Harley-Davidson continues to hemorrhage motorcycle unit sales in 2020, with the Bar & Shield brand reporting an 8% loss worldwide on its third-quarter numbers.
This Q3 result means that Harley-Davidson is down 18% for the first nine months of the year, compared to the same point in time as last year.
The news isn’t all bad however, as Harley-Davidson is also reporting that the net income for the third-quarter was up 39% for a total of $120 million – the company’s highest Q3 income since 2015.
2020 continues to be a tough year for motorcycle sales, though it comes with the silver lining that brands have seen a strong summer and early fall in terms of customers buying bikes.
Today, we see early sales numbers from BMW Motorrad typifying that trend, as the German brand is reporting big gains for Q3 2020, to the tune of 20.9% (52,892 units sold to customers).
That good news is tempered by the bigger picture though, as BMW Motorrad is still off the mark for the year so far, having sold only 129,599 motorcycles in the first nine months of 2020 – a 5.4% drop compared to this time last year.
Motorcycle sales in the United States have had a tumultuous year so far, starting Q1 off with a 9% sales decline from 2019. That figure didn’t tell the whole story though, as not all segments were reacting similarly to the coronavirus lockdown.
While street bike sales were down 23%, off-road bikes were up an astounding 30% (dual-sport sales split the difference, and were down 5% for the first quarter).
That dichotomy has continued onward as 2020 marched on, with the MIC now reporting that dirt bike sales continued to impress this year with a 50.3% gain, when tallying the first six months of the year.
As more quarterly reports come in, we continue to see the trend that the global motorcycle industry is down by double digits for the year, and today’s numbers from Ducati Motor Holding continue to show that trend.
Reporting a 24.2% drop in sales worldwide for the first half of 2020, we also learn that Ducati sales were down 24.6% for Q2 2020.
While those numbers are nearly identical, diving into the model segments and quarterly results provides some intriguing data.
The second quarter sales results for Harley-Davidson are in, and once again the American brand is seen floundering with its sales, not only in the United States, but also abroad.
For Q2 2020, Harley- Davidson sees its American sales dropping by 27% compared to Q2 2019 – the same can be said of Harley-Davidson’s worldwide sales for the same time period, which fell by the same percentage.
Added to the already lackluster results from the first quarter of the year, Harley-Davidson sales have sunk 22% for the first-half of the year, with worldwide sales diving 23% so far this year, compared to last.
While the MIC and the motorcycle industry at large tries to spin a narrative where motorcycle sales are thriving throughout the coronavirus pandemic, the cold and hard numbers don’t lie, and they paint a different story. Today is a continuation of that trend.
Case in point, we have the mid-year sales report from Pierer Mobility, the company behind the KTM, Husqvarna, and GasGas brands, and for the first six months of 2020, the Austrian group is touting only a modest (for the times) sales decline of 8% compared to last year.
That would be a decent and expected figure, considering the turbulent year with the coronavirus, if it wasn’t a complete fabrication and a contradiction to the company’s own reported sales numbers.
There is a concerted effort in the motorcycles industry to spin the sales nightmare that is 2020.
A great example of this is today’s press release from BMW Motorrad, which disclosed that the German brand is down 17.7% in unit sales for the first six months of 2020.
Everyone knew that the coronavirus outbreak was going to be hard on sales for the motorcycle industry, but no one was certain on how big of an impact the global lockdown would be…until now.
The first shoe to drop, Harley-Davidson has released its first quarter report for 2020, and the numbers are not good.
The report shows that Harley-Davidson motorcycle unit sales in the USA are down 15.5% (22,732 units sold) compared to this time last year, with international sales taking an even bigger hit, to the tune of a 20.7% drop (16,707 units sold).
This means a total unit sales decline of 17.7% for Harley-Davidson worldwide, with 40,439 units sold around the world in the first three months of 2020, down from the 49,151 units sold last year during the same time period.
Pierer Mobility is once again spilling the beans on its holdings, releasing the 2019 sales results from the KTM and Husqvarna motorcycle brands.
To that end, the combined effort sees another sales record for the group, with 280,099 motorcycles sold last year. This marks a 7% gain over 2018.
This makes 2019 the ninth year in a row that the KTM Group of motorcycle brands has seen positive sales growth, which is not a claim that too many brands can lay their hands on.