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The Yamaha Corporation announced today that it will be selling 8 million shares of its holdings in Yamaha Motor Co., a movement of shares that will see roughly 2.3% of the voting power in the powersports company changing hands.

This deal is expected to close on December 4th, and the Yamaha Corporation says that it will be selling its position to various unnamed securities companies, presumably to then be sold on the open market.

At the current market price for Yamaha Motor stock, this deal should be worth close to ¥26 billion, and ¥18 billion after tax expenses have been factored.

The Motorsport Aftermarket Group (MAG) is not a name that motorcycle enthusiasts are usually familiar with, but the family of brands that the company owns certainly is: Performance Machine wheels, Renthal handlebars, Vance & Hines exhausts, Tucker Rocky, J&P Cycles, etc.

The network of brands has been struggling over the recent years though, and today we learn that many of them will be filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, while the overarching MAG Group business restructures its debt and finds new ownership.

While this is not the sexiest news story to happen in the motorcycle industry this year, it is certainly one of the most important and complicated. As such, we will try to break it down in a digestible way for you.

A bit of news that has gone under the radar: at the Frankfurt Auto Show, Volkswagen Group Chairman Matthias Muller dropped a bombshell, saying that the German company’s house of brands would all have a fully electrified lineup of vehicles by 2030 – at the latest.

The initiative is called Roadmap E, and while Volkswagen is focusing mostly on it automotive holdings, the Germans have made obvious signs that they are including their Italian motorcycle company, Ducati, in this push to go electric.

The most obvious indication comes from the company’s press statement. In it, the Volkswagen Group says that by 2030 “there will be at least one electrified version of each of the 300 or so Group models across all brands and markets.”

Cummins is better known for its diesel truck engines, but the Fortune 500 company makes its money from also selling generators and alternative energy power sources.

So maybe, it shouldn’t come as a surprise then to learn today that Cummins has acquired Brammo, Inc. and its electric drivetrain business.

Before we should go further, we should point out that Polaris still owns Brammo’s motorcycle business, which it bought separately back in 2015, and that this purchase by Cummins applies only to the parts of Brammo that Polaris didn’t buy, including Brammo’s race bike, the Empulse RR.

A major surprise out of Borgo Panigale this afternoon. Ernesto Marinelli, the man behind so much of Ducati’s World Superbike success, is to leave the company at the end of 2017 for pastures new.

Marinelli has been a lynchpin in Ducati’s WSBK operation, working with the company for 22 years. He started as a track engineer, working with both Carl Fogarty and Neil Hodgson, but soon took on a major role in Ducati’s racing operations.

The Italian led Ducati’s AMA racing program at the end of last century, working with such legendary riders as Troy Bayliss, Ben Bostron, Anthony Gobert, and John Kocinski.

After returning to Europe, he took over the role of technical director, then project manager of Ducati’s WorldSBK project.

Reports out of Italy are confirming the news that Ducati will remain as a part of the Volkswagen Group, with the German company ceasing its pursuits of divesting the Italian motorcycle company from its ranks.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone following Ducati’s business situation, as reports of the divestiture stalling out were circulating this time last month.

The news seems to come with a bonus, with Ducati CEO Claudio Domenicali reportedly confirming the news internally (other reports quote Audi CEO Rupert Stadler doing the same as well).

Bloomberg is reporting that California Governor Jerry Brown is considering ways to ban the sale of vehicles that use internal combustion engines – a move that could have massive implications not only for vehicle sales, the environment, but potentially the motorcycle industry as well.

Still in the early days of consideration, the news comes from remarks made by Mary Nichols, who is the Chairman of the California Air Resources Board (CARB), and her remarks and relaying of thought from Gov. Brown don’t make it clear if the ban would apply only to passenger vehicles, or if it would include modes of transportation like trucks, commercial vehicles, and motorcycles.

However, the move mimics similar bans that we have already seen in places like China, and follows a trend that is catching on in European countries too, with the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and The Netherlands all recently announcing similar efforts and goals to block the sale of internal combustion vehicles in the coming decades.

We broke the news last week that helmet tech-startup Skully was rising from the dead, and today we have more news from Skully Technologies and how it plans to correct the wrongs of its predecessor.

In a letter to its “SKULLY Nation”, Skully Technologies lists how various backers of Skully’s Indiegogo campaign will be treated under the new company.

While the plan lists several bullet points for the various supporter levels, along with caveats, the short version is that Skully Technologies will honor all of the Indiegogo campaign promises make by Skully, Inc, substituting the Skully AR-1 helmet with the new Skully Fenix helmet, of course.

Things don’t look great for Bimota, one of the most iconic motorcycle brands ever created. The happy merger of the talents of Valerio Bianchi (BI), Giuseppe Morri (MO), and Massimo Tamburini (TA), Bimota has a storied past of failure, and a history of rebirth.

Several weeks ago, we covered a report from Cycle World’s Bruno dePrato, which outlined the currently dire state of the company. It seemed that once again that Bimota was falling on hard times, and the future of the brand remained uncertain.

Bimota took issue with this news, naturally.

For reasons beyond our imagination and comprehension, the failed business experiment that was the Skully AR-1 helmet has been revived by new investors.

Sending out a blast to the “Skully Nation” email list, the brand’s new owners Ivan and Rafael Contreras, have announced their plans to revive this seemingly dead project.

One can barely fathom why someone would want to continue a project that so obviously was doomed to its own failure, and that also so grossly betrayed the goodwill of the motorcycle community; and yet, here we are, with Skully Technologies taking over where Skully, Inc. left off.

The presumption of this news is that the new management hopes to bring the AR-1 helmet, with its heads-up display technology, to market.

The announcement goes on also to say that Skully Technologies will leverage augmented reality, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence technologies for the wearable products industry – a nod to the three hottest technology sectors in Silicon Valley at this moment in time.

Two labor unions have ended a partnership agreement with Harley-Davidson, citing differences with how the Bar & Shield brand handles staffing issues at its factories (Harley has been accused of replacing hourly union workers with temporary seasonal workers).

The move comes after a meeting on Monday, which saw leaders from the International Association of Machinists & Aerospace Workers (IAM), United Steelworkers (USW), and Harley-Davidson President & CEO Matt Levatich unable to agree on how to handle staffing issues going forward.

While the disagreement ends an accord that has existed between the unions and Harley-Davidson for the past two decades, it does not affect the collective bargaining agreement that the unions have with Harley-Davidson, which has been incorrectly reported elsewhere.