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KGB

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Turn around plan
« on: February 02, 2021, 12:28:25 PM »

Harley-Davidson posts a quarterly loss and reveals its turnaround plan https://www.jsonline.com/story/money/2021/02/02/harley-davidson-posts-quarterly-loss-announces-five-year-turnaround-plan/4346766001/


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Re: Turn around plan
« Reply #1 on: February 02, 2021, 01:42:13 PM »

What is this now; turn-around plan # 13?  14"?

Or do we start the count over each January?  :nixweiss:
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iski

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Re: Turn around plan
« Reply #2 on: February 02, 2021, 01:47:06 PM »

You are counting them?  After they did away with the hydraulic clutch, I think they should consider the old reliable kick start instead of those newfangled battery reliant expensive electric start thingys.

"In the past, we have over committed and under delivered," Zeitz said.

Yeah, that sums it up well.  Stock is down about 19% today since HOG missed it's earnings report, opposite the current market trend.  HD is shrinking & is giving up market share - unwillingly perhaps but inevitable.  Hope they can turn it around, but so far do not see anything that indicates they can.
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ultrafxr

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Re: Turn around plan
« Reply #3 on: February 02, 2021, 01:52:13 PM »

A quote from the article:

"I think there are a lot of questions around that...I'm just not sure they can recreate the kind of demand they had back in the heyday of bike sales. That's the million-dollar question."

I kinda, sorta, absolutely think the answer is NO they cannot.  The 'heyday' was a one off black swan event that would require realignment of the sun, moon and stars to reoccur imo.
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laylonlor

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Re: Turn around plan
« Reply #4 on: February 02, 2021, 03:35:15 PM »

I heard there going back to carbs :drummer:
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Twolanerider

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Re: Turn around plan
« Reply #5 on: February 02, 2021, 04:06:43 PM »

The Sears of the automotive industry.  It is (unfortunately) still all too likely the MoCo end up getting broken up in to subsidiary parts the becomes even more of a niche than we think it has become already.  It's been a huge fall in just over a dozen years.
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Re: Turn around plan
« Reply #6 on: February 02, 2021, 05:09:09 PM »

Well here's my 0.02

Harley has the capability to turn things around but only if they start listening to the one demographic they still have and that is me, you and all the other people of a certain age that have the desire and the ability to buy their products.

I actually want to buy another Harley and would do so if they would make one I really, really, really want to buy, but they are too busy trying to cheapen up their costs on every part while adjusting the retail prices up because they think it will improve their bottom line, but they are dead wrong. Their sales are down because their product is overpriced and at times grossly unreliable.

In this day and age it is reprehensible that HD couldn't design a proper and reliable oiling system for the M8 until at least the eighth attempt. That they could not fix the oil transfer on the M8 without venting the Trans to the primary. Etc, etc ,etc.

The day the last of the folks who bought the company back from AMF in 1982 left the helm and they started bringing in outsiders to run things is the day it went to hell in my opinion. People like Jeff Bluestein knew what the connection between the motor company and the customers meant, the new folks want to go find a new demographic to buy an overpriced electric bike or adventure bike, while other motorcycle companies like Polaris are laughing all the way to the bank.

Maybe someday one of these new leaders will figure this out, but I doubt it.
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Re: Turn around plan
« Reply #7 on: February 02, 2021, 05:17:29 PM »

Well here's my 0.02

Harley has the capability to turn things around but only if they start listening to the one demographic they still have and that is me, you and all the other people of a certain age that have the desire and the ability to buy their products.



Yes.... but.   But only as a company completely restructured for a much smaller market.  Old farts that still ride are not a mass market.  Development costs for complicated quality products needed a larger sales base for the production/development costs to be amortized out enough to make individual units affordable.  I truly don't know if that math can still work in their favor.  All that is at least (probably) a partial reason why a motorcycle with many fewer systems, components, applied tech and design development cost as much as a well equipped mid sized car with much more of all of those things.

I can understand the argument suggesting they need to develop the younger audience.  This is too often stated without asking if that audience actually exists or can be generated in today's environment.  If there is no such audience to help spread costs out over, however, and we are it the audience we are part of can not support the company in its current form and structure for another generation.
« Last Edit: February 02, 2021, 07:22:03 PM by Twolanerider »
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iski

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Re: Turn around plan
« Reply #8 on: February 02, 2021, 05:54:09 PM »

In some respects we are discussing a fall like Studebaker except this one only has 2 wheels.

