Twenty or thirty years ago, there were 2-3 well known racquet companies, but also 10-15 other companies that had somewhat decent market share. The top 20 ATP pros in the Eighties played with 12-15 different racquet brands, but it is not like that anymore. Now, just a few brands (Babolat, Wilson, Head and Yonex) dominate the racquet market share market and the lesser brands have become almost non-entities. When I was on these boards for the first time in 2000, there used to be a lot of discussion about Prince, Volkl, Fischer, Gamma, ProKennex etc. which I don’t see anymore and the only new entrant I hear about is Angell which is going after a niche custom market anyway. As these top brands sponsor more and more pros, college players and top juniors, it becomes even harder for lesser brands to do well.
With less competition and more of a ‘monopoly’ by a few companies, it is easy for all of them to decide to keep increasing their prices and give consumers less choice of less expensive racquets. I’m not saying that the top companies get together and do ’price-fixing’, but with fewer competitors it is easy to guess that none of their strong competitors will undersell them on price. All industries where few companies dominate market share have a faster increase in prices and this is totally independent of costs going up. I’m only in a half-joking mood when I say that the FTC should look at non-competitive practices among tennis manufacturers - but, this is a very small industry and the FTC has bigger fish to fry.
Also, tennis is still an upper class sport in many countries played by the same people who are willing to spend thousands of dollars for golf clubs. So, tennis racquet manufacturers have realized that those people are not going to quibble too much about the rising prices of tennis racquets. I have a friend who works in an executive Marketing role at Srixon (who owns Dunlop) and I have had some interesting conversations with him about how prices are set for tennis and golf equipment - let me just say that it usually has nothing to do with costs going up except in a small minority of cases.