Originally Posted by seely
Actually I just read in Bicycle Retailer that road bikes account for 30% of the market and MTB's count for 38%, so the whole theory about mountainbikes outstripping road sales is out the window I guess. 8% marketshare difference will make little, if any, impact in the pricing.
Sorry to be impatient...
I spoke with a friend today who read this article in the latest hard-copy version of BRAIN and the
data represented the market share in dollars spent, not units sold. Unless they included an average unit cost, you cannot extrapolate the market share by units sold. If you are curious what the real data looks like relative to bicycle sales and market share, try this:
http://nbda.com/site/page.cfm?PageID=34
You'll note that in 2002, based on sales data from the 19 largest bicycle manufacturers road bikes accounted for 5.3% of the market while mountain bikes still held the top spot with 33.8% of the market. Average unit cost was represented as $450 for MTBs and $1,195 for road bikes. This data reaffirms the original poster's premise that road bikes, in general, have a higher unit cost than mountain bikes than it does for anything else.