# Mountain Cycle Dead?



## Warp (May 24, 2004)

Hey Guys!

Sometime ago we were dissing off Mountain Cycle frames 'cos the brand was dead...

Well, this pic is off from this year's Crankworx... Maybe time to snag a Rumble or Fury for cheap?


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## 545cu4ch (Aug 11, 2005)

Yeah those bikes look nice. Heres another one of that bike.
EDIT: oh and BTW, how do you post very large images. Do you host them on a webpage or something? I had to make mine this small so it fit


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## Warp (May 24, 2004)

545cu4ch said:


> Yeah those bikes look nice. Heres another one of that bike.
> EDIT: oh and BTW, how do you post very large images. Do you host them on a webpage or something? I had to make mine this small so it fit


Yeah... I host them on from a website (imageshack.us - for free) or link them directly.

Click on the insert image icon, type there the url for the pic and voila!


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## Warp (May 24, 2004)

"*Kinesis Sells Mountain Cycle Brand to Ideation Industrial
*
By John Crenshaw

JULY 15, 2006 -- PORTLAND, OR-Taiwanese trading company and manufacturer Ideation Industrial has purchased Mountain Cycle from Kinesis, which had acquired the high-end mountain bike frame company about four and a half years ago.

The sale was effective June 20, said Ben Tan, Ideation's managing director. It includes the brand's tangible and intangible assets, everything from intellectual property rights and inventory to computers, a van, tooling and molds to the web site.

Most importantly, Tan said, Ideation's top consideration is to maintain Mountain Cycle at its current high standards. Ideation, a large and experienced company founded in 1977, can bring considerable resources to bear.

The company's European business is well established, and owning Mountain Cycle will help it approach the U.S. market.

Ideation has factories in Tianjin and Shenzhen in mainland China, but will keep Mountain Cycle production in Taiwan and source its frames from Kinesis.

"The manufacturer of the frames will be the same for the time being, and the final assembly of the bicycles will be from selected, high-quality bicycle manufacturers only," Tan said.

"We will use the U.S.A. as our research and development source and to market this brand in Europe and worldwide. We will focus on the high-end dealer's market," he added.

Mountain Cycle headquarters will remain in Portland, Oregon, for the immediate future but may move to California later. Tan said he is seriously considering hiring some of Mountain Cycle's remaining employees, but has made no decisions have yet.

Mountain Cycle was a distressed company when Kinesis bought it from its founder, Robert Reisenger, in December 2001.

After considerable internal debate, Kinesis executives concluded that they could no longer justify owning Mountain Cycle and decided to sell it off for several reasons, said Michael Chen, president of Kinesis USA and of Mountain Cycle.

"When we bought Mountain Cycle in 2001, we pretty much bought it as an experiment in going into our own brand. But we are an OEM (original equipment manufacturing) company, and taking an established brand and nursing it back to health was really a new thing to us," Chen said.

Kinesis had some success, he said, but the pace of the growth did not justify continuing to divert resources from the company's core private-label manufacturing business.

"We felt it was time to take another look, and probably we will go back and focus on our core business rather than spend more energy in this territory," Chen said.

Kinesis operated a frame-making facility in Portland until last year to serve high-end U.S. customers, but shut it down because of high overhead and sold off most of the equipment.

"Owning Mountain Cycle made more sense when we had the synergy of our manufacturing business to develop new models, manufacture frames and share some of the overhead. But without the frame production, it was difficult to justify having the brand," Chen said.

Mountain Cycle's greatest growth potential lay in becoming a complete-bike, rather than frame-only, brand, but that presented Kinesis executives with another dilemma.

"There would have been some conflict with our core OEM business. If we took that step, we would have become a competitor with many of our OEM customers," Chen said.

He is confident that Kinesis is handing Mountain Cycle off to a company that's better suited to handle it.

"Ideation has been in the complete bike business and in the sales business for years, and they certainly can do a better job than Kinesis. Kinesis is basically a manufacturing company, not a sales-oriented company like Ideation. So I think Ideation can probably do a better job than Kinesis in terms of the future growth of the brand," Chen said.

Kinesis USA will remain in Portland and continue as a servicing site for the company.

"We remain the extension of the Kinesis global sales department, servicing all the U.S. customers and consumers. If they have any requests, they can come to me," Chen said.

In addition to its original equipment frame business, the U.S. branch handles a motorcycle parts and accessories business, Universal Engineering, which Kinesis started up four years ago."

Man, those Rumble frames look sweeter now... just 200 from Greenfish... Damn, I'd get one if I had the dough.... :madmax:


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