Piaggio sta uccidendo aprilia

[iraz]

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/analysis-piaggio-killing-aprilia-micheal-uhlarik

Inviato dal mio LG-D855 utilizzando Tapatalk

[iraz]

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/analy...icheal-uhlarik



Inviato dal mio LG-D855 utilizzando Tapatalk

Piaggio is killing Aprilia. If it were doing this as a business decision, for cost cutting or consolidation purposes then this could be understood. But Piaggio is destroying a major asset and shareholder value with short term greed and long term blindness, using the same mis-guided planning and lack of brand understanding that destroyed Gilera, Puch and other valuable motorcycle assets in Piaggio's portfolio in the past.

I am grateful to Piaggio. Grateful because they gave me my first opportunity in the motorcycle industry, and also because they have given the world so many delightful two-wheeled moments. After WW2 the legendary Vespa provided dignified, democratic transportation to millions; Piaggio saved historic motorcycle brands like Gilera, Moto-Guzzi, Derbi and Puch from bankruptcy; and the company has exported technical knowledge and the better aspects of Italian culture to far corners of the world.

I am a?Piaggista.?I lived in Pontedera, the historic home of Piaggio and ate my meals at the?mensa?alongside the factory workers and executives. But I am also a pragmatic industry professional that can see wasted opportunity and a destructive business policy.





A Death in Venice

Aprilia is sick. It has been sick since 2001, but while the cancer discovered back then was affecting a strong and vibrant OEM, today's disease is infecting a withered, tiny Aprilia that is already on life-support. It is hard to believe today, but back in 2001 Aprilia was Europe's largest motorcycle manufacturer pumping out 330,000 vehicles a year. Today it is a shell of it's former self, selling about 10% of that figure.

Unknown to the general motorcycle public, Aprilia was the only European brand that regularly defeated the best Japanese efforts in successive Grand Prix world championships. They pioneered new methods of manufacturing and were a design and branding leader at a time when Ducati, Triumph and BMW Motorrad were struggling to remain relevant.




Aprilia understood the value of modern marketing of contract manufacturing. Subcontracting most of the manufacturing process to suppliers meant reduced R&D costs, allowing the company to release many radical designs into the marketplace quickly. Some, like the Guliver scooter or the Moto 6.5(pictured above)?styled by famous French industrial designer Philippe Stark sold poorly. But products like these won design awards made Aprilia a household name in Europe, while emboldening the in-house staff to keep innovating.

Aprilia was the first modern European motorcycle brand, embracing technology, the future and contemporary culture instead of some romanticized vision of the past.

Eventually Aprilia's global design attitude would make it's mainstream product lineup the best-selling in Europe. By 1998 the Aprilia Scarabeo scooter line outsold Vespa, re-imagining Italian urban mobility; the Leonardo added sophistication and performance to maxi-scooters that a the time when most were bloated plastic squares; and the RSV Mille superbike outpaced Ducati's flagship 998.




( above : 1998, When Aprilia was legend... 3 Aprilia racers finished in the top 3 places beating Honda, Yamaha and Suzuki factory efforts )

The bulk of the company's discretionary spending was in racing, where they developed new technological ideas but more vitally cultivated a fresh, aggressive brand image that was unrivalled by any other manufacturer in the motorcycle space. Winning races with colourful characters like Valentino Rossi, Max Biaggio, and Noriyuki Haga cementing Aprilia's technological superiority over rival brands, while also attracting newcomers and veteran motorcycle consumers alike.

By 1998, Aprilia raced in all three classes of Grand Prix and the World Superbike Championship as fully supported factory efforts, a level of participation matched only by Honda, a motorcycle company with?60 times?the sales volume.

Meanwhile the consumer product catalogue was filled with a range of motorcycles and scooters that handily won mainstream magazine showdowns against all comers, and out-classed anything made in Europe in terms of performance and quality, a record that inspired BMW to commission Aprilia to design and engineer several models for them.




( above : Aprilia poured vast sums into it's Grand Prix effort and dominated the 125cc & 250cc categories. Four successive world championships with Italian Max Biaggi made Aprilia's RS 250/125 street missiles desirable, and sold hundreds of thousands of scooters wearing the red Aprilia logo )

During this golden era the target was none other than Honda. Buoyed by a decade of double-digit growth Aprilia's charismatic leader believed that the company was poised to follow the Japanese to the top echelon of the motorcycle industry. He leveraged big to introduce, at the same time, multiple new platforms across multiple brands to expand Aprilia into a global motorcycle OEM powerhouse.

This target was not impossible, but depended on continued success in the scooter mass market. When a minor cyclical recession in Europe in 2001 dried up credit and new scooter sales shrank, Aprilia began burning cash at a prodigious rate. By 2002 rolling production cuts were routine, and the company's debt load was crushing. By 2003 labour unions, government and banks began demanding a restructuring plan.?


Piaggio, Godfather of Italian Motorcycling, Saves Aprilia




Piaggio had spent a decade playing catch up in the scooter wars with it's Venetian rival, and with new owners IMMSI and a bold new CEO of it's own in Roberto Colannino, it made the aggressive move to acquire the beleaguered Aprilia Group to create a European motorcycle colossus. Colannino told media at the time :

?I had a crazy idea. With Aprilia we could produce 600,000 vehicles a year. We would have volume. We could compete against the Japanese.??

It was a good plan. Consolidation meant increasing margins, lowing costs, streamlining models and instantly gaining prestigious motorcycle brands to compete directly with Honda, Yamaha, Suzuki and Kawasaki.

