Cutting-edge Luxury Bicycle Frames From Rural Taiwan

“Even before the pandemic, demand for e-bikes and pedelecs already outstripped supply. Our order books are full,” says Boris Lin, president of A-Pro Tech Co. Ltd. (Apro Tech). Hands on his hips, Lin stands between two rows of bicycle frames that are ready for shipping – on the left an order for American trekking bike brand Santa Cruz and on the right a batch for YT, a hip German electric mountain bike brand. “We are already taking orders for next year,” he asserts.

Founded by Lin’s father Lin Chun-shan in 1982, Apro Tech today runs factories in Dajia as well as in China’s Kunshan and Shenzhen as well as in Vietnam. In terms of output, the company is Taiwan’s leading manufacturer of aluminum alloy bicycle frames.

The European market accounts for 70 percent of revenue, followed by North America with 25 percent. Apro Tech’s customer list reads like the Who’s Who of the bicycle industry: Among others there is American road bike veteran Cannondale, the largest U.S. bike brand Trek, as well as Germany’s leading bicycle brand Cube. Even Decathlon, the world’s largest sporting goods retailer, uses Apro Tech frames for its high-end bikes. The top range of frames is manufactured and shipped from the Dajia factory in Taiwan. These high-tech frames are used in top-end bicycles with a price tag of around NT$300,000.

Because of this, luxury customer segment industry insiders call Apro Tech the “Louis Vuitton of the bicycle industry”.

(Source: Chien-Tong Wang)

In 2020 Apro Tech generated NT$4.2 billion in revenue. Despite pandemic-related production shortfalls in Vietnam this year, revenue is expected to grow 30 percent annually to top NT$5 billion. While Apro Tech is not a listed company, it has long reached a dominating position in Taiwan’s bicycle parts supply chain.

Severe skilled welder shortage in rural Dajia

Among bicycle parts suppliers, Apro Tech not only stands out for its high-end customers but also for its courage to invest heavily in automation. “This year our budget for equipment stands around US$13 million,” explains Lin, rattling off figures while touring the factory grounds: “We bought 40 robotic arms that cost about NT$2.5 million per piece,” says Lin.

They buy not only more expensive but also more automated equipment than other manufacturers. Apro Tech owns up to three times as many automated welding machines as its competitors. “Even the automotive industry is not necessarily using them,” notes Huang.

(Source: Chien-Tong Wang)

When Lin’s father and company founder Lin Chun-shan and Apro Tech CEO George Lee tried to automate the bike frame welding process ten years ago, they were pioneering what no one else had tried before.

Welding together aluminum alloy tubes requires much greater skill than welding iron parts. On top of that, welds on a bicycle frame must not only be of good quality but also good-looking. Aluminum alloy tubes are often joined with a welding technique known as the “fish-scale effect”. It takes more than a year of training before a welder is able to produce fish scale welds of consistently good quality.

A hot welder can earn between NT$3,000 and NT$5,000 per day. In the early days, the skilled welders of central Taiwan were crucial in helping Taiwan’s bicycle industry develop into a profitable, foreign currency earning export machine.

Yet this success was at stake ten years ago when skilled welders were increasingly hard to find. Even when manufacturers offered wages of NT$5,000 per day, they could not fill a single vacancy as young people shied away from entering an industry that is physically challenging and comes with health risks. Top-quality welding requires high concentration and a steady hand. At the same time, the hazardous welding fumes and the very bright light from the welding arc can cause eye and lung damage. “We couldn’t even find a single welder,” recalls Lin, who was still working under his father at the time. Before taking over as president, Lin had to learn the ropes, rotating through different departments, including the factory floor. He started out as an auditor at a monthly salary of NT$28,000, then worked in the prototype section, in technical design and, of course, also tried his hand at welding.

He noticed that new welders were becoming an endangered species and eventually went extinct. “We truly couldn’t find any, we had no choice but to hire foreign laborers,” says Lin. In China, welders were still to be found, but they were easily poached by competitors, which made it difficult to maintain stable quality on the production line.

Hiring engineers to alleviate welder shortage

Amid this predicament a decade ago, Apro Tech established a technical research center and recruited a dozen experts from the fields of mechanical, electric, and automation engineering. The company bought world-class robotic arms and welding machinery. The team of young engineers who had no clue about the bicycle industry hunkered down in a lab in the middle of the factory to study the high-tech equipment in detail, all the while being cold shouldered by the veteran welders.

Lee vividly remembers this period when no one believed in their success. “Bike frames are a conventional craft. For contract manufacturers, skills come first. For 30 years, everyone believed that the automation of welding could never succeed.” Since Apro Tech is not producing inexpensive steel bike frames for the mass market but small batches of highly customized aluminum alloy frames, the automation challenge and necessary investment were even higher.

Aside from procuring equipment for the production lines, they bought another set for training purposes. They hoped that the higher investment would pay off by shortening the learning curve and quickly upgrading their employees’ skills.

“They dare to invest in the training of their employees,” observes Huang, the industrial robot vendor. This is rarely seen among Taiwan’s contract manufacturers.

Meanwhile, Apro Tech has fully automated the entire manufacturing process for the front triangle of frames, and from welding to transferring, not a single soul is involved. Workmanship and experience accumulated over many years have been converted into computer-based precision parameters. Boosted by the boom in pedelecs starting in 2019, revenue at the Shenzhen factory, the most automated plant, has grown 73 percent over the past five years.

(Source: Chien-Tong Wang)

Next year, the company is planning to introduce an enterprise resource planning system. Lin is also looking for even more advanced automation technology to improve production line efficiency. “After all, managing finances is what we contract manufacturers do.”

Since Apro Tech manufactures a large variety of products in small quantities, production line changes must be carried out quickly. While rushing production and shipping orders, Lin always ponders how the foundation for future growth can become even stronger. Yet having overcome the manpower crisis, the company can look to the future with confidence.

(Featured Image from CommonWealth Magazine)