Brompton boss calls Trump tariffs “naive”, suggests bike brand likely to raise US prices “between 5 and 10%”

Donald Trump’s tariffs “are a little bit naive”, according to Brompton CEO Will Butler-Adams who suggested the folding bike manufacturer will likely have to follow other brands and raise US prices by “between 5 and 10 per cent” in response.

Trek, Giant and Specialized have all raised prices, or spoken about imminent increases, in the weeks since the US president’s tariff announcement, Taiwanese brand Giant saying the policy was “absolutely not positive” for the bike industry.

> Giant “inevitably forced to reflect cost” of Trump tariffs, as manufacturers warn US bike prices could rise by 50% amid “existential threat” to cycling industry

Now, the boss of British folding bicycle brand Brompton has suggested its prices in the US are likely to rise “between 5 and 10 per cent” in response to Trump imposing a 10 per cent tariff on imports from the UK, although prices are only under review at the time of writing.

Brompton CEO Butler-Adams also told the Telegraph plans to open new stores in Los Angeles and San Francisco are on hold until things “settle down a bit” as “nobody knows” how the situation will develop.

“The aims and objectives of the administration in the US at the moment are a little bit naive,” he said, questioning Trump’s plan to simply shift production to the US with 145 per cent tariffs on China and lesser tariffs on other countries’ imports.

“You could build the factory. You could buy the equipment. But the know-how, the engineering, the skills and experience, you’d have to open up your immigration if you want to sort that out and obviously that’s not at the top of the agenda for any of the political parties,” Butler-Adams continued before claiming that it would take a “10, 15, 20-year shift” anyway.

“What you have to be terribly careful of, when things start going a little bit mad, is that you try to react. You could think, ‘Oh my God, the tariffs. Oh wait, there aren’t tariffs. Trump is going to turn them off. Actually, wait, now they’re coming over here. Oh my God, China’.

“The best course of action is just to keep calm. Who knows where we’re going to end up in three months’ time?

“Ultimately if you look at the US and the UK, we need stable trading because we’ve got debt and we’ve got bonds. If that all spirals out of control, look what happened with Liz Truss – the wheels fall off. Even though leaders think they can play, they are limited by things bigger than themselves that will bring a bit of sense to all this.”

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If Brompton does up its US prices it will follow in the footsteps of some of the industry’s biggest players. Giant has said it would be “inevitably forced to reflect cost” of Trump’s tariffs, the policy “absolutely not positive” for the bike industry.

Likewise, Trek has increased the price of “most” bike models, but suggested the impact of price hikes has been minimised on “key entry-level models”. Specialized too has told retailers to pass the new 10 per cent surcharge directly to customers, but says it could remove the charge if the tariffs change, a stance that seems likely to become the norm across the industry.

“If you think about demand globally, there hasn’t been some tremendous fall off a cliff”

Tariffs are just the latest challenge to hit the bike industry, the post-pandemic years seeing sales and profits fall across the board. Brompton’s most recent financial accounts were perhaps one of the most eye-catching industry stories of recent times, the brand announcing that its profits had nosedived by over 99 per cent in the financial year to March 2024.

Profits fell from £10.6m in 2023 to just £4,602 last year, as total bike sales dropped by almost 7,000 and operating costs increased.

However, a few months on and CEO Butler-Adams is “actually feeling quite buoyant, quite excited”.

He said: “As a company, if you put profits to one side – they’re not the most important thing – we’ve been really busy in the last two years, opening stores, building our team, innovating […] If you think about demand globally, there hasn’t been some tremendous fall off a cliff.”

The company also received planning permission to build a new £100m factory in Kent, Butler-Adams calling the three years the brand has to break ground on the site “important” as it “buys us time to feel that recovery”, even if things will “not get better” this year.

In the UK, the bigger picture of more cycling infrastructure and wider policy emphasis on the health benefits of exercise has been particularly encouraging.

Butler-Adams explained: “There has been talk about, rather than dispensing pills to people, dispense exercise. We could say, here’s a bicycle for a week. The solution has always been drugs.”

Speaking about Sadiq Khan’s re-election as London mayor, he continued: “There was one choice in those elections, which was to rip up bike lanes, get rid of quiet neighbourhoods, let’s all have six-cylinder diesel belchers going through our roads.

“The other option was to continue the momentum of designing cities around the people that live in them, this idea of clean air, quieter streets, healthier and happier citizens. Guess what? London chose to continue.”