Cycling shoe brand Sidi reports £3m profit increase and 33% revenue growth, two years after takeover

In some rare positive news for the cycling industry, shoe manufacturer Sidi is back in profit after reporting a 33 per cent year-on-year rise in turnover for 2024, which the company’s CEO attributed to the success of its relaunched product range.

The Italian cycling and motorbike shoes brand made a net profit of €400,000 (roughly £333,000) during the 2024 financial year, a jump of €3.1 million (£2.6m) compared to the previous year, and the first time the company has made a profit since it was taken over by the Italmobiliare Group in 2022.

Sidi’s annual turnover has also grown by 33.1 per cent to €31.7 million (£26.4m), after a growth in revenue in both its cycling and motorcycle sectors.

According to a statement published by Sidi in the wake of the financial report, growth in the cycling sector was driven by the “completeness and variety” of products covering both road and off-road, following the launch of the company’s gravel line.

2025 Sidi Ergo 6 road shoes - rear.jpg (credit: road.cc)

While its annual turnover still falls short of the €38m posted in 2021, the financial report will prove a welcome boost for Sidi, which was sold by founder Dino Signori to Milan-based Italmobiliare, one of Italy’s leading investment holding companies, in 2022 for €66 million.

Since then, Italmobiliare has conducted an overhaul of the formerly family-run brand, reorganising the company’s structures to “improve flexibility” and increase the “pace of product innovations”, resulting in the launch of a new, diverse range of shoes.

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“Considering we own and operate two factories, our inventory level has always been on a healthy level and we can easily adjust to market demand,” CEO Davide Rossetti told Bike Europe earlier this year.

“So, we never over-invested in our inventory which also meant we didn’t have much stock to eliminate, damaging the market and our image.

“Model year 2025, which was the first collection made and tested by the new team, was warmly welcomed by the market and we started to deliver last September. All those elements combined had a positive impact on our 2024 result. In Q2 our sales were up 10.7 per cent compared with 2023 and in Q3 even 23.4 per cent.”

Responding to this week’s financial report, Rossetti said: “The positive results over 2024 are the result of Sidi’s desire to constantly innovate and improve.

“In 2025 we will continue to invest in the renewal of our product range, allocating a significant portion of the turnover to the research and development sector, but also to the evolution of the production plants and the creation of a new logistics hub.”

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Meanwhile, reflecting more broadly on the current state of the cycling industry, the Sidi CEO believes 2025 will prove a “plateau year” before the first signs of real recovery begin to show in 2026.

“In the initial period after Covid, bike shops were suffering as they rely for 70-80 per cent of their business on bicycles and e-bikes, but those with a long term and sustainable approach are in a better shape now. The ones with a much shorter perspective are still under the pressure of the results of yesterday,” Rossetti said.

“For the industry overall, 2024 has been the year of digesting the problems caused in previous years and I expect that 2025 will be a plateau year.

“We will have to wait until 2026 to get the first signs of recovery. At the same time, sports cycling remains very popular and events are often overbooked with participants.”

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While Sidi’s results for 2024 offer a tantalising glimpse of the potential for recovery for the bike industry as a whole, other brands’ financial reports for last year haven’t proven as optimistic.

Earlier this month, we reported that Giant’s profits had been slashed by almost two-thirds in 2024 as heavy discounting and inventory challenges hit the business.

More positively, however, the company noted that sales were actually only down 7.4 per cent on 2023 and still exceeded pre-pandemic levels, Giant stating that the “over-inventory situation continues to improve, consumers are demanding new fresh products” and that it is expected that the business will enjoy “profit recovery in 2025”.

Meanwhile, despite making a net loss of £180m in 2024, Merida announced that it is defiant that the financial blow is just a “one-time” hit and that losses of a similar scale would not be seen again in the future.