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to be negotiating to acquire a substantial slice of the indebted scooter speciaiist, in which TPG has a small shareholding - AC) - but we have no interest in doing anything in that direction. I've never even met him, but the rumors spread, and people buy the stock. It's very volatile. Q But another reason the share price shot up recently was the rumor that TPG was actively looking to unload its remaining stock in Ducati. How much equity does it still hold in the company? About 33.4 percent - and TPG will unload it, since for David Bonderman (the boss of TPG) this is now a vanity investment, even if he doesn't like me saying so! He keeps it because he likes sending his friends here to try our bikes and to go to races - really, for TPG a $140 million stake in Ducati is insignificant for a fund which now controls about $30 billion in sales. He has a price in mind, which is quite honestly pretty high - but I think he's set it that high because he doesn't want to sell it! A Q so the assumption that many have made that you were reinstated as CEO of Ducati in order to plan TPG's exit strategy is a false one? (LaUghin g) No, there's no relationship with that - they're not in fact planning an exit strategy, and to be honest they don't even look at us very much. They leave us alone and let us run the company - the best kind of investor. A Turnin g to racing, Ducati's MotoGP debut this year could hardly have been more impressi,ve - but at what cost? Can the presumably very high price of developing a bike good enough to lead its very first race on Honda's home circuit be justified in terms of Ducati's overall commercial strategy? I hope we can soon lead the whole race, not only the early laps! But in reality it has not proved that expensive, which is kind of strange. Originally we budgeted Euro 25 million ($28.9 million) a year for four years for everything, including Superbike, which was however downscale budgetarily - but we discovered that 77 percent of the cost of our racing activities could be covered by sponsors, which is something we had not planned for! Frankly, we were taken by surprise by the attraction that the combination of Ducati, MotoGP and TV has for a major sponsor like Marlboro, Shell or companies like that. Also, we got some very interesting finance from the European Union for blue sky research into avant garde engineering, part of which relates to our Grand Prix race program after all, nobody makes a four-cylinder desmodromic motorcycle engine, except us! Q A Nice to have Brussels sponsor the Ducati MotoGP team! But surely you're lookmg at your desmosedici as the prototype of a future road model, just as KTM has admitted doing with its future V4 GP bike? Will Ducati develop a V4 streetbike based on the GP racer? YOU know that I have to say no, don't you?! Under GP rules, the official line is that we will not develop a street four-cylinder bike - but, however, the official line is also that some of the solutions we are testing and developing in the prototype GP racer will eventual trickle down to the Superbike, and from the Superbike down to the production level. Ducati has always raced to develop something we then put into production. Let's leave it at that for the time being! Anyway. I look forward to seeing how the FIM is going to define the word "prototype" ... Q A . What's Ducati's position about World Superbike, though - not only in relation to MotoGP, but also in respect of the new lOOOcc rules being implemented next year aimed at creating a level playing field for fours and twins - and triples, I g\less? Superbike of course is our history; our heritage our museum along the corridor is packed full of such bikes. The Flamminis were here just before you, by the way - and we have made an agreement with them that Ducati will continue to run a factory team in World Superbike indefinitely, because we believe that there is definitely the need, and the space, for two World Championships, proVided they are clearly separated. I have always said that the beauty of Superbike lies in comparing it to Formula 1 car racing - the difference between a Ferrari fan and a Ducati fan is that the Ferrari fan is not a buyer of product, just maybe a T-shirt or a flag, but not the car. The fan that goes to see Superbike races is the one that buys the street version of the bike he sees on the racetrack, and you have only to look at the parking lot at a race to confirm this. I think MotoGP racing is more about the brand, whereas Superbike is about the actual customer product. Therefore, this form of racing is very important for us, and we will continue to be in Superbike for the foreseeable future. However, we want the other manufacturers to be there too, which is why we have accepted the new rules, which I think do make sense and do offer the Japanese the opportunity to renew their commerciai interest in Superbike, which in the past has lapsed. Now I think they have to come back: We were crazy enough to go into their field - at quite some risk of looking stupid, I might add - so now they have to come back on to our turf, as well. However, I did teil the Flamminis that we have to work together on the TV coverage, which is what Superbike is weak