In spite of what a lot of us think I read nothing that suggest HD is listening to the "over priced & lack of reliability, etc." that so many have noticed over the past few years.
« Last Edit: February 02, 2021, 05:55:56 PM by iski »
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PBSTN

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Re: Turn around plan
« Reply #9 on: February 02, 2021, 05:55:49 PM »

I heard there going back to carbs :drummer:
Then they would sound like a Harley.
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Re: Turn around plan
« Reply #10 on: February 02, 2021, 06:12:23 PM »

I agree Don but you and I weren't born old farts.

I remember sitting in class in 1983 lusting over an indigo blue Wide Glide. I'm maybe a little different than some because my family, Dad and older Brother, always had motorcycles and a lot of them were Harleys. I learned to ride on a 1949 Harley that is still in the Shrader Fleet, along with about 70 others. My first bike was a Harley 65 that Dad bought for me after I learned to ride.

My point is there are ways to develop new potential customers that are riders without straying too far from the thing that got you where you are or were...

The main reason I lusted after that particular Wide Glide was because it was in a Billy Joel video called Uptown Girl with the lovely Christy Brinkley. I thought the bike looked cool. My first big twin was a 1980 shovel head that I scrounged parts to build from basically a motor. Guess what I built it as, that's right it looked like a 1983 Indigo Blue FXWG right down to the paint that I got from Harley.

I guess what I'm saying is it about passion. A passion for a bike that you see, whether it's on a TV show or riding down the road, or whatever. For whatever reason Harley has failed to get me passionate enough about one to buy one for the last 7 years. Partly because of their paint colors and partly because of the reliability issues.

Maybe someday they will trip my trigger again, but what I've seen lately ain't done it.
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Re: Turn around plan
« Reply #11 on: February 02, 2021, 07:33:52 PM »

I picked up on this...

They are doing the right thing by trying to correct the supply and demand problem. There has been way too much supply in the market and not enough demand," Yarbrough said. "But I just don't know that shrinking your way to profitability works."
« Last Edit: February 02, 2021, 08:40:43 PM by Mark »
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Twolanerider

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Re: Turn around plan
« Reply #12 on: February 02, 2021, 07:34:00 PM »

I wish I could be optimistic for some crash/clash/slash of inspiration within Mother Harley that would allow them to re-strike an arc of market interest in some younger audience that would bring follow-on generations to HD.  They've got (I think) an even more difficult road to traverse than just the incredibly difficult highway that are their current self-inflicted wounds.

We weren't always old farts.  Too true.  And on days when things don't hurt (or even oft times when they do) we still do our best not to be.  NASCAR raced on Sunday to sell on Monday.  Automotive interest generally was a different thing.  Styling had a legitimate and forceful say over aerodynamicists and other design engineers.  Now everything the kids drive looks the same.  It doesn't even occur to them to consider more than function. 

I ride one of my (admittedly decent looking bikes) to a high school parking lot with some regularity.  And I'm on the tech end of the high school.  Kids that come out the same doors as me are the engineering students, the vo-ed kids from the auto tech and body programs, the welding, the construction, and the HVAC classes.  There's never another bike on the lot.  Not even cheap hacked together stuff like either of us might have cobbled together back in the day.

A few will comment on a bike.  But rarely and not much.  It's just not in their circle of interests for the great great great many of them.  I'm not smart enough to suggest how a company makes the generational jump from us as a last vestige of a major target audience to that a next generation of buyer; especially when the equipment being offered just isn't that good or cost competitive even within its own market.
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Re: Turn around plan
« Reply #13 on: February 02, 2021, 08:34:27 PM »

Thanks to the offerings lately I've devised my own turn around plan.... turn around and walk out the door with money in my pocket. :huepfenlol2: :huepfenlol2:

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Re: Turn around plan
« Reply #14 on: February 02, 2021, 08:43:38 PM »

I’m not pretending to be a business turn around expert, but I’m pretty sure a purple $44,099 Ultra isn’t the way...
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