It was recently reported that Harley-Davidson posted an increase in revenue for the third quarter, but wait, there's a catch, and quite big one. Something is brewing behind the scenes at H-D and In fact, there's a black cloud of investors barreling down on the company as stock prices continue to fall and profit margins tighten.
So how can a company post a gain, but be losing the financial battle? Simple, the sales number are slightly skewed. Sales of bikes like the super low are through the roof, but what people want isn't being produced due the "restructuring" of the company over the past few years.
Recently, Harley has not been able to match up with the demand for the bigger custom cruisers like the Ultra-Glide, which generate more profit margin. Instead, retailers have been forced to pedal smaller, more affordable rides to consumers, which is not so good for the rest of the team.
“Maybe we haven’t done as a good a job communicating the magnitude of this,” Keith Wandell, Harley’s chief executive officer, said in an interview. “Shame on us because we had some issues in the quarter that precluded us from producing as many touring bikes as we would have like. Are we disappointed? Absolutely. Are we discouraged? No. Every day, we get further through.”
It's not expected for Harley to rebound from the hit in production until the end of 2013.Hopefully they can pick it up and move forward. It's encouraging that people are at least willing to spend money on bike again, but the challenges are still very present to everybody.
"Lots of good people have lost their jobs and now the remaining ones are being given twice the work, and it's hard to keep up", said an independent Harley-Davidson Analyst. "Restructuring hurts everybody, from the workers to the stockbrokers, but there's a rebound coming soon."
Below is a video of CEO, Keith Wandell, explaining a little bit about the history of Harley, sales, and growth.
