American Motorcycle Dealer AMD 177 April 2014 | Page 4

Congratulations to the Survivors

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change that has taken place.
AST experience with predictions still has me leery about such
Since I got back from the show I have been (as diligently as possible) following up
prognostications, but some six weeks after this year’s 13th
on the meetings that I had, and reaching out to those exhibitors that I didn’t get the
annual V-Twin Expo at Cincinnati, market sentiment appears
time to meet with, in order to ensure that our post-show AMD Magazine editions are
to support my stated hopes that this year, finally, we may
as chock-full as possible of company and product news.
indeed have finally and decisively turned a corner!
This is an annual exercise for me, indeed one that is a routine and major part of
Market-specific concerns about the sustainability of the absurd trading bubble that
we saw in the years to 2006 were already evident to those who cared to look at what my annual workload cycle, and that involves many shows, of many kinds in many
was going on carefully and think logically and laterally about where the custom v- countries.
It is a well known characteristic of recession survival that those businesses that
twin industry had gotten itself to.
Leveraged as it was on a bogus business volume that paid scant regard to margins invest most heavily in brand marketing and new product development when times
and real world riding, pre-shocks were already registering in the low Richter scale in are bad, are those that benefit soonest and bestest when times are good.
It is with a great deal of pleasure therefore that this year I find that workload to
the 24 to 36 months before September 2008’s Lehman-led apocalypse.
The year-round solid 12 month cycle of business activity that had evolved since the be disproportionately intense relative to exhibitor numbers as the sheer volume of
new product action exceeds anything that the market
late 1990s was already being truncated by a variety of
has seen for at least 5 or 6 years.
factors, from Detroit pricing right through to
The annual AMD Magazine
Katrina and regulatory woes.
he market remains firmly rooted in ‘staples’
industry photo at the V-Twin
In 2010 it did appear, briefly, that the recession
(service items and workshop activity) and
Expo has become a unique record
as such, as formally defined by greater than two
lower price-point ‘bolt-on’ accessories but joy-ofquarters of negative growth, may have ended.
joys, the volume of performance and tuning
of industry change
However, such hopes were premature, and
innovation taking place and being offered is
regardless of whether or not it was some kind of
noteworthy and significant.
double-dip phenomenon, the fact is that market
Noteworthy because it goes to the beating
atrophy continued apace.
heart of the kind of industry that this has always
been at its core, and significant because as
y 2012 an overriding sense of ‘it is what it is’
signals for a healthy future, it doesn’t get much
had replaced the doom and gloom, and
better than seeing the ‘old school’ hard-core
although it was difficult to gauge through the
values of v-twin performance engineering retake
bellwether that the V-Twin Expo provides, 2013
their rightful place up front and center stage.
did see the majority of vendors arriving at this
Throughout the past years I have always
year’s show saying that they had had a “decent”
maintained that whilst consumer confidence has
prior 12 months.
left us high and dry, marooned above the economic
It was therefore with some sense of optimism
that the surviving “Class of 2014” gathered in Cincinnati in February, and so far it tide-line, the fact remained that people were still doing and wanting to do the miles,
and that despite the temptation to misinterpret demographic change and regulatory
would appear that the optimism has not been misplaced.
Very few businesses are going to be uprooting trees, and inevitably there are still impacts as ones that might call time on riding enthusiasm, there was, for me, no
going to be some who have not yet managed to overcome the challenges posed by evidence that this was going to be the case.
the recent past – let’s face it, all generalizations are just exactly that, an average view
he re-emergence of performance and tuning (even if the oil under the fingernails
of a middle ground based on the widest possible range of contradictory experiences.
is being replaced by Android and IOS technology) proves that our ‘drug of choice’
As generalizations go, though, the vendor feedback that we here at AMD Magazine (adrenaline) has not gone away