Everything’s relative. Right now Harley-Davidson is fighting to sustain its share of today’s fast-changing global marketplace, with its 2023 overall sales declining by 5% year-on-year to 168,050 motorcycles, against the 329,776 machines that the motor company’s dealers shifted worldwide in 2014.
Back then, few people either inside the company or out could have imagined that 10 years later, Harley sales would have declined by half – one of the poorest records of the world’s top 20 manufacturers. By contrast, H-D’s leading rival for the crown of the world’s number one luxury motorcycle manufacturer, BMW, increased its deliveries from 115,215 bikes and maxi-scooters in 2013, to 208,528 units in 2023. No wonder the Harley-Davidson stock price has all but halved in value from its all-time high 10 years ago of $58.23 on April 30, 2014, to $34.69 as of May 10, 2024.
But disappointing as those stats must be to any investors holding Harley stock, let alone the company’s CEO since February 2020, Jochen Zeitz, and his management colleagues, America’s number one isn’t currently facing an existential threat. At some stage Zeitz & Co will get things stabilised long enough for the motor company to become an appealing takeover target for some company or other with deep pockets, and the resources to turn this iconic brand around. So that’s quite unlike Harley’s previous dance with death in the early 1930s, during the Great Depression which followed the Wall Street Crash on October 29, 1929, when its very survival was genuinely at risk.
For with the devastating effects of the Depression reaching cataclysmic proportions in the USA, where by mid-1932 one-third of the workforce – around 15 million people – was unemployed, 5000 banks had failed, countless small businesses were closing down every day, and mass
