POLARIS MISSILE
I was going to start this article with a couple of paragraphs of facts and figures showing how well Polaris as a company and Indian as a brand have done in the last 12 months or so. However, after she’d cast a shrewd eye over the copy my pet copy-editor (or my wife as most people call her) asked when I was going to actually talk about the bike. So in a nutshell, by the third quarter of 2017, Indian had increased its market share from only three per cent in 2016 to well over 10 per cent — particularly noteworthy in the face of an overall declining market. Hand-in-hand, the value of Polaris’ shares have soared dramatically while those of its main motorcycle rival, Harley-Davidson, have gone in the opposite direction.
Of course, the reality is that the two companies are orders-of-magnitude apart in terms of profit from flogging bikes, and clearly Indian is not going to put H-D (which sold 260,000 motorcycles last year) out of business anytime soon.
However, industry experts are suggesting the market has topped-out to a degree and any increase in sales for one brand can only come at the expense of another. If Indian can maintain its current growth rate, it won’t only be the bean counters at Harley sitting up and
