“Fulfilling the new orders will definitely be a challenge, because going over 400,000 bicycles a year will require expanding the current team, first of all. This is why new people have joined us in the past ten days and we will resume hiring once we get back from holiday, on January 11, 2016,” the company officials say.
VeloCity Resita assembles bicycles for French sporting goods retailer Decathlon. The retailer, which has a store chain in Romania as well, is its only customer for the time being and ordered 1 million bicycles for 2016 and 2017. The plant assembled some 400,000 units this year so it expects production to go up by 25% next year.
VeloCity is run by NextCity, which posted almost 19 million lei (EUR4.2 million) revenue last year, down about 10% on 2013. NextCity is the leading bicycle manufacturer in Romania, accounting for 45% of the reported bicycle production of the country, according to the statistics of CONEBI (Confederation of the European Bicycle Industries), its officials say. It is not the largest by revenue, though.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)