Accell Group has started insolvency proceedings after saying it could not find a solution to continue operating in its current form, putting Raleigh bikes inside a formal court process. A suspension of payments has been granted to its Dutch entities, and the company says the next step is to work with court-appointed administrators.
Jonas Nilsson, Accell Group CEO, said the situation was "deeply sad and frustrating" and that no realistic option had delivered a solution. He added: "Every realistic option for the future of the business has been tirelessly explored, and none have resulted in a solution to continue the Group in its current form".
Accell Group and KKR
The filing follows a difficult four years after a consortium led by KKR acquired Accell Group in 2022. That bet rested on rapid growth in the electric bicycle market, but the boom slowed, inventory piled up and discounting intensified. Accell also carried out its One Accell strategy, with job cuts, centralisation of functions such as marketing and consolidation of locations.
The company’s financial pressure deepened after Accell’s lenders took control from KKR in February 2026, following its second debt restructuring within a year. KKR and its backers lost all of the €1.1bn equity used to buy Accell, along with hundreds of millions they injected later to help stabilise it.
Raleigh for
Accell is the parent company of Raleigh, Lapierre, Babboe and Haibike, so the insolvency reaches beyond a single brand and into the group structure behind it. Accell bought Raleigh for $100m in 2012, and Raleigh saw redundancies in 2024 before reporting losses of $30m in accounts released in 2025.
Nilsson said the company’s immediate focus is to support an orderly process, provide clarity wherever possible and work with the relevant court-appointed administrators to preserve viable activities and employment where circumstances allow. That makes the priority practical: keeping parts of the business alive where the administrators see value, while the insolvency process determines what can continue.
By June, the transfer of Accell Group to DuTech Group appeared to be nearing completion, but the new insolvency step now puts that transition into a different legal framework. For employees and business partners tied to the Dutch entities, the immediate change is that decisions move under court supervision, not company-only control.
