Yes this has been a trend for quiet sometime. Not to ditch Harley’s because I know a lot of people like them in most cases love them. But their bikes are so outdated to compared to Japanese bikes, and they seemed to have gotten away with that for the longest time because people buying them for the name and looks.
Yes the have a plan to not continue getting their profits eaten up by the tariffs. You lay out a good plan and it builds investors confidence so more people buy.
So you feel strongly that a company should just bend over and take significant financial damages to support your political agenda instead of working to limit damages/maximize profits (which is what any company should be doing and doesn’t have a single damned thing to do with their politics)?
One might also add, there is precisely 0 indication in the article that their sales slump (which has been happening for better than a year) has anything at all to do with politics. If you had actually read the article, the slump is being attributed to older riders aging out of the market, and younger riders not purchasing this type of bike. Again, not politics - unless you think (which on this board is not entirely impossible) that natural aging is a political statement?
It is entirely possible that politics will affect HD’s business down the road of course, but at this point that isn’t a relevant factor (and it still has nothing to do with HD being political - they made a simple business decision).
Thank you for such a thoughtful post. I may have spoken too vaguely in that I disagreed with Trump’s criticism of Harley’s business decision to manufacture motorcycles outside of the country and said so here on this board. My post was more in general. It’s a rule in business that you don’t bring politics or religion into it because you divide your market. In this case, Harley made the decision based on market/global/tariff conditions and decided to manufacture outside the country. Then Trump entered into it and made it political…hence my original post.