on, especially right here in Italy. Superbike is great for the actual public that comes to the races, but it's not so good in terms of TV, and it's in everyone's interests to work on that. Q A Lookin g at Ducati's future competition activities, there's also World Supersport, in which you were title contenders as recently as two years ago but have since dropped off the pace. Will you return to the Supersport class with a competition version of the 749? supersport operates under a set of rules which penalize small companies like Ducati, in terms of homologation levels. While in Superbike these are proportional to the size of the company, in Supersport it's a flat number irrespective of how big or how small the company that manufactures the bike is. That number (1000 units, compared to 150 units in Superbike for a company of Ducati's size) is too high for a small company like we are. We hope we will find within the MSMA a way to allow us to consider the opportunity to return to Supersport - but right now we can't even think about participating because of the homologation numbers. I think we can bring added interest to a form of racing which has become very important and exciting - but we have to work out a way we can do that which is fair to everyone, and the MSMA is the place to do that. Q A Let's look at Ducati's present commercial situation, starting with the USA. Shouldn't it be your largest market? lt should be, but it isn't - our Italian home market is biggest. We're suffering quite a lot through not being able to race there with bikes that have any resemblance to our World Superbike machinery. We hope that something will happen with the AMA to establish a set of U.S. Superbike rules which has some common sense and is at ieast pretty close to the FIM rules, otherwise for all manufacturers, espe- Q A cially one as small as Ducati, it doesn't make sense to develop different specifications of bikes for different championship series. We're either in or we're not in from now on - being in halfway like at the moment makes no sense. To be honest, it seems like we're being kind of kept out, whether intentionally or not I can't say - but for sure they're creating regulatory problems for us to go in and race there. HOW have Ducati's U.S. registrations in the past five years charted? well, it went from 2000 bikes a year up to 6000, and then it dropped slightly to between 5000 and 6000. But we know this is way below our potential, and we need to work hard to get 'up there. There's no reason at all why we can't sell 10,000 bikes a year in the USA, apart from being asinine about the way we've gone about it. Q A HOW do you see Ducati's sales developing over the next five years? What's your corporate game plan? I came to the board a few days ago and said that our next dream was to make 50,000 bikes in one year - and I think you must have just one dream at a time, and that's ours right now. How long it will take depends on the market specifically and the macroeconomic situation in general and especially what's going on in the USA and Germany. The other countries in the world are just fine for us, but those two have a question mark. But just look at what happened in Japan - we became the number-two manufacturer after Honda in the sports bike market. We're selling more sports bikes than Yamaha or especially Suzuki, which is pretty astonishing. It became our third-biggest market with 15 percent of our production, after Italy which takes 24 percent, and the U.S. with 17 percent, followed by the UK, Germany and France, which are all around the same, then Australia, which is a big one, too. But a lot will depend also on how the Multistrada does for us. Right now we see this as a family which can sell maybe 5000 bikes a year, but from the reaction we've got from our dealer network and the press, as well as from early public response, maybe that's wrong and we can in fact expand the Multistrada concept into other niches, which will allow us to do more. But we also want the SS range to come back and represent a higher proportion of our total volume than it has in recent years. That's a priority now. Q A So can we take a look at Ducati's future model strategy? Taking your answer about the V4 desmosedici streetbike at face value, let's look at other potential new families of models in the Ducati range. Given your problems in terms of market penetration in the USA, have you considered building a line of bikes specifically targeted at the American customer? I don't think you'll see a cruiser in Ducati's lineup anytime soon. You see, right now the share of dream we have in the United States is so much larger than our share of market that it is exclusively our fault not to catch up, and the share of dream is built on Ducati's true essence, which is absolutely not cruiser. in order to grow in the U.S .. we don't need to invade other markets - we should do better what we already know how to do, and that is to sell sportbikes. Through a series of circumstances, we have not done the job in the U.S., and that's down to our marketing strategy, not our products. Q A Q What are those circumstances? A First of all, usually no European company does well in the U.S., which is a complicated country cue I e n eVIl's JULY 16. 2003 23