The financial security of a professional cycling team is a tenuous thing, at the mercy of the whims of sponsors and technical partners that can, almost overnight, sink a whole project and dozens of careers. And that’s piled on top of the sporting challenges of the WorldTour, where the threat of relegation hovers over the teams struggling for survival.
The long-running Astana Qazaqstan squad, largely bankrolled by the Kazakh government, is a perennial example of both struggles. In recent years, the team has weathered late wage payments, equipment shuffles, and sporting challenges. It languishes at the bottom of the WorldTour standings – indeed, there are three ProTeams ahead of it in the standings, making it a near-certainty that Astana will get relegated at the end of the license cycle in 2025 – and worse, there’s no guarantee it’ll even qualify for wildcards at the major races thereafter. This season, the team has notched up just 12 victories, only one of them at a WorldTour level: Mark Cavendish’s historic stage win at the Tour de France.
All of that would seem to paint a fairly bleak picture for Astana’s future, but against all odds, Astana Qazaqstan heads into the 2025 season with renewed optimism and a big boost in investment. A little-known Chinese bike manufacturer, XDS, is the catalyst, with the team reportedly taking a new name – XdS (Carbon-Tech)-Astana Qazaqstan – from next season onwards (yes, there should be more brackets in team names [or should there?])
The team has talked up the long-term financial security that this investment can bring. XDS is expected to be involved for a minimum of five years, expanding the team’s budget from the lower end among professional teams to a level that would apparently allow it to compete with the financial might of powerhouse squads like UAE Team Emirates and Visma-Lease a Bike. And all of that with relegation seeming a near-certainty, and with the team’s most marketable rider having retired.
Which leaves some questions – not least who XDS is, where the money comes from, and what its partnership with Astana Qazaqstan might look like.
Time to find some answers.
What at a surface level appears to be an unlikely partnership came together quickly. Representatives from the two entities first met at the China Cycle expo in Shanghai in May 2024; according to the company CEO, Yancong Tan, XDS had been hunting for a way into the WorldTour since 2022, and Astana Qazaqstan was their opening. By the time the Tour de France rolled around, representatives from the brand were on the ground for negotiations. Good timing: Mark Cavendish snagged a history-making win on July 3, securing a 35th Tour stage win, and by July 5, a draft partnership deal was finalised, and announced by the team on July 15.
The announcement raised more than a few eyebrows – as is often the case when a largely unknown entity with big promises enters a sport burned by past sponsorship misadventures. One of the questions: who are these guys? Another: can they provide WorldTour-level equipment?
XDS is an abbreviation of the company’s full name, Xidesheng (or Shenzhen Xidesheng Bicycle Co. Pty Ltd, if we’re being formal), and was founded in 1995 in the vast tech and manufacturing hub of Shenzhen, southeastern China, near Hong Kong. It lacks strong brand recognition internationally, despite distribution in a number of countries. In Australia it is best known for its low-end products – mostly cruisers and vintage-style bikes with a smattering of hybrids and budget mountain bikes; the most expensive bicycle in its range, an eMTB, is AU$3,000. In the USA, the range tops out at US$1,399. In neither country is there a single carbon fibre road bike available.
But what XDS lacks in brand recognition, it makes up for in scale. According to Astana Qazaqstan’s press release announcing the partnership, XDS is one of the world’s biggest bike manufacturers, with “an annual production capacity of 10 million units”. XDS’s Chinese homepage has a slightly more modest tally of five million bikes a year. Either figure is so big it’s almost abstract: using XDS’s figure, this is a company producing a minimum of 14,000 bikes every day, or about 10 bikes a minute. Heck, let’s get even more granular: a new bike rolling off the production line every six seconds. “XDS has the world’s largest carbon fiber manufacturing plant and the largest bicycle production base in China. It controls every link of frame manufacturing, starting from a carbon yarn and an aluminum ingot,” a page on the company website reads. There are few other companies in the industry operating at this scale, with the exception of Taiwan’s Giant and Dutch conglomerate Pon.
