Steering a path to making bicycles in Africa Across Africa they are used to carry infants, lug sacks of grain and ferry boxes of vegetables and crates of chickens to and from markets. In Rwanda, people careen down hills astride homemade wooden versions bereft of brakes. The bicycle is a part of everyday life for many Africans. Yet, despite demand, there is no mass-market African bicycle manufacturer. The continent is instead flooded with cheap Indian and Chinese imports. Now, however, a new company is preparing to enter the market, backed by SRAM, the largest bicycle component maker in the US, which lays claim to supplying parts for Lance Armstrong's Tour de France racing machines. SRAM's journey to Africa began after Frederick K. Day, its executive vice-president and one of the company's founders, set up a charity, World Bicycle Relief, to help Sri Lankans after the 2004 tsunami. The project then moved to Africa, where WBR teamed up with aid agencies to donate and distribute cycles to Zambian health workers. By 2008, there was sufficient demand for WBR to begin selling bicycles as part of a pilot programme. Mr Day is now behind the launch of Buffalo Bicycles, a company that was registered in Mauritius in December, with subsidiaries in Zambia, Kenya and Zimbabwe, where WBR already operates, and South Africa, a market it is preparing to enter. It will be owned by WBR with a former US investment banker as its chief executive. "When we got to Africa the bikes were such junk we couldn't use them, so we had to spend more and more time improving the bikes," Mr Day told the Financial Times. That's where it began to dawn on us that we had kind of stumbled on an unmet need that we would be wrong not to fill, and we can't fill it philanthropically. SRAM is helping design the Buffalo bicycle, while the majority of its components come from Giant Bicycles, a Korean company, with assembly done in Africa. It is hoped that in future parts will be manufactured on the continent. WBR is looking into the possibility of producing the rear carrier in South Africa and Zimbabwe. It's all based on economic scale. I firmly believe there's no reason we cannot manufacture on the continent," says Mr Day, who will be chairman of Buffalo Bicycles. Once we see the demand begin to pick up to a sustainable rate, we have already identified the sequence of going into manufacturing in Africa. The bikes are not cheap, costing $134-$150 depending on the country, but WBR says it is the quality and lasting power that is key. The Buffalo, designed to cope with the rigours of working life in Africa, boasts that its rear carrier can carry 100kg. And its latest model, launched in October, comes with a five-year warranty for the frame, forks and rear pannier. Musa Shisiali, a Kenyan carpenter, knows all about the problems of using a cheap bike on potholed dirt roads. He bought his Indian-made bicycle three years ago for Ks3,600, packing his tools on to a makeshift rear carrier entwined in black elastic. "The roads are so bad I have to carry it a lot," he says. The holes in the road stress it and the frame can crack in two places, so I added six extra supports. Even with the price differential, Buffalo believes it can offer a viable product. WRB sold 14,311 cycles this year and Buffalo hopes to start to return a profit in three years with minimum sales of 12,000 a year in each of the countries it operates. Mr Day is confident those numbers can rise rapidly. "If we do our job right, which is to continue to serve the end user's needs, increase the quality, the usability and decrease the price, I think we could begin to claim hundreds of thousands of units a year," he says. It's not based on fickle philanthropy . . . it's got to do it on its own value proposition.