On 30 September, almost without anyone noticing, a short entry appeared in the Italian company register for FIVE Bianchi SpA. It was a request for composizione negoziata della crisi — a negotiated settlement of a business crisis. In plain English: the oldest bicycle brand in the world has asked the courts to hold its creditors back while it tries to work out how to pay them.
Bianchi has been building bikes since 1885. It survived two world wars, the collapse of Italian manufacturing, the carbon revolution and the arrival of the Asian factories. What it may not survive is the hangover from a pandemic boom it read completely wrong.
This is not a bankruptcy. Not yet. But it is the clearest sign so far that the downturn in our industry is no longer just squeezing the weak and the badly run. It is now bringing giants to their knees.
More Than a Badge
Living in Torino, I can tell you that Bianchi is not just a bike brand here. It is part of the furniture of Italian life. Celeste green is a colour people recognise before they recognise the logo. Coppi rode Bianchi. Pantani rode Bianchi. Generations of Italian kids learned to ride on one.
That kind of heritage is supposed to be a moat. It buys you loyalty, pricing power, and a little patience from your dealers when things get rough. For most of the last decade, it worked. Between 2019 and 2022, Bianchi’s Italian revenue nearly doubled, from €57 million to €108 million, and it made money every single year.
Which is exactly what makes what came next so hard to watch. Heritage, it turns out, does not pay the bank.
The Numbers Behind the Filing
The facts, as reported by Escape Collective from company filings in Italy, Sweden and the UK, are bleak.
- Debt: about €100 million at the end of 2024, €64.3 million of it owed to banks.
- Losses: roughly €28 million between 2023 and 2025, accelerating from €7.3 million to €7.7 million to around €13 million last year.
- Inventory: €51 million of stock sitting in Italy at the end of 2024.
- Leadership: four CEOs or managing directors in three years.
- Life support: more than €40 million injected by the Swedish parent, Grimaldi Industri, since 2023 just to keep the lights on.
The court protection runs for four months from the end of September and can be stretched to 240 days, to late May 2027. Management stays in charge and the bikes keep shipping. But if Bianchi cannot agree new terms with its banks and suppliers inside that window, the protection simply ends, and formal insolvency is the next door down the corridor.
Even the 2025 Italian accounts have not been filed. They were postponed, in the company’s words, in agreement with the auditors. When the accounts are late, it is rarely because the news is good.
Death by Ambition
Nothing here happened overnight. It was a slow-motion pile-up of decisions that each made sense at the time, and every one of them was made on the assumption that the boom would come back.
In 2021, at the very peak of the COVID bike rush, Bianchi announced a new factory in Treviglio, east of Milan: more than €40 million, 1,000 bikes a day, 250+ jobs. Casa Bianchi finally opened in June 2024, a year late, into a market drowning in unsold stock. Today it reportedly runs at about a quarter of its capacity. A cathedral built for a congregation that never showed up.
At the same time, Bianchi bought out its own distributors in the US, Japan, the UK and the Nordics. Those subsidiaries bought bikes from Italy on credit and then tried to sell them into some of the most overstocked markets in the world. By the end of 2024, Japan alone owed the parent more than €10 million, after €5 million had already been written off. The US owed another €5 million. In 2024 the subsidiaries lost €7.85 million between them.
Add a raft of new e-bike lines, new IT systems, and a WorldTour sponsorship with Bahrain Victorious that was quietly ended after a single season, and you get a company spending like it was 2021 while selling like it was 2023.
Interim CEO Tony Grimaldi, son of the 81-year-old owner, was disarmingly honest about it to Escape Collective: “We have been too ambitious in too many segments.” He also admitted that the group’s Nordic arm, Cycleurope, cut costs fast after the boom, and Bianchi simply did not. Cycleurope is profitable again. Bianchi is in front of a judge.
What strikes me most is the recovery that never came. 2024 was going to be the year. Then 2025. In mid-2025, the then-CEO was telling the Italian business press that 2026 would be the year of recovery. He left in June 2026, a little over a year after arriving. The recovery did not.
A Warning for the Rest of Us
The uncomfortable truth is that Bianchi did not do anything most of the industry didn’t also do. Everyone over-ordered. Everyone believed the new normal was permanent. Everyone told their banks the recovery was twelve months away. Bianchi just did it bigger, with more concrete and more subsidiaries, and with a parent company whose own revenue has fallen about 40% since 2022 and which has now posted three straight years of losses.
And the safety net is fraying. Grimaldi Industri’s own auditors say the bike business’s profits should go first to paying down external debt. The family has ruled out bringing in a new investor. So the plan is to cut e-bike investment, review every market, review the 171 staff, and win dealers back with new high-end race and gravel bikes, the first of which won’t land until early 2027.
Maybe it works. I hope it does. Italy has already watched Campagnolo shrink to survive, and I’m not sure our cycling culture can afford to lose another icon. But I can’t shake the feeling that we are watching the end of something. A 141-year-old company is now living on a clock measured in days, with its future in the hands of bankers in Milan.
The bike boom is long over. What we’re living through now is the bill. And it’s starting to arrive at the biggest addresses in the industry.
Source: Suvi Loponen, “Bianchi fights to survive amid losses”, Escape Collective, 2 November 2026.