Is 125+ MTB companies too many? Here's the list.

I wonder how many of those brands are made by the same bike manufacturers?

My friend has a custom LaMere I think they will qualify.

I am pretty sure eminent is DEAD a local auction company has a few hundred frames they are trying to offload 

I was curious how this compares to another industry so I looked at the global smartphone market. Allegedly there were 750+ companies in 2017 but in 2023 that number came down to only 250. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mobile_phone_brands_by_country

That's in an industry worth something like $550+ billion USD worldwide (as of 2021). The total market size of bicycles (not just MTB, everything including road and department store bikes) was ~$75 billion in 2021. 

Even compared to the smartphone high of 750 companies, that's 6x as many companies in an industry 7.3x as big in 2021 so somewhat comparable. I don't know the specifics of how rapidly or why the number of smartphone brands collapsed, but that would equate to roughly 2/3rds of the bike brands on that list disappearing leaving you with only ~45 brands as of now. 

There is a significant difference in the industries in that you can go to a custom or small scale bike manufacturer like Reeb or Frameworks but such a thing does not exist in the smartphone market. 

If you really go into the niche market, there are so many more brands still. For example:

https://www.arbr.bike/

https://cdurobikes.com/

https://www.crossworx-cycles.com/

https://aper-bikes.com/

https://alutech-cycles.com/

https://www.actofive.com/

https://www.fracebike.de/

https://berriabikes.com/en/

https://superiorbikes.com/

https://www.sciu-bikes.com/

https://www.cavalerie-bikes.com/fr/

https://antidotebikes.com/

Here is on you missed.

Digit Bikes - Innovative, lighter, stiffer, and more reliable

Hi. Kingdom Bikes should be there too. They sell titanium frames but also complete bikes.

You consider making an editable list for people to add onto? Be curious how many it would get up to.

there’s some super niche brands.

peregrine bikes

emrg

dead rabbit

Daambuilt

Rip Cycles

Rosario Bike Co

Machina Bikes

terraplane bikes

Alutech cycles

mde bikes

crestline

ra bikes

pyga

Acoustic 

terra bikes 

pinnit

Liteville

Scar 

Zumbi

dark owl

Added a bunch more off the top of my head and what I follow on IG. If I get bored I’ll scroll through peoples comments and add some of the missing. 
I tried to stay limited to just full suspension availability. If we get into hard tail world, it’ll be too much haha. 

Wildwood, Cduro, Rheintritt, Btchn' Bikes, Are Swarf still going?

I wanted to add swarf badly. But couldn’t see if they were still going. 
I might add an honorable mention spot.
 

Fiveland Bikes builds Cotic and was doing some of the Swarf frames. They’re more of a sourced frame builder than a bike company. But they do help lots of others such as Neko Mullally with his steel frame experiment.

Thadeus Tisch lands there as well. Builds more for fun than as a builder you’d easily buy a bike from. 
 

Frank the welder is kind of in this spot also

I'm not the creator, so OP may feel different, but this list has gotten fringy; maybe there should be tiers with a threshold of a number of bikes sold per year. I'm not sure if a company is selling 20-30 bikes that they are impacting other brands' existence. 

I know BTCHN' still is (I have one )

For sure agree that they have an impact when combined. I know I am really just suggesting the obvious that not all are created equal here, but knowing that 25% of the 130+ are low-impact is an important data piece. 

Google says the mountain bike industry is a 6.28billion dollar industry. 3.6 million in sales is only .057% of the market. 

That all being said, a company that sells 30 bikes has the potential to impact a company that sells 300-500 bikes. And I bet quite a few on that list fall into the 300-500 category. 

Sales volume isn’t the only impactful aspect either. When it comes to innovation, the smaller brands have the ability to help drive a lot of it. A larger brand has the funding to prototype and experiment with new designs, but they might not see the value in doing it based off of how they see their general market and how they want to allocate funding. 
A smaller brand has less oversight on experimenting, and can do it just because they want to see how it rides and maybe a few people are interested in it. 
Big brands adopting something will steer the entire industry, but if you look at who built something first in the concept of trying new things, a lot of these “fringe” brands are the ones out in front. 

Elan is back in the bike game. We used to have Cult and Wildcard bikes as well in Slovenia but apparently Wildcard is going into hibernation (they were very small time anyway) and Cult only has electric hardtails now after a few years of hibernation and being an Astro catalogue brand before that (15 years ago).