Q2 Outdoor Industry Roundup

Jeff

When I started writing about the outdoor industry, the only question anyone cared about was when normal would come back. COVID had whipsawed the business from record highs to brutal lows, and underneath all of it sat a quiet anxiety about when things would snap back to the way they were.

If the last three months made anything clear, it is that the pre-COVID normal is not coming back, not this year, not ever. We are in a genuinely new era, and waiting for the old one to return is like driving a car going forward with your eyes locked on the rearview mirror.

The biggest theme worth watching is China’s impact on the entire industry. The obvious version shows up in companies like DJI, through Avinox and Amflow, and now Gobao (Aventon) on the e-bike side. It does not stop there. The full story is more nuanced than “China is coming for the incumbents.” In simple terms, though, that is exactly what is happening.

The rest of the quarter filled in the picture: the slow-motion demise of a 2010s action sports darling, another round of gloom out of Taiwan’s frame makers, a super El Niño that could punish anyone levered to winter, with Vail chief among them and now fighting an activist investor on top of the weather, and a consumer whose mood somehow got darker.

So let’s pull the lens back and give you my perspective as to where we actually are. I’m going to lean into my days as an analyst at StreetAccount and go full bullets here for quick and easy reading. Skim this and take what you like, ditch what you don’t. The point of this is orientation, not The Atlantic level storytelling.

Jeff’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The thread to follow is China, and it runs well past e-bikes.

The thread to follow is China, and it runs well past e-bikes. The clearest edge of it is the propulsion, where China is now ahead, not catching up.

Pace and players

  • DJI’s Avinox (I keep calling it DJI because Avinox/Amflow is a wholly-owned subsidiary, spin-off theater aside) splashed at Sea Otter in April with the Avinox drive unit and a sharply-priced Amflow line. Since then it has shown an “SUV” utility bike and a motor-gearbox prototype.
  • The real headline is not any single product, it is the cadence. Avinox is teasing brand-new platforms less than three months after its last launch, while many brands are still waiting for deliveries of the current motors.
  • The deeper story is vertical integration, and that is the knife pointed at SRAM and Shimano.
Avinox debuts motor gearbox e-bike drive system | Cycling Electric
bye bye derailleur

Specs that matter

No Derailleur, No Cassette: Gobao's New 1500W Motor Eliminates Traditional Shifting - Pinkbike
While we see what Bosh’s response is, Gobao is quietly in the arena (supplying Aventon). Their motor CVT offering…

Why eebs structurally favor China

  • Off the record, every brand and shop I talk to pegs e-bikes at 50%+ of revenue and climbing fast. China owns motors and batteries, so the mix shift hands them the highest-value part of the bike.
  • The lightweight premium is dead. The motor puts out ~1hp (even the “low(er) power” ones) while you contribute a fraction of that, so saving 100g on a cassette is pointless, and the cassette is going away anyway. My 50+ lb Aventon rides fine on no-name wheels and cranks; paying up for lighter anything is a joke.
  • Weight even flatters the suspension. A heavier bike sits more settled, so mid-tier dampers overperform. That guts the slightly-better-parts-on-a-pareto-curve model the industry was built on, back when a human could barely sustain half a horsepower.

The moat: three legs, all breaking

Where it lands

  • “New era” is not a vibe. It is the value of the bike physically relocating, out of frame, groupset and brand, into a motor-battery-software stack China leads.
  • Endgame: nearly every bike becomes an e-bike, and purists who want to pedal just pull the battery and ride. VitalMTB’s Jason Schroder is already doing it on a Levo SL.
  • The big point here is China can now go direct to the West without a middleman as a “brand”. Add to this the absolute stall in non-eeb technology, and poor balance sheet health across the industry and its not a good setup for the old gaurd.

What the new era is doing to the incumbents

Hold that thesis next to the people on the other side of it.

Trek

  • Private, so signals are indirect but aligned. Escape Collective reported, via an anonymous ex-manager, that internal dashboards had been “all red” for ~18 months, that the company took on debt to warehouse pandemic overstock, and that some acquired stores now turn as little as 20% of pre-acquisition business.
  • Layoffs hit in late 2024, again in September 2025 (~15% of the workforce), and again in January.
  • CEO John Burke confirmed the long red stretch to Fortune, then pivoted to purpose, saying he is proudest of how Trek “changed the world,” not the results.
  • Off the record shops can’t really get supply.
  • My read: Burke isn’t a bad operator, he’s running a playbook built for a world that ended. The purpose talk is a company that hasn’t accepted the map changed.
  • Caveat: the ugliest numbers are single-anonymous-source and Trek declined to comment. Shape solid, severity unconfirmed.
  • Trek has access to capital and is very large, but if I were to pick one company that doesn’t survive this era, its Trek. At a point, the market can no longer support this many big companies that are offering things people just aren’t buying.
How John Burke led Trek to become a $2B global powerhouse - Milwaukee Business Journal
I felt like adding a photo of Burke. BTW, what PR dork decided an entry level bike was the right one for this photoshoot? Grab something cool, John!

