With forty years’ experience in the bike industry, Chris King is someone worth listening to. He’s a man that knows how to make a good quality product and in this video you can see where the bottom brackets, hubs and headsets he produces are made.

While this video may not featuring exploding turns or wild whips it’s still worth your attention for the criticism King lays on the industry.

We recommend sitting through the whole thing but to get to the juicy bit skip to about five minutes in. King says: “I’m sure there are some companies that would like the rules to be a little easier and less expensive to do things. In a nutshell, I think that the cost of our products are kind of heavy compared to other similar products in the bike industry.

“I can think of some companies that are having their stuff made in Taiwan or China where they’re selling them close [price wise] to ours, maybe even the same, but what they pay for them is like a tenth of what it costs us to make a product. I tend to call this profiteering – they’re making money on something, somewhere.”

Profiteering is generally considered to be unethically making a profit. King believes that these companies are sacrificing the environment in order to make a quick buck off the consumer – a practice he considers to be immoral. In contrast to this, he claims that his own local, holistic approach is what has kept him in business for forty years.

Do you think King has a point? Should the bike industry be doing more to be environmentally conscious? Or is the price we pay more important?