The Italian bike market: the 2025 numbers explained

Italy's bike market closed 2025 at 1.303 million units sold, down 4% on the year before. On its own, that figure doesn't say much — it's a mild decline after two much rougher ones. To understand where the Italian bike market is actually heading, you have to read it against the last decade, not as a standalone data point.

A decade in three acts

The first act was the slow pre-Covid climb, with eBikes starting to gain ground while muscular bikes still dominated. The second was the 2020 explosion: the pandemic bike boom pushed sales to 2.01 million units, up 17% year on year, fueled by mobility bonuses and a sudden appetite for individual transport. The third act — the one we're still in — is the post-boom correction, and it's been harsher than expected: -10% in 2022 (1.7 million units), -23% in 2023 (1.36 million), before settling at 1.303 million in 2025, a -4% that looks more like a landing than another freefall.

The comparison that matters isn't really 2025 versus 2024, it's 2025 versus 2020: the market has shed more than a third of its volume since the pandemic peak. Anyone who sized inventory, staff and investment around 2020-2021 numbers is still paying for that today.

eBikes: the one line still going up

In a shrinking market, eBikes are the one component moving the other way. Italy sold 56,200 eBikes in 2017; that jumped 120% to 124,000 in the same year, and their share of total sales hasn't stopped climbing since — roughly 10% in 2017, around 20% today. It's a trend Italy shares with the rest of Europe, and one that's already further along elsewhere: in Germany, eBikes overtook muscular bikes in 2024, reaching 53% of units sold. If the Italian market follows a similar path, eBikes stop being a niche segment here too and become the reference product within a few years.

That's not a footnote for the supply chain. eBikes carry a higher average price, but they also bring category-specific parts — motors, batteries measured in Wh, dedicated chainrings — and warranty handling that the industry, as of 2026, openly calls its number-one operational headache.

Value has shrunk faster than volume

Units sold are down, but the supply chain's total turnover has fallen even more: from €3.2 billion in 2022 to roughly €2.5 billion in 2025. Margins took the same squeeze, dropping from 7.6% in 2021 to 3.2% in 2023. In plain terms, the industry is selling less and keeping proportionally less on every euro sold — a legacy of post-Covid overstock, when in 2022 about 40% of ordered products were never actually delivered, with lead times stretching up to 24 months.

What's keeping shops upright

Inside these numbers is the detail that explains why many bike shops aren't just surviving but staying genuinely solid: the workshop. Service work accounts for up to 60-90% of revenue at specialty shops and roughly 70% of their real profit, to the point that, as of 2026, the industry says plainly that without workshop revenue many shops would be underwater. It's not a fringe case: 95% of Italy's roughly 4,000 bike shops (4,012 as of 2025) do repair work, and eBikes now make up about three-quarters of the bikes coming through the workshop door.

Italy's bike market in 2025, then, is one selling fewer units and generating less turnover, but shifting its center of gravity from sales to service — right as the product landing most often on the workbench, the eBike, is also the hardest to manage technically.

For shops willing to read these numbers as an opportunity rather than an alarm, having work orders, parts inventory and warranty tracking in one system is what separates riding out the transition from steering it. That's exactly the ground CrankPal works on: a platform built to put the workshop, not just sales, at the center of the shop's business.