French News in Translation: "The Stagnant Bicycle Industry" (Le Monde, 4 April 2013)

Here’s an article from Le Monde
about the bicycle industry in France that I translated for a client last
spring. It’s old news now, but for those readers interested in the bicycle
angle of my blog it might still be interesting.

For the tl;dr crowd, the highlight is near the end, when the CEO of Look
takes a pot shot at bicycle recycling initiatives and insists that cyclists
renew their material (ALL of it) as often as possible. Good one, Thierry!

PS the group cited in the article called “L’Heureux cyclage” gets serious
points for the pun in its name. If you don’t get it, I’ll leave it to you to
look it up.

(The original published text can be found
here.)

                 
                     
                     
                     
                     
    “The Stagnant Bicycle Industry”

Three million new bicycles sold per year, €1.3 billion in revenues,
12,000 jobs…and make that 20,000 if we include tourism and urban
self-service bicycle systems. The French bicycle industry “is hanging in there,
although we could be doing better,” says The National Council of Bicycle
Professionals (Conseil national des professions du cycle, or CNPC),
which includes over 30 manufacturers such as Michelin, Abus, and Zefal. “In
2012, sales declined,” notes Jérôme Valentin, one of the CNPC’s vice
presidents and the director of the professional organization Cycleurope. “The numbers don’t
rhyme with the increase in the number of people using bicycles to get around,
which is something visible at street level,” he admits.

Disappointment.  Bicycle industry professionals, who
presented these numbers on Thursday, April 4 during a meeting of The Bicycle
Advocate’s Club (Club des parlementaires pour le
vélo) and the Club of Bicycle-Friendly Cities (Club des villes
cyclables), are a bit disappointed with the results. Sure, French people
still buy more bicycles (three million) annually than they do cars (two
million); however, even in its current state of decline the automobile industry
still carried a €17.9 billion load in France’s 2011 GDP. In fact, pedal-mania
doesn’t necessarily mean increased sales of new bicycles in general, and even
less so concerning urban commuter models: Only 9% of new rides purchased each
year are considered to be “city bikes,” the rest consisting of mountain bikes,
hybrids, dirt bikes, children’s bikes, and toys.

Safe Parking. In order to sell their products, people in
the industry depend on an ever-widening network of bicycle-friendly
infrastructure that aligns their interests with those of the most intransigent
bicycle-rights groups. “You don’t just leave an €1800 bike on the street: you
need safe parking facilities. What if there were a bicycle garage next to
every Vélib (the Parisian public bicycle system) station?
The bicycle would see an unprecedented rise in popularity,” remarks Valentin.
The CNPC is also in favor of a bicycle registration program to limit theft, and
hopes that companies will make pools of bicycles available for getting around
industrial sites, something that already exists at the Peugot factory in
Sochaux (that’s right!) and in the Rungis wholesale food market.

“Substantial Added Value.” Bicycle retailers hope
to sell more electric bicycles, models that accelerate as the rider starts to
wear out. “These bikes have higher added value, require special assembly
techniques, and have a specific maintenance schedule,” says Valentin. To be
sure, they are more expensive and are not easy to repair, a little bit like the
influx of luxury cars from the automobile industry…all to the benefit of the
manufacturers who bring them to market. For Thierry Fournier, president of the
CNPC and CEO of manufacturer Look Cycle, cyclists are well-advised to change
bikes often and update bicycle accessories. “I know people who buy a new bike
but keep the pedals from their old bike. C’mon: when you get new skis, you get
new bindings too, right?” he says.

Do-it-yourself Cycling. This sort of consumerist thinking
runs afoul of a certain subset of bicycle riders, at least in France where the
average price of a new bicycle is around €270, compared to €495 in Germany and
€790 in Holland. Here people often prefer to buy a used bike or have an old
bike repaired at the shop rather than renew head-to-toe their equipment every
two years as the industry would have them do. Bicycle recycling workshops,
loosely affiliated under the label “L’Heureux cyclage,” have
more participants than ever, people motivated to fix up their bicycles with the
help of an experienced volunteer. For their part, the Club of Bicycle-friendly
Cities, which consists of 1100 different organizations, envisions an agreement
with France’s excellent system of public dumps “so that abandoned bicycles,
especially those of children who have outgrown them, can be recycled,” says
club president Jean-Marie Darmian, who is also the socialist mayor of Créon in
southwest France. As for Thierry Fournier of Look Cycle and the CNPC, this idea
inspires a bit of cold irony: “We can’t go about recycling too much,
now, can we?”