BMC is reportedly set to lay off 40 employees, roughly a quarter of the company’s global workforce, as part of the Swiss bike manufacturer’s latest restructuring process, which it admits has been influenced by the ongoing uncertainty surrounding US president Donald Trump’s tariff policies and their potential impact on the cycling industry.
The news, reported this week by local outlet Solothurner Zeitung, marks the third wave of redundancies at BMC in as many years, after at least 20 employees were let go in late 2023 and early 2024, amid a failed attempt by the Grenchen-based company to cut the working hours of its remaining staff as part of a Swiss government-backed scheme.
According to this week’s reports from Switzerland, 40 jobs are now expected to be cut across BMC’s worldwide operation – which currently constitutes around 160 staff – with the exact number, and the location of these cuts, yet to be determined and still subject to a consultation process.
“In order to ensure sustainable competitiveness and put the company back on a sound economic footing, additional cost-saving measures are necessary,” said a spokesperson for the beleaguered brand, which supplies bikes to UCI ProTeam Tudor, which is set to make its Tour de France debut in July after signing French star Julian Alaphilippe in the winter.
BMC has so far declined to specify exactly how many staff will be affected by these cuts, though the restructuring is expected to impact all aspects of the business, both in Switzerland, where its bikes are manufactured and distributed, and internationally.
The company also admitted that the Trump administration’s so-called ‘reciprocal’ tariffs, which have sparked panic and uncertainty within the cycling industry due to the hefty import rates imposed on many of its key manufacturing hubs, have “influenced the decision to restructure” once again.
The current consultation process is expected to be completed by the end of June, while it is likely that the reorganisation will usher in a renewed focus on mid to high-end road and gravel bikes.
It is expected that no further models will be developed for SCOR, the mountain bike manufacturer which exists as a separate brand under the BMC umbrella, or for the company’s Adicta Lab clothing brand. Instead, these brands will now solely focus on handling customer inquiries, supporting retailers, and selling their existing product range.
Of course, the Trump tariffs aren’t the first crisis to hit BMC, leading to lay-offs, in recent years. Faced with waning demand since the Covid bike boom, several employees were made redundant in the final months of 2023, after BMC announced that it was exiting the WorldTour for the first time in two decades, in the wake of Decathlon-AG2R La Mondiale’s move to Van Rysel.
And in February 2024, the company submitted an application to the office for economics and labour in the canton of Solothurn for a ‘short-time working compensation’ arrangement, a Swiss scheme where businesses can put a proportion of workers on temporary part-time hours while the local government covers their remaining salary to avoid redundancies, similar to the UK’s Covid-era furlough scheme.
However, this application was rejected, a move a BMC spokesperson described at the time as “totally fine” and “all hot air”.
“We thought we’d ask given we globally had 15 per cent lower sales in 2023 and the industry outlook for 2024 was not that encouraging”, the spokesperson continued, adding that several other businesses in Switzerland had also benefitted from the scheme.
BMC added that after the short-work application was refused, 11 people were made redundant with “no further reorganisation” planned for the remainder of 2024. road.cc was also told at the time that at least seven more staff members left BMC, though it was unclear if these redundancies were linked to the rejected application.
However, despite these regular lay-offs, BMC insisted in April last year that “business is back on track” and had “been less affected compared to many other brands” due to its focus on the mid to high-end market.
“Since [the application], we work full-time and are even hiring”, the spokesperson said last year. “We hear from Shimano and SRAM [that] mid-high-end business is much more stable if not growing, same here!”
Nevertheless, reliable sources informed road.cc that the brand was sitting on a significant stock of unsold inventory, most of them e-bikes, explaining the company’s strategic repositioning in the relatively higher-end market.
And earlier this year, BMC issued a voluntary recall notice on its Kaius 01 gravel bike, asking owners to “immediately stop riding” the bikes after tests showed that the “fork steerer tubes separating under heavy duty riding conditions”.
