kawamura, the serial number format makes it easy to determine the intended market. Offhand, I can’t think of any other manufacturer that did this, so even if we did see a Giant frame intended for another market, it would not necessarily be readily apparent.

I wouldn’t put any faith in the tubing origin as an indicator of the country of manufacture. The tubing could simply have been imported, the same as the components.