International Motorcycle Show Long Beach 2015!

Another thing the interwebs have diluted a tad is SoCal’s local International Motorcycle Show, the one that kicks off new-motorcycle fever in Long Beach, California, every November. Now that we get to see nearly all the new bikes the week before from Milano, it’s slightly anticlimactic. Only slightly, though. It’s still a great place to see everybody in the U.S. bike industry all in one place and gauge their confidence/fear ratio, along with most, if not all, of the new machinery, and to ask each other collectively, ‘How we doin’?’

Scooter sales seem to be in the toilet (cheap gas?), but scooters remain a small segment of the U.S. market anyway. The big chunk of bike sales are On-Highway, and they’re up a healthy 6.4% for 2015. An overall motorcycle gain of 4.7% may not seem like much, but a senior Yamaha official told us it looks pretty good to him, on the heels of last year’s really big gains. They’re not selling many more motorcycles, but they’re selling more expensive ones – high-profit units like the new R1 and FJ-09.

In fact, the real success story is in the DUAL category, which includes everything from small Yamaha TW200 playbikes to the biggest Triumph Explorer, and all the BMW S1000XRs and Ducati Multistradas in between. Not only are those bikes up 6.9% year to date, for the last four years their sales have grown 12%, 7.1%, 16.7% and 2.9%.

Elsewhere, the MIC’s numbers aren’t great for the overall market in terms of units sold. Motorcycle/Scooter sales posted a 3.7% increase in sales from 2013 to ’14, with 560,000 bikes sold. Contrast that with the number sold before the Great Recession: MIC says 1,190,000 units were sold in 2006, the peak year; so 2014 marked unit sales clawing back to just about half of what they were before the economy tanked. And 2015 marks the first time there’ve been two consecutive positive years since then.

If you’re a regular reader of MO News, you already know lots of companies have been reporting robust if not record sales, including Yamaha, BMW , Ducati and many others. So, let’s have a look around, shall we?