American Motorcycle Dealer AMD 251 June 2020 | Page 20

NEWS
BRIEFS
India's TVS Buys Norton
Motorcycles' Assets
Sources: AMD, IDN, FT, Reuters, PSB, MPN, B&B, BDN, MCN, AP, Bloomberg, MSNW, Electrek, electricmotorcycles.news
This year's FIM Bonneville Motorcycle
Speed Trials have been cancelled for
2020. Featuring the AMA Land Speed
Grand Championship, they were
slated for August 29 - September 3rd;
organizer Delicate Promotions has
announced 2021 dates of August
28th through September. This will be
a major but inevitable blow for the
many hundreds of racers and their
teams who would have been
travelling from all corners of the
world to compete on what, for once,
was being touted as likely to be
excellent course conditions this year -
an increasingly rare occurrence.
As the race world continues to
wait on the starting grid, the
latest formal news from the
AMA's Daytona Beach, Florida
AFT office is of "postponement"
of the May 30, Lexington,
Kentucky, 'Red Mile'. AFT said it
would "communicate its full
updated race schedule following
the release of updated federal
social distancing guidelines. The
OKC Mile at Remington Park,
Oklahoma City, is currently
scheduled as the season opener
on June 20.
MotoAmerica, the home of the AMA
Superbike Series, has announced that
due to the ongoing COVID-19
pandemic and the Governor of
Wisconsin's safer-at-home order
being set to expire on May 26, as this
edition of AMD Magazine headed for
press, the plan was for the racing
portion of the opening round of the
2020 MotoAmerica Series, May 29-
31, at Road America in Elkhart Lake,
Wisconsin, to continue, but without
fans. All five classes of the premier
national motorcycle road racing
championship in the U.S. – Superbike,
Supersport, Liqui Moly Junior Cup,
Stock 1000 and Twins Cup – will
compete in the series opener, May
29-31. After that, MotoAmerica is
planning to return to Road America,
June 26-28, along with all previously
scheduled activities, including Vintage
MotoFest, the MotoAmerica Heritage
Cup and the opening round of the
Mini Cup by MOTUL.
The Easyriders Rodeo slated for
June 5-7 at the Bloomsburg
Fairgrounds, Bloomsburg,
Pennsylvania, has been
cancelled. The remaining
upcoming events at Fowlerville,
Michigan, (August 21-23) and
Chillicothe, Ohio, (September 3-
7) are not yet affected and are
still planned to go ahead.
India's TVS Motor Company has
emerged as the buyer of Norton
Motorcycles - or at least of the
brand, design IP and the most
likely remaining, still viable
current models.
In an all-cash deal of around $20m
(GB£16m/€18m), the assets have
been acquired from Norton
Motorcycles (U.K.) Limited (in
administration) through one of TVS
Motor's overseas subsidiaries. "This
will be one of the most interesting
acquisitions of a storied motorcycle
maker in recent times and will reflect
TVS Motor Company's and India's
rapidly rising prominence in the
international two-wheeler market,"
said a TVR press release confirming the
deal.
Norton went bankrupt in January after
several months of becoming
increasingly "creative" in its attempts
to secure additional funding. Indeed,
even when the brand was originally
acquired from Kenny Dreer in 2008, it
was alleged that the approx. $1.5m
that then new owner Stuart Garner
used to fund the deal was the proceeds
of a tax fraud.
There had been widespread industry
scepticism about the financial and
strategic stability of the project to
revive the brand in Britain under
Garner's ownership ever since - with
reports of embezzled customer
deposits, banked dealer inventory full
pre-payments with no bike deliveries,
pension funds fraud and repeated
misuse of public monies raised from
naïve politicians and overly optimistic,
poorly informed government
sponsored seed corn funding schemes.
Throughout Garner's 12-year
ownership of the Norton brand and his
efforts to build motorcycles in a former
airline call-center office behind
Donington Hall in Derbyshire, England,
it had often felt like Norton was a place
where 'due diligence' went to die.
In January 2020, after a flurry of failed
efforts to raise cash in 2019, Garner
inked an apparent firestorm sale of
Norton Commando 961 cc engine
design rights and tooling to Chinese
scooter and engine designer and
manufacturer Jinlang Science and
Technology Co., Ltd - its scooters sell
under the Jinlang and Ariic brand
names.
Additionally, Jinlang also
manufactures some ATV engines for
Polaris and supplies parts for other
companies, including Zongshen - with
whom Garner signed a "Design and
License" deal with in 2017.
That deal involved a Ricardo 650 cc
engine design that had, apparently,
theoretically, been slated to power two
additional new middleweight models
that Garner intended to build under a
comeback for the Norton Atlas name -
last seen when the air-cooled Atlas
750 was replaced by the Commando
in 1968.
However, in 2018 Norton showed two
Sudarshan Venu, Joint Managing
Director, TVS Motor Company: "This
is a momentous time for us at TVS
Motor Company. Norton is an iconic
British brand celebrated across the
world and presents us with an
immense opportunity to scale
globally
pre-production prototype Atlas
models at Motorcycle Live in the UK -
the Atlas Nomad and Ranger - a pair
of 650 cc parallel twin Scrambleresque
naked Roadsters built around
half of the engine for the V4 Superbike
that Norton had been pimping - and
nobody has been talking much about
the Zongshen deal ever since.
Two weeks after his trip to China in
January this year, Norton filed for
bankruptcy in the UK. So far, it hasn't
been disclosed what had happened to
the undisclosed sum of money that
Jinlang paid Garner for the 961, or
who now, in theory, owns rights to the
Riccardo/Zongshen 650. It does rather
call into question quite what value TVS
has acquired and what long-term
plans for the brand will eventually look
like.
This is not the first attempt TVS has
made to "scale globally". Among
other hitherto unsuccessful endeavors
had been a non-equity deal with
Triumph some years ago to take on
manufacturing of lightweight and
middleweight machines for the Asian
market.
That came to nothing, and Triumph,
who had themselves been forced to
emphatically deny any interest in
acquiring the Norton name earlier this
year, is now in a non-equity sweetheart
deal for lightweights and
middleweights that will be for global
sale with 50% KTM owner Bajaj Auto.
For its part, TVS is talking a positive
game and doesn't appear to have any
doubts about the 'value' that the
Norton name can, eventually, bring to
its table.
Commenting on the acquisition, Mr.
Sudarshan Venu, Joint Managing
20 AMERICAN MOTORCYCLE DEALER - JUNE 2020 www.AMDchampionship.com