So where do all those bikes go? XDS’s Chinese language website claims that it exports to over 50 “countries and regions around the world”, although only 10 of those countries appear to be under the XDS brand name. Perhaps some of those bikes are produced for bike-share schemes or other related micromobility initiatives; another likely answer is that the company is a major manufacturer for brands that you’ve actually heard of. One industry source described the company as “the 800lb gorilla that the riding public isn’t aware of.” Another acknowledged the “big gap between [XDS’s] perception in the public space and in the industry”.
Sitting within the broader parent company is its carbon fibre division, XDS Carbon Tech. This is what you’re likely to come across if you’re Googling Astana’s new sponsor – specifically its separate website (which does not appear to have been updated since 2021, and looks more dated than that). Here, we learn that the company (presumably referring to the carbon division) has more than 1,800 employees and more than 200 senior research and development personnel”. There’s a product line-up too – carbon framesets that appear about as contemporary as the website (canti bosses, post-mount brakes, sometimes both on the one frame/fork). In short, and with the utmost of respect and open-hearted curiosity, it appears that there is a gap between these products and those being ridden in the WorldTour.
There are risks in oversimplifying the narrative around XDS, however, because there is a distinct split between its open mold products and those of the brands it manufactures for. A second industry source told Escape Collective that XDS’s main customer is Trek (comprising a substantial slice of XDS’s output – up to half, according to one source). Other brands it manufactures include Orbea, Pivot and MCipollini. Each of these brands is well-regarded internationally, and strongly indicates that XDS has the manufacturing know-how to pull off a new WorldTour sponsorship.
“Regarding their capability to develop WorldTour-worthy bikes, I have no doubts when it comes to anything carbon technology. Their layup development, manufacturing technologies and ability to come up with technical solutions is on par with competitors, as they are showing with products they are manufacturing,” an industry source with a long history working with XDS told Escape Collective. “Where they will need to prove themselves is for design. Their self-designed open mold models were often lacking in this regard, something they acknowledged by outsourcing design, something they maybe also [will] do with their X-Lab frames for Astana. And then of course there [are] fields like building a brand image, international distribution, market understanding, where we simply don’t know about their capabilities [at this stage].”
In other respects, however, XDS appears to be a genuine innovator of the Chinese cycling industry. “While obviously a Chinese company, it differs from other Chinese factories in that it has a much more established and western feel to it,” Escape Collective was told by the second industry source. “It still is a family business and seemingly less dependent on government subsidies than other Chinese manufacturers.” XDS’s huge factory facilities look impressive, and it has recently announced plans to expand a factory in Bavet, Cambodia, to match its scale. Even the word ‘factory’ is probably itself an oversimplification of XDS’s presence in Shenzhen – just look at this thing:
Included in the complex is a ‘Bicycle Ecological Theme Park’, along with the crown jewel: a “self-built UCI standard mountain [bike] track” on the grounds, which is used for testing and development of the company’s MTB frames – bikes which have sufficient chops to have been used by the Chinese team at the 2024 Olympics.
The XDS Carbon Tech facilities, located elsewhere in Shenzhen’s Guangming New District, look about as lush as a major composite factory can, boasting a “beautiful environment, green mountains and rivers with birds and flowers, make you feel in nature park [sic]” as well as “complete entertainment facilities” for employees “including basketball courts, badminton courts, table tennis rooms, reading rooms, billiard rooms and other entertainment venues.” Escape Collective was told that there is also farming conducted within the grounds, which in turn produces some of the food served in the staff canteen.
Within China, XDS’s brand perception is bolstered by high-profile brand and celebrity endorsements: the company’s “global ambassador” is the popular young Chinese actor Wu Lei (Leo Wu), while the brand has done collaborative product showcases alongside big tech brands including Huawei and BYD, drawing an array of Chinese influencers, celebrities and members of the public and industry.
