Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/1035029
I N D I A N M OTO R C YC L E P R E S I D E N T ST E V E M E N N E TO P96 INTERVIEW Steve, the overall U.S. motorcycle market suffered a 3.2% drop in 2017, and it's dropping even further so far this year. How are Indian's sales holding up in your home market? I'm happy to say that we're actually expanding very well—and that means growing our market share and growing our volume, as well. We're also lifting our dealer count in North America, which is good. No question, the U.S. industry situation is pretty challenging, but Indian's been able to continue to prosper, and keep growing in the way that our business plan called for it to do. What's Indian's current percentage increase in unit sales? Year on year, we're beating the market right now by about 11%. But that's against a declining U.S. market. Compared to 2017, how many more actual motorcycles are you currently selling year on year in North America? On that basis we're doing even better—we're in the upper teens in unit growth in the USA, and we're up over 50% in year-on-year growth in Eu- rope and in IMEA markets [India, Middle East and Africa]. Our finance guys are going crazy! What do you attribute the reasons to be for Indian's ongoing global showroom success? We've always focused on staying true to the Indian brand in a way that defines us compared to our com- petitors, plus we continue to make quality product with a strong identity, and we're also trying to be an engaging kind of brand with our customers, too. It's really been a question of getting out and trying to do different things, to build the customers' awareness of Indian, but also to build their familiarity with how we want to run it as a brand. We're doing this around the globe, and now it's paying off for us as we go full blast into the things that we do, and do them right. But even you couldn't have imagined it was going to be so successful? No, we honestly did not! We said, "If we're going to get involved in racing, we're going to commit to it fully." So with the credibility of our race team—the engineers, the product guys, the riders who took a chance on us and came aboard—plus all the sup- port that we'd get, we thought we'd have a shot at doing well. By that I mean we honestly thought if we could win a couple of races that first year in 2017, that would be a really successful debut season, and we could work hard to build on that for year two. We knew we'd have tough competition from teams with a proven winning streak. But it turned out even better than any of us had honestly imagined, winning so many races as well as the AFT Twins Championship. We thought that if we could win maybe four races or so, that would be outstanding, and we could maybe get on any level of the podium about 10 times throughout the season. Okay, but are you maybe even a little bit embarrassed that Indian has been so domi- nant in the AFT series from your very first race onwards? No, I'm not embarrassed about winning, be- cause we can only control what we do at Indian, Indian's Spirit Lake factory in Iowa is a happy place.