phyko

kidshibuya

That's all good but the fact remains that sales increased and the company was always in profit. And that was after a huge scandal that pretty much every person on the planet heard about. Its a serious dent in the scandals take down business argument. And you don't want to bring the timing into it because for 2017 when everyone had time to digest the scandal and choose wisely guess what happened? VW doubled profits. I'd like my paycheck to be hit with scandals like that.

phyko

GTA

when you say 10 "facts", they should not be rumors or personal opinions.

Siu Blue Wind

wesgreen

Yup, it's definitely up there. Tern must be getting desperate. I don't really like Dahon's current model range much, but after all these years they still seem to offer the most bang for the buck. If my Vitesse D3 ever dies I'll try to find another one.

Joe Remi

I've liked every Dahon I've owned. I probably would've liked Terns, too, if they hadn't developed that nasty habit of snapping in half. But thanks for the silly list, Tern Troll.

tds101 

I own 3 Dahon folders, and 1 tern. I have no issues with buying another Dahon.

Bonzo Banana

There is nothing wrong with outsourcing to China as you have stated most bike brands do it. The bike industry as a whole has many famous European, US and other international brands that do it. What makes me uncomfortable is many of these brands claim to be the manufacturer and often use their heritage of building bikes where the brand was developed to sell their current Chinese imports. Many of these bikes are completely generic and can be found under many other brands. Often not their more expensive models which may get more design input from the brand itself even if the bike is wholly made by a Chinese company. The retail price is often hugely above what the same bikes would sell with the Chinese brand on.

Dahon regularly outsource most bikes it seems to me. Some of the designs are not Dahon and some are. Even those Dahon designs that are can be wholly made by someone else.

You have their ford folding bikes which are just imports from a lower quality facility in Bangladesh.

Dahon?s Ford Bikes for Europe Launched at Taipei Cycle - Bike Europe

You have bikes from fuj-ta and flying pigeon and you have bikes with frames manufactured at their Chinese factory including frames and you have many other companies involved.

How on earth does Dahon represent a quality level? It isn't its a brand exercise of slapping the brand on as many bikes as possible and taking a financial cut of the profits. It's not a business model I respect and also its very difficult to support end customers when products are sourced from such a wide spectrum of factories. Dahon seem happy to constantly change their model line up.

I've seen a basic entry level Dahon and the frame welds looked poor, it was a pretty basic aluminium folding bike with freewheel for about 450 pounds here in the UK and likely wholly manufactured or assembled at maxcom in Bulgaria. Better quality bikes are available for half the price. The only possible reason you would buy that bike is because the Dahon brand is recognisable. It looks like Halfords have stopped selling Dahon's now as the bike isn't on their site anymore but had a review showing many of the quality issues with the bike. However that Dahon bike may not represent the quality of a Dahon bike sold in the US which could be sourced from a completely different company and those bikes might be good quality.

That's the thing with bike importers who are constantly looking to find the cheapest factory to use there is no consistency to quality. That's why I like companies like Giant, their bikes are actually made by Giant themselves, sounds ridiculous stating that as a novelty but that is the reality of the bike industry in 2018. Let's say you want to buy a fuji-ta bike, you know they represent pretty much the best quality vs price ratio and have one of the most advanced efficient bike factories in the world how do you find out which brand that is or the exact model that uses their frames and which is offering the best deal on a fuji-ta bike. I'm just making the point that it's actually quite difficult to make an informed choice when so many brands are simple importers. If we accepted Chinese brands more easily not only would it be easier to obtain a quality bike but it would be much cheaper. Our obsession with recognisable brands makes this difficult.

diogo

MovingViolation

Well I don't think this instance was exactly a case of "Nothing personal, strictly business."

I've lived out East for a long time now. It looks like a typical case of <irony> Confucian Family Values, FTW </irony>. When things go bad, they really go bad.