HARLEY-DAVIDSON is continuing to forecast increased unit shipments for 2015 as a whole despite the fact that Q2 and year-to-date unit sales, unit shipments, net income, consolidated income, operating income/margin and EPS are all down.
Its latest financial filings state that the company "continues to expect to ship 276,000 to 281,000 motorcycles to dealers and distributors worldwide in 2015, an approximate 2 to 4 percent increase from 2014" and that " revenue, earnings and motorcycle shipments" for the second quarter were "in line with [April revised] company expectations".
This optimism is despite a second quarter decline of -1.4 percent in worldwide sales (88,931 units sold against 90,218 in the second quarter of 2014) and a 0.75 percent drop in the United States (57,790 units against 58,225 in Q2 of 2014).
In international markets, dealers sold 31,141 new Harley-Davidson motorcycles during the second quarter compared to 31,993 motorcycles in the year-ago period, with sales up 16.6 percent in the Asia Pacific region and down -8.9 percent in Harley's most important Middle East & Africa (EMEA) export market, -2.6 percent in the Latin America region and -9.9 percent in Canada.
For the first six months of the year Harley report worldwide sales down by -1.4 percent at 145,592 units from 147,633 for the first six months of 2014; with domestic US sales -0.7 percent and -7.7 percent in their EMEA region.
On a discretionary basis, the company repurchased 2.8 million shares of Harley-Davidson, Inc. common stock during the second quarter of 2015 at a cost of $164.8 million.
As reported by AMD Magazine recently, the company is to repurchase up to an additional 15 million shares of its common stock and, significantly, to do so with no dollar limit and by incurring long-term debt in the third quarter of 2015 in the amount of $750 million to fund the share repurchase. This is in addition to the 20 million share repurchase announced in early 2014; there are approximately 200m shares outstanding at this time.
AMD, a noted authority on the Harley-Davidson and custom bike market, believes that a stalled share price performance and recent soft fiscals make Harley vulnerable to hostile take-over activity.