Shimano and the Taiwan gloom

Fox Factory (the bright spot, sort of)

The action sports darling

How this ends for an incumbent that won’t adapt. (Covered in “The Verb That Couldn’t Defend Itself.”)

Shares of camera maker GoPro surge in IPO - Los Angeles Times
I post this whenever I get the chance. Interesting to now know how much DJI had already put them in the crosshairs at this point.

Vail, the weather, and the wolves

After “Greedheads,” a few of you asked whether I still think Vail is a structurally broken model dressed up as a compounder. After this quarter, more so.

The weather (Q3, reported June 8)

The wolves (broke in the last week)

The El Niño wildcard

  • NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center is carrying an El Niño advisory, with the event expected to strengthen into next winter and a “super” event on the table as the likeliest peak.
  • Not a clean negative: it loads the southern tier and Southwest and dries the PNW and northern Rockies. It scrambles the map rather than uniformly helping or hurting.
  • The real problem: weather variance is now the dominant earnings driver, and variance is the last thing you want under 3.5x leverage and an activist who wants the mountains sold..
El Niño on the Horizon: Can the Warm Phase End Six Years of Drought in the Southern Plains of the U.S.? | March 11, 2026 | Drought.gov
Maybe its my Teton’s bias, but El Nino has never been good for skiing in North America barring placing like Taos or Snowbowl.

Around the campfire

A few more that mattered, because the new era isn’t only a bike-and-snow story.

The consumer, and the barbell

The backdrop under every company here: the consumer’s mood got darker.

Where we are now

As the saying goes, things happen slowly, then all at once. Maybe I’m overreacting, but it certainly feels like the bike industry is at an inflection point, where more of the market goes to China and fewer Western brands get invited to the party. The market for bikes, with a motor and without, is only so big, and only so much infrastructure can be carried by a market that size. It is hard for me to see a world where some of the companies we know, and maybe love, don’t go away in this shift. Then again, maybe they retool, pivot, and live to fight another day. That is the more hopeful read, and I would like to be wrong in their favor.

The snow sports side is a whole other bag, but the conclusion rhymes. I don’t see the Vail we know persisting much longer, no matter what weather 2027 brings.

From here, the big thing to watch is how the West responds, and it has to respond on two fronts at once. The first is the shift to e-bikes, where Asia already holds the better hand. The second is quieter but just as dangerous: analog bikes are lasting longer, and riders have less and less reason to upgrade. A well-kept mechanical bike from a few years ago is still a great bike, which means the velocity of human-powered sales keeps slowing, fewer units moving and moving less often. Companies big and small have to reorient around both realities at the same time, and neither one is optional.

So the open questions are the ones that decide who is still here in five years. What does Bosch do when its highest-margin product is the thing getting integrated away? What does a Specialized do, sitting in the exact mushy middle this whole piece has been about? Retooling is possible. It is also slow, and slow is the problem.

Because here is the thing about big ships: they are hard to turn. That, more than any single spec sheet, is what should worry the incumbents. The one thing DJI and the broader Asian push have done better than anyone is move fast and iterate faster, shipping new platforms before the last ones reach dealer floors. You cannot answer that with a committee and a two-year product cycle. The West is not losing because it cannot build. It is losing because it cannot turn fast enough, and the other side keeps accelerating.

Here is what I am watching into the back half of the year. How many OEMs sign with Gobao versus Avinox for model-year 2027, and my expectation is “many”. Bosch response is important, too, or wthey’ll go the way of the Yamaha motor really fast. Fox’s next print, for any sign of a bike inflection rather than another quarter carried by trucks. And whether Oasis actually files at Vail, or whether Katz talks his way out of a fight he is currently losing on the scoreboard.

The incumbents got their wake-up call this quarter. The open question is whether anyone in Waterloo, Morgan Hill, or Koblenz is actually awake. I have my doubts, and I have had them early before.

More soon.

Jeff Brines is a former pro mountain bike racer turned finance-and-software guy who writes about the outdoor industry, where the money is moving, and why. He builds AI tools, works as a fractional CFO, helps companies find ROI in ways they usually miss. Based in Teton Valley, Idaho. Check out www.guiderail.io for his finance offering or www.jambr.co if you are a GC and need software to run your next project (how’s that for weird range?)

Sources

Avinox, Gobao, and the gearbox

China direct-to-market / XDS-Astana

Trek

Shimano, Giant, Taiwan

Fox Factory

GoPro

Vail Resorts

Kawasaki, KTM

Amer Sports, Yeti

Consumer sentiment and GLP-1

https://www.sca.isr.umich.edu