Whether that domestic standing can successfully cross over to a diversified international market is another thing, and how XDS will measure success from the Astana Qazaqstan partnership is unclear; both the team and the brand failed to provide a response to our requests for comment, including to the specific question of whether the ambition of the sponsorship is to grow XDS internationally, or to grow cycling within China. There’s conflict in either scenario: elevating X-Lab will raise brand recognition domestically, but risks alienating XDS’s OEM customers who will have concerns about their intellectual property helping establish a rival. (Giant is a noteworthy example of a company that has navigated this imbalance.)
Domestically XDS lacks the cachet of a western brand, but sources say it is seen as the most trustworthy of the Chinese domestic brands. An important step in growing the brand internationally may be the establishment of an appealing brand identity, with XDS apparently positioning its X-Lab sub-brand as the S-Works to its Specialized (this is not the same X-Lab as the US-based bottle cage and aero equipment manufacturer – Ed.).
Spy shots taken during the season, seen by Escape Collective, have shown black X-Lab bikes on the roofs of Astana Qazaqstan vehicles, and there have been leaked photos of the bikes in a new Astana livery. Videos on Chinese platforms have also suggested that the X-Lab aero bike, the AD9, may be competitive against rivals like the Canyon Aeroad, with a claimed 3 watt saving at 45 km/h compared to the Aeroad. Wind-tunnel testing has been conducted at the Silverstone Sports Engineering Hub Wind Tunnel, which is conveniently located for Alex Dowsett, Astana’s new performance manager. CyclingNews reports that another likely candidate to sit alongside the AD9 is the climbing-oriented RS9 model; the only hiccup is that there is no time trial bike currently listed in XDS’s lineup, so either this is still in development or Astana will use rebadged bikes from another manufacturer.
There is precedent for a little-known brand entering the WorldTour with positive results – in 1998, Giant took over bike sponsorship at ONCE from iconic brand Look, a partnership that was essential to raising Giant’s profile as the brand transitioned from an OE partner to selling under its own name – an obvious parallel here. More recently, the Van Rysel-branded bikes used by Decathlon-AG2R La Mondiale were similarly unheralded at the start of 2024, but have been cited as a factor in the team’s successful season. Whether XDS can replicate that success story in the X-Lab AD9 is yet to be seen.
But while there are reassuring signs about XDS’s entry into the WorldTour – and, to be clear, we’ll take a bike company investing in cycling over about half the title sponsors already in the sport – there are still plenty of questions that linger. The injection of cash that has come from the new sponsor has seen Astana go on a spending spree in the hopes of staving off relegation, picking up 12 new riders for 2025 including established names like Sergio Higuita (ex Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe), Alberto Bettiol (a mid-season move from EF Education), Fausto Masnada (ex Soudal-Quick Step) Wout Poels (ex Bahrain Victorious), Diego Ulissi (ex UAE Team Emirates) and Clement Champoussin (ex Arkéa-B&B Hotels). But the scale of the challenge they face to remain in the WorldTour (or even the top two ProTeams, hence securing invites to the most prestigious races) is stark: they’re so far behind that they could win all three Grand Tours in 2025 and still be on the chopping block.
There are questions, too, around how quickly the new partnership can get up to speed, and there have been speed bumps already – less than a month ago, Astana missed the UCI’s initial deadline to register for the 2025 season (a now-overcome administrative faux pas, according to team boss Alexander Vinokourov). This is a new world for Astana, which seems set to shed a little of its Kazakh identity – and according to a local government press release, will soon be the first Chinese-registered team to compete at the WorldTour level, providing a development pathway for Chinese riders who have historically been extremely underrepresented in the Euro-centric world of pro cycling.
In the churn and burn of cycling’s sponsorship scramble, there is apparent stability in the length of this Chinese manufacturing titan’s commitment (a reported 5-10 year agreement). But the devil is in the details, and five year commitments have fallen apart in less than a season before – and that’s to say nothing of the threat of relegation, and whether the lustre of Astana Qazaqstan remains in a post-Cavendish, likely-post-WorldTour existence.
Will XDS be the shot in the arm securing Astana’s future? Is it a play for OEM customers for XDS? A bold pitch for a share of the international market? A way of growing cycling domestically? Who knows – but there’s a new (and big) player on the scene. Welcome to Astana’s new era, and wherever it leads.
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