Sales director Gareth Robinson of multi-franchise 5-Ways Motorcycle Centre in Hull is waiting to see how the manufacturers react to the exchange-rate problem. 5-Ways sells Kawasaki, Suzuki, Yamaha, Piaggio and Vespa.
“Piaggio has set its stall out with significant price increases on key models – some as high as 20%,” he says. “It will be interesting to see what the others do. Overall, 2016 was a good business year, with record unit sales.
“We’ve had some fantastic new models from Yamaha in 2015/16 with improved market share and turnover.
“The downside has been missed sales opportunities on MT125 and YZF R125 due to lack of stock. Ah well, that’s reality,” says Robinson, who is surprised how under-prepared some of the manufacturers seem to be with new Euro 4 bikes. “I expected the new compliant models would be readily available by the end of the year for January sell-out. As it is, we could be waiting until the second quarter for a lot of Euro 4 bikes to arrive, meaning it will be challenging to hit bonus targets in the first quarter,” he added.
5-Ways is one of 35 dealers interviewed by BDN as part of our second quarterly Trade Talk series. See the January issue for full coverage.