Massive job cuts at Swiss e-bike manufacturer Flyer

The German bicycle purchasing cooperative ZEG is apparently planning far-reaching job cuts at the Swiss e-bike manufacturer Flyer in Huttwil, which it acquired in 2017. Although the site in the canton of Bern is to be retained, production is to be relocated abroad.

The company informed its employees about the cuts on Wednesday. As reported by Swiss Radio and Television, among others, the company writes that a ‘large proportion of the workforce’ is affected by the job cuts. Flyer currently employs 170 people. According to an insider quoted by SRF, around 155 employees are to lose their jobs.

Flyer AG was taken over by the bicycle-purchasing cooperative ZEG in 2017. The vision at the time: as part of ZEG, the leading Swiss producer of premium e-bikes was to benefit from the cooperative’s strong purchasing position and extremely dense distribution network – in Germany alone, ZEG united 670 dealers at the time, and even more than 1,000 across Europe.

But the calculation no longer works out. After demand for electric bikes had risen steadily for years and manufacturers were once again able to achieve record sales during the pandemic, demand has been dwindling since 2023. ZEG writes of a “difficult market situation in the bicycle industry.” As a result, Flyer is now planning to relocate production abroad and reduce administration in Huttwil to a minimum. A further restructuring of Flyer is an ‘unavoidable business step’, it says.

Flyer had already made around 80 employees redundant around a year ago – around a quarter of the workforce at the time. To this end, the company decided to restructure in order to “secure the long-term future of the company,” as it said at the time. The job cuts in October 2023 affected both production and administration. At the time, Flyer also referred almost verbatim to ‘the current difficult market situation in the entire bicycle industry with a market correction following the pandemic’.

Flyer is not the only e-bike manufacturer with problems. In July 2023, Dutch manufacturer VanMoof filed for insolvency. At the beginning of September 2023, Lavoie, a British supplier of e-bikes belonging to McLaren Applied, announced the takeover of VanMoof. This was followed in 2024 by the insolvencies of Vässla and Onomotion.

srf.ch, blick.ch, sazbike.de, handelszeitung.ch (all in German)