Superfluous Things: Taiwan's Bike Sales Reel in Europe and China.

• Bike Europe reports on China's stagnant growth in bicycle purchases aside from the eBike. Remember how some of the very large bike manufacturers in Taiwan were very bullish on ECFA early harvest benefits and the growth of high yield road bike sales in China to boost the bottom line... Nope! Air pollution has strangled recreational cycling in China while Taiwan's imports from its neighbor far outpace exports. The report also cites anti-dumping measures driving Ideal to relocate production to China. Don't worry, they'll be back. China's lack of interest in expensive luxury bicycles and recreational bicycles and a sales of Taiwanese bicycles plummeting in Europe do not bode well for Taiwan's bike makers.

• Taiwan's women's tandem of the great Hsiao Mei-yu and Huang Ting-ying won bronze in the Asian Games.

• Taiwan's Tourism Bureau has announced the dates and events for the Taiwan International Bike Festival. The events will be held between November 8 and16.

• On the tail of a New York campaign, the Taiwan Tourism Bureau is on full offensive in San Francisco. The Tourism has laid out its familiar narrative of world class cycling routes, the CNN infomercial on Sun Moon Lake being world class, and Wuling's 105km KOM Challenge. The question remains.... Can Taiwan live up to its own hype or will Taiwan's cycling tourism suffocate before it reaches maturity?

• A cycling tourist buys some faulty information from the Taiwan Tourism Bureau. The offending paragraph and a good reason to question everything about a government sponsored junket:

These influences are still very strong, but the Taiwan we know today reflects the influx of the mainland Chinese in 1949, led by Chiang Kai-shek, who fled the Communist takeover and brought with him as much of China's heritage as he could organize (apparently, the treasures of the Forbidden City had already been boxed up during the 1930s because of the Sino-Japanese War, so it was relatively easy to get them out). 

Feel free to write-in and offer your own correction to this piece.

Inside Knowledge: Taiwanese Bike Companies and The Costs of Chinese Manufacturing

Bicycling IQ has a very good article up on the exodus of smaller Taiwanese bicycle component manufacturers from China as structural increases make doing business in China less of a profitable endeavor. The problem for these companies is in finding competing economies of scale.

Courtesy of the China-Taiwan cross-strait economic cooperation framework agreement (ECFA), tariffs on bicycle imports between the two countries have dropped from their previous levels of 12%, to 0% this year. The ECFA has been well-received by Taiwan-based makers of higher-end bicycles; but mostly those who had previously added mainland infrastructure to their manufacturing arsenal, years before they caught a whiff of earnest free trade discussions. They can now toggle their operations almost effortlessly between the two countries, depending on demand and client need. Other, smaller, OEM’s may struggle to compete against such flexibility in a declining global market.

The whole article is really intelligently thought out and is worth a read.

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In other news, Giant has apparently won a bid to supply the city of Taipei with a system of bicycle rentals. Details of the winning bid or competing proposals are scant, but it appears Giant has its work cut out for it. This must be good news for Giant's President and Founder, King Liu, who also serves as a special advisor to the Taiwan's president Mr. Ma Ying-jiu.

The You Bike program aims to:

• Promote Taipei City's image as an eco-friendly international metropolis
• Create new tourism opportunities in Taipei
• Improve residential quality of life and citizen satisfaction
• Reduce the use of cars and motorcycles to improve air quality and transportation
• Encourage people to take up cycling
• Transform Taipei into Taiwan's capital of cycling

It is this writer's belief that the Taipei city government will have to do much more in providing city-wide bicycle infrastructure to make this project more than leisure rentals along bike paths. The city will need to provide a safe cycling environment, enforce traffic laws, provide safe storage facilities, retrofit busses and MRT cars for bicycle transit, increase the number of bicycle ONLY lanes and many other projects before this projects can begin to benefit Taipei residents. Lots of work to do before putting bikes on the roads.
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Also:

• Jim's Bike Blog takes a brief look at Taiwan's Cycling Scene.

• Merida's Ike Tseng passes away at 81. Merida is Taiwan's second largest producer of bicycles and a major shareholder in Specialized.