On factory floors across Bangladesh right now, workers are welding frames that will never touch a sewing machine. What leaves those gates does not stitch anyone a shirt. It rolls out on two wheels, bound for Hamburg or Vienna. Nobody outside the industry notices them much. Perhaps they should.
Bangladesh's economy still speaks one language to the world. Garments alone brought in 84% of the country's export earnings last fiscal year, according to figures the commerce minister placed before parliament this June. A nation of 170 million people has built its entire trading identity around a needle and thread. That comfort has served us for four decades. It will not serve us for the next one.
There is a smaller story here that sits quietly beside the big one that needs a closer look. Quite remarkably, Bangladesh made a handsome $116.44 million from bicycle exports in fiscal year 2024/25. This is a skyrocketed figure with a jump of 4% over the year before. Germany alone bought $34.39m worth of Bangladeshi bicycles. Eurostat now places Bangladesh as the third largest bicycle supplier to the European Union and the eighth largest in the world.
What makes the recovery worth watching is how it happened. Exports had touched $168m during the pandemic cycling rush, then fell by half once European retailers worked through their overstock and the war in Ukraine cooled demand further.
Plenty of export sectors never climb back after a fall like that. Bangladesh's bicycle makers did climb back, and that says more about the industry's staying power than any single good year could.
Europe is also moving in a direction that suits us. The European Cyclists' Federation expects the continent to sell 30 million bicycles a year by 2030, close to 10 million more than today, driven by city planners redesigning streets and younger buyers choosing bikes over cars, not because of fashion.
There is a policy tailwind working in our favour too. The European Commission renewed its anti-dumping duties on Chinese bicycles in January 2025, this time extending the measure to cover electric bicycles as well. Brussels did more for Bangladeshi exporters with that single decision than most of our domestic industrial policy combined.
Here is where the celebration needs a pause. Protections handed down by someone else's trade ruling are never permanent. They come up for review.
Politics in Brussels can shift. And a much larger deadline is already bearing down on us. Bangladesh was to graduate from least developed country status on November 24, 2026, though the government has now asked the United Nations to push that date to 2029.
Whichever date holds, the World Trade Organization has warned Bangladesh could lose close to $8bn a year in export earnings once current trade preferences run out, while UNCTAD's own estimate runs as high as $17.5bn.
Most of that exposure sits with garments. It should still worry the bicycle industry, because a weakness sits right at its centre that nobody has fixed.
Bangladesh still imports the bulk of the expensive parts that go into every bicycle it exports. Annual demand for freewheels and sprockets alone runs to roughly 35 to 40 lakh and 50 to 55 lakh units, most of it met through imports, even though the Trade and Tariff Commission found local value addition in these parts already running close to 40%.
Every imported gear and chain raises our own production cost and sends the margin straight back to a foreign supplier. Garments could survive on imported fabric because labour was cheap enough to absorb the loss. Bicycles cannot lean on the same trick.
We have solved a version of this problem before. When motorcycle assemblers faced the identical bottleneck a decade ago, the government cut the duty on completely knocked down units by 25 percentage points in 2016.
Within a few years, local manufacturing and assembly met 96% of domestic motorcycle demand instead of relying on imports for nearly all of it. Nobody had to invent a new economic model. A tariff structure changed, and investors responded.
The same tools sit within reach for bicycles. Lower duties on components would encourage local vendors to enter the space rather than depend on imports. Bonded warehouse access, already extended to garment factories, could be widened to cover bicycle component manufacturers as well.
Trade diplomacy with Brussels needs to begin now, while the graduation date is still being negotiated, not after the clock runs out and our negotiating position weakens.
Bangladesh has already shown twice that it can win foreign buyers on quality rather than cheap labour alone. Garments proved it first. Bicycles are proving it again, on a smaller scale but a genuine one.
The choice in front of us is whether we treat this as a pleasant accident or as a pillar our economy has needed since long before anyone in Frankfurt noticed our welders.
We built one industry because building two felt unnecessary. That comfort is running out of road faster than we think. Bicycles alone will not carry an economy of 170 million people. But they are proof that we can compete on something other than a sewing machine, provided we invest in the parts before the deadline arrives, not after.
Nazma Sultana holds a key strategic position at Akij Bicycle & Engineering Limited (ABEL).