The plan fell apart due mostly to external circumstances, including the 2008 economic meltdown and the further collapse of European scooter sales due to Europe's sovereign-debt crisis. But major blame also falls on Piaggio, who wasted time with conflicting brand offerings among its many (at one time seven) motorcycle nameplates, slow introduction of new models and bad product design.

The most egregious mistake of Piaggio has been recurring brand mismanagement. The company pollutes it's prestige by?sloppy badge-engineering exercises?where vehicles from one brand are painted different colours and labelled as another brand in the portfolio, regardless of if they fit.




( above : the Aprilia SR is nothing more than a Piaggio Typhoon, built in India, with a red Aprilia sticker. This is how brands equity is destroyed, and precisely how Piaggio destroyed Gilera )

Another sin is redressing old products with new stickers long after they cease to be competitive, in order to cut R&D costs and show increased profit margins to stockholders.

Short term, this increases the number of offerings in a brand or show modest financial gain, but long term destroys the only thing that Piaggio has to offer the world. Brand. Prestige. Luxury goods that people desire.

The Piaggio Group has used this method before, on Gilera. A brand that once rivalled MV Agusta for technological sophistication and prestige, Gilera was slowly blended into a forgettable mess using Piaggio products resulting in the complete destruction of Gilera brand.

Piaggio acquired Gilera in 1969 but left it to operate as a stand-alone business unit in it's own factory until 1993. During those years Gilera invented the modern supermotard, won the Paris-Dakar rally and leveraged those achievements into adventure bike sales, a decade before BMW and KTM did the same. Gilera also developed radical designs like the CX and Saturno Piuma, radical and wonderful sales flops that none-the-less maintained the brand pedigree and sold thousands of mainstream Nordwest?(pictured below)and SP-02 motorcycles.




(Above : the 1991 Gilera Nordwest introduced high-spec, sport bike suspension, wheels and aerodynamic fairings to large enduros ten years before the KTM Duke)

In 1993 Piaggio merged Gilera into the scooter operations, stopped making motorcycles and spent the next decade devolving Gilera into a sticker on some low cost Piaggio scooters. 80 years of hard won grand prix victories, product innovation, engineering and brand equity, all wasted because product planning decisions were made by fiscal managers without any understanding of the power of product design or of the tastes of the consumers who buy them.

Aprilia today is a similar pathetic shell of it's former self, selling motorcycles designed ten years ago that are completely uncompetitive against market rivals (the RSV4 is, perhaps, a rare exception), and flogging it's legendary name on miserable, low cost commodity motorcycles made in China.

This is a disgrace. More to the point, it is like burning money because the brand equity so expensively won over decades is lost with every badge-engineered "Aprilia" sold.


Piaggio Fasts Forward....

The Piaggio Group has enjoyed some sympathy lately from the stock market, and the angry demonstrations by workers at their factories in Italy have subsided. Moto-Guzzi, the one-time weak man of the Aprilia Group, is selling well and growing, all of which is good news. But Aprilia itself is essentially a dead brand walking, with virtually no marketing in America or western Europe, declining sales and a catalogue of original motorcycles that are in seven to ten years old.




Aprilia today exists as a shell name to sell low cost scooters and commuter motorcycles in India and Asia. The quality of these products is mediocre, the designs anonymous. The scooters are rebranded Piaggio products and the few high quality motorcycles left are based on the obsolete Shiver platform. Piaggio hasn't even bothered to restyle them, only adding small component upgrades and new stickers.

The racing program, once a mighty talent pool rivalling HRC in the motorcycle competition world, is an irrelevant also-ran operation. In MotoGP it is regularly beaten by newcomers to the sport, while the World Superbike program limps along with old machinery and inheriting points only when rivals break down or crash. The best people,?like former Aprilia

Inviato dal mio LG-D855 utilizzando Tapatalk

[*Profeta*]

Piaggio non pu? permettersi die fare due linee diverse di Scooter (Piaggio e Aprilia) rimarchia e ottimizza i costi.

[mito22]

Ragazzi.... ma piaggio deve fare gli interessi del gruppo.

a LIVELLO MONDO poi...

Ok la passione... ma purtroppo ci sono i BILANCI.....

[MiKiFF]

Piaggio star? distruggendo Aprilia ma i bilanci vanno bene e Aprilia ? considerabile come la parte "pubblicitaria" del gruppo che aiuta a vendere tutto il resto con una immagine tecnologica e di prestazioni superiore.

Secondo me potrebbero osare uno scooter sportivo anti T-Max con estetica tipo RSV4 marchiato Aprilia (non come il Gilera GP800 eh...) ma per il resto Piaggio ormai ? un nome che si fa rispettare forse anche di pi? del marchio di Noale a livello qualit? e affidabilit?.

Che poi ? ci? che vuole lo scooterista (il 90% del gruppo Piaggio) ovverosia poche menate.

[G4BRO]

Secondo me potrebbero osare uno scooter sportivo anti T-Max con estetica tipo RSV4 marchiato Aprilia

ci sta gi? da diversi anni, non s? stati boni a vende manco quello

[MiKiFF]

Perfetto, manco sapevo esistesse...

[adriF4]

una disgrazia, ma dice ci? che ? agli occhi di tutti!

Mi manca da morire quando al timone di comando di Aprilia c'era il mio buon vicino di casa, IVANO!!

[interceptor79]

Aprilia ha raggiunