Originally Posted by
noodle soup
Shimano offers technical support to any team that uses their components, but they don't just hand over their hardware for free. In the past one team is sponsored by Shimano in the traditional sense, and it will be part of the team's name.
If they're part of the team's name they're giving a lot more than free gear. A named sponser would be paying a reasonable portion of the $10-30m it costs to run a team at the top level.
Shimano sponsored 7 world tour teams with components and I assume all of those teams get all their components for free. What can components for a team cost for a year? $60k? That's a drop in Shimano's marketing budget.