Questor/Schwinn later purchased GT Bicycles in 1998 for $8 a share in cash, roughly $80 million. The new company produced a series of well-regarded mountain bikes bearing the Schwinn name, called the Homegrown series. This includes sales, revenue, price, market share and growth rates by type. Post your bicycles, parts or literature that you want to sell or trade.
Unlike Schwinn, many of these brands were perennial participants in professional bicycle racing, and their production road bicycles at least possessed the cachet and visual lineage of their racing heritage, if not always their componentry. One example was Peugeot, which won several Tour de France victories using race bikes with frames occasionally constructed by small race-oriented framebuilders such as Masi, suitably repainted in Team Peugeot colors. In reality, mass-market French mongoose bmx bike manufacturers such as Peugeot were not infrequently criticized for material and assembly quality — as well as stagnant technology — in their low- and mid-level product lines. Nevertheless, Peugeot proudly advertised its victorious racing heritage at every opportunity. While not as prominent at the winner’s podium, Japanese brands such as Fuji and Panasonic offered consistently high quality, reasonable prices, and state-of-the-art-derailleur, crankset, and gearing design.
If they cannot, vertical integration and the elimination of small independent competitors are likely to follow. Meanwhile, the Court has, sua sponte, created a bluntly indiscriminate and destructive weapon which can be used to dismantle a vast variety of distributional systems — competitive and anticompetitive, reasonable and unreasonable. The Greenville plant was not a success, as it was remote from both the corporate headquarters as well as the West coast ports huffy mountain bike where the material components arrived from Taiwan and Japan. Additionally, Asian manufacturers could still produce and assemble high-quality bicycles at a far lower per-unit cost than Schwinn at its plant in Mississippi, which had to import parts, then assemble them using higher-priced United States labor. The Greenville manufacturing facility, which had lost money each year of its operation, finally closed in 1991, laying off 250 workers in the process.
By this time, increasingly stiff competition from lower-cost competition in Asia resulted in declining market share. These problems were exacerbated by the inefficiency of producing modern bicycles in the 80-year-old Chicago factory equipped with outdated equipment and ancient inventory and information systems. After numerous meetings, the board of directors voted to source most Schwinn bicycle production from their established bicycle supplier in Japan, Panasonic Bicycle. As Schwinn’s first outsourced bicycles, Panasonic had been the only vendor to meet Schwinn’s production requirements. Later, Schwinn would sign a production supply agreement with Giant Bicycles of Taiwan. As time passed, Schwinn would import more and more Asian-made bicycles to carry the Schwinn brand, eventually becoming more a marketer than a maker of bikes.
Starting in the 1890s, Arnold, Schwinn and Company were a bicycle manufacturer with none of its own retail sales outlets. Their bicycles were sold in Sears and Roebucks and other department stores. This changed in the 1930s as Schwinn began to withdraw from selling bicycles through mass-market retailers. Schwinn developed high-cost, high-quality bicycles and started focusing on the sale of its bicycles through local bicycle retailers.