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/786372
INTERVIEW MV AGUSTA'S GIOVANNI CASTIGLIONI P98 As far as the pro- duction of new motor- cycles here in Varese is concerned—is that back in full flow? Yes, it is. We stopped production in Febru- ary last year, and com- menced our restructuring program. As you can imagine, not everybody was happy about this, so we had to talk to our cred- itors—who were mostly our suppliers—to establish a plan. That done, we restarted production in June, and increased it step by step until by Sep- tember we had returned to full production, working every day of the week with the same number of people in the assembly area. That's because in laying off the 110 people necessary to reduce the size of the workforce, we did not touch the assembly workers. They work every day and there are about 50 of them—we hired temporary staff to increase production, who we simply didn't rehire. We've also cleaned up all our short term financing, paid everything up to date on that, and we've restructured our long term financing with our banks, and part of that restructuring plan was a repayment schedule for our sup- pliers up to a certain level, via our now positive cash flow. Are all your suppliers now supplying you as before? Yes, they are. Including Brembo—they were the main holdouts, weren't they? Yes, but they then were the first ones to restart supplying us, and have given us great support, for which I'm very grateful—as indeed to all our suppliers, who I think universally recognize the validity of our restructuring plan. I understand you've ap- pointed a new importer in the USA, so that MV Agusta can expand its American opera- tions. Can you tell me about this, please? The U.S. market will play an important role for MV Agusta in the future. Our U.S.-based investor Black Ocean sees the American market as a key target for our super premium motorcycles, so we have appointed our very successful Aus- tralian importer, Urban Moto Imports, to open a new distribution network in the USA, based in California. Urban Moto has been an outstanding partner for MV Agusta in Australia, and its owners Allan and Joseph Elas- mar have been skillful in developing a con- solidated sales strategy there. This has gained the confidence of their dealer network, and above all, their customers, and I'm con- fident they can bring the same successful formula to a much larger market in the USA. Looking at the future, then, you say you plan to maintain the same level of production as at present, making 5000 bikes a year. But how will these be split between three- and four-cylinder models? At the moment we're making 90 three-cylinders for every 10 four-cylinders. But when the new four-cylinder arrives in 2019, this proportion will change—and also the 5000 units annual produc- tion will increase slightly, but not by very much. CN Hopefully the MV Agusta story will continue for many more chapters.