The brazilian bicycle industry supply chains and its competition against the international brands

Abstract

Bicycles have been used for more than one century for transport, leisure, and sports practices. However, contrary to automobiles, they reached different social classes rapidly worldwide and many factories were created. Brazil, for instance, has many local assemblies and frame manufacturers competing equally with many international brands. In this study, we investigated part of this industry in Brazil – factories in Manaus/Amazonas - that has incentive policies from the Brazilian government to produce and compared it with imported equipment from international manufacturers. We adopted a literature review, empirical knowledge, and economic figures to build this comparison. The results showed that the market in Brazil, after a huge growth during the Pandemic of COVID-19 (2020-2021), is shrinking, increasing the competition between local and international brands. Moreover, they indicated that the actions of the Brazilian government to reduce tariffs on Brazilian companies that produce in the free trade zone in Manaus had positive effects on the reduction of imported goods and in increasing the competition of local industry.

Keywords

• bicycle manufacture
• international competition
• bike supply chains