According to the financial daily FD, VanMoof would sell its electric bikes at a loss. Which logically raises many questions about the future of the Dutch brand.
Is VanMoof going through the worst cycle in its history? With 15 years of experience, the manufacturer is one of the pioneers in connected electric bicycles. Except that the latest items highlighted by the financial daily financial time (FD) – via Tech.eu – does not bode well for the future.
According to the Dutch newspaper’s calculations, VanMoof would simply sell at a loss. Clearly, a sold electric bike would not allow you to cover all the related costs. In total, the loss of gross margin would have reached the tidy sum of 11.9 million euros, according to 2021 sales figures.
sequence of events
The previous year, in 2020, therefore, this operating loss would have been 6.7 million euros. In short: it’s going from bad to worse. To explain these figures, the daily DF it points to a main problem: the replacement of parts under warranty, which would have cost the manufacturer a whopping 8 million euros.
This means, above all, that these parts were defective and therefore lacked long-term reliability. We have no details on the precise nature of the replaced parts. In addition to its quality problems and its difficulties to make ends meet and sell profitably, VanMoof suffers from the law of the crisis.
Since 2020, global supply chain issues have affected every industry, including bicycles and e-bikes. Cowboy paid the price, VanMoof too. This is the reason that was given in October 2022 to justify the one year delay of his first speed bike, the VanMoof V.
In addition, they are still waiting for the VanMoof S5 and A5, which had been made official in April 2022. Frandroid had even had the opportunity to take them by hand in Amsterdam, when they were still in prototype form. At the time, the group was counting on a July 2022 release. Since then, it’s been quiet.
a lot of questions
Inevitably, many questions remain about the future of VanMoof, despite the €128 million fundraiser made in September 2021. But between costs related to research and development, production, after-sales and replacement of parts, money can be spent quickly.
In the event of a stoppage of activities, what would be the fate of current customers in the event of technical or software failures? The software monitoring, precisely, could simply be abandoned, without any new update. It would also be a turn of events if a young shoot that has since gone big were to pull out of the industry, with VanMoof being considered a storied player.
It’s all the same VanMoof that has partly democratized the connected urban VAE, with a stripped-down, minimalist design.
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