But they'll make it up in volume! ;D

Isn’t the assumption that they are losing money on the cost of expansion, not the material cost? Eg, if they were only selling in the Netherlands it would be profitable—but they are paying for international growth and that isn’t profitable.

Nobody would hand them over hundreds of millions of dollars just for the Dutch market, though.

The point is that it might have made sense as a big business but not necessarily as an international growth story. If you can sell 100k bikes with $1000 profit (~15% of cost) that’s still 100M profit.