While we wait for the New Year and ponder what has occurred in the last 365 days, the folks at Honda certainly have a milestone to remember 2019 by – this was the year that they built their 400 millionth motorcycle. That’s a lot.
This marker comes in Honda’s 70th year of making motorcycles (the Honda Dream D-Type went on sale in 1949), and it is an astounding achievement for the Japanese brand.
The rumors turned out to be true at EICMA: Kawasaki has bought the iconic Italian brand Bimota. Well…technically, the business transaction is a little bit more complex than that.
It was Italian Motorcycle Investment S.p.A. (IMI) that actually bought a 49.9% stake in Bimota S.A., with IMI being an investment arm created by Kawasaki Motors Europe, which in turn is a wholly owned subsidiary of Kawasaki Heavy Industries. Got all that?
With a couple caveats, I would describe the track day business model as heavily commoditized. That is to say, there is little to differentiate the track day of one organization from the next, which leaves most riders buying track time based on location, schedule, and price.
If you don’t give it too much thought, this concept shouldn’t be too surprising. After all, what riders are really buying is time on the race track, the conditions of which are relatively outside the purview of the organization hosting the event. This makes a brutal business landscape, and it is not surprising to see the space making a race to the bottom.
Now to be fair, some organizations run a tighter ship than others; some track day groups offer more instruction than others (especially for novice riders); and there are track days that offer more perks (lunch, photos, celebrity riders, etc) than others, but all-in-all the product is the same: a few hours of cumulative time on a race track.
In my 15 years of track riding, the biggest differentiation I have found between track day groups is the culture (or lack thereof) an organization has been able to infuse into its program. But, this only moves the needle a minuscule amount, and it shows in the ever-increasingly competitive marketplace that is motorcycle track riding.
Big news coming from Varese, Italy today, as MV Agusta announced that is has secured funding for a new five-year business plan.
The Italian brand is also announcing some changes in its top leadership, most notable of which is Giovanni Castiglioni pivoting into an advisory position.
Remember that day when KTM bought a struggling dirt bike brand? No, we’re not talking about Husqvarna again, because today Stefan Pierer and his team acquired 60% of the shares of Spanish dirt bike marque GasGas.
The acquisition is actually an interesting one between KTM and GasGas’s owner, Black Toro Capital, as it sees the Austrian conglomerate “partnering” with its Spanish counterpart, primarily on electric dirt bikes.
Rumors out of Italy are suggesting that Kawasaki Heavy Industries has bought the Bimota motorcycle brand and its intellectual property.
We first saw the report on this news at the respected GPOne website, though details on the transaction remain virtually non-existent, with a press conference on the news expected in the coming days.
If true, this information is truly interesting, as it will likely set off a firestorm of speculation regarding what Kawasaki could want with the defunct boutique Italian motorcycle brand.
You probably saw the headline yesterday, the one where the stock market took a nosedive and there was talk of doom and gloom for our economic future.
For those that don’t know, the news behind the news is the fact that the bond market saw an inverted yield curve between the 2-year and 10-year treasury bonds. This is a fancy way of saying that investors expect to make more money in the short-term than the long-term, and this opinion reflects where our economy is headed.
For the last 50 years, an inverted yield curve has signaled the start of an economic recession, and while that is a scary thing to think about (we would all rather have a booming economy), the boom/bust cycle is common in economics and can often be mild.
Of course, what is different here is that the last recession that the United States experienced was the worst recession of all time, and in many ways we are still feeling its effects, whether those are physical or merely psychological.
While I will let the financial publications debate what kind of recession we are headed into, if they even agree that a recession is looming in front of us, this news does spark some interesting conversation for the motorcycle industry. Let me explain.
There is new leadership at the venerable two-wheeled online retailer RevZilla, though you wouldn’t know it beyond the PR-friendly Technical.ly publication where the news was published yesterday – and not on the company’s own news site.
Announcing that Ken Murphy will take over as the head of both RevZilla and Cycle Gear (technically, Murphy will become the President and CEO of Comoto Holdings, which owns both RevZilla and Cycle Gear), the news means that RevZilla co-founder Matt Kull is stepping down from the role, which he has held in an official and in an interim capacity since Anthony Bucci’s resignation from the post in late 2016.
Murphy comes from outside of the motorcycle industry, but has retail experience, working in the mattress and shoe business.
Interesting developments on the EV side of the motorcycle industry, as Energica & Dell’Orto have decided to team up on making electric drivetrain systems for small and mid-sized motorcycles.
The move does not mean that Energica is about to burgeon its lineup with smaller electric motorcycles, but instead it means that Energica will follow Dell’Orto’s lead as a product supplier for other OEMs.
While motorcycles sales in the United States continue to slip, sales in Europe continue to grow. I use that line almost every time I write about this subject – largely because it’s the truth.
The fact is that there is a fundamental difference about what is going on in the European markets versus what is going on here in the United States, and it shows in the sale data.
Reporting on the first half of the year so far, the European Association of Motorcycle Manufacturers (ACEM) says that the European motorcycle market is up 9.1%, compared to the first-half of 2018.
I had to dive back into the A&R archive to find out that Triumph and Bajaj first announced their intent to partner on middleweight motorcycles almost exactly two years ago.
Details were light at the time of the announcement, and few specifics have surfaced since…until today…sort of. This is because news out of India tells us that Triumph and Bajaj are aiming to have a formal agreement signed in Q3 of this year.