If you can still expect deliveries from China before January 25, 2020, you can count yourself lucky as a bicycle supplier - and fill your warehouse with the goods or use them to build entire bicycles. After all, full warehouses will soon be a thing of the past in the bicycle industry, even if hopefully only temporarily. Due to the coronavirus pandemic and the quarantine measures, many businesses in China remained closed for several weeks after January 25, the Chinese New Year, which is considerably longer than the approximately two weeks of vacation for the New Year celebrations. And at the beginning of March 2020, there are only tentative signs that production in Chinese companies is starting up again. For example, Chinese electric drive specialist Bafang reports that the emergency level at its headquarters in Suzhou, west of Shanghai, has been officially downgraded by the authorities and companies are being asked to resume normal production.

Not affected today

"As of today, we are not yet affected by supply disruptions. We are still well stocked for the coming weeks and can continue to utilize our production capacity. Thanks to our very good stock situation of fully assembled flyers, we can currently deliver many models from stock at short notice," says Anja Knaus, responsible for PR and media relations at the Swiss electrical engineering company. And she immediately puts things into perspective: "We are currently receiving daily reports from our suppliers that work has not yet resumed. If the situation does not improve, we have to assume that we will also experience delays in production from mid-March".

The scenario is very similar at Swiss bicycle manufacturer TDS Rad AG, whose Managing Director Reto Meyer says: "We have good stocks and still have incoming goods from before Chinese New Year. Corona won't affect us in the short term". According to Meyer, the à la carte specialist from Eastern Switzerland will also be able to compensate for shortages of individual parts with alternatives in the medium term. However, Meyer is somewhat concerned about the further course of the sales season: "In the long term, if capacities and logistics are not normalized again during April, there will be noticeable consequences in the supply chain and in availability."

Customers who want to buy a bike are therefore currently best advised to act anti-cyclically. Or in other words: buy the bike now and don't wait until the warm spring temperatures tempt you outside. Because one thing is certain: spring is coming. How long the coronavirus will have a negative impact on the globalized flow of goods is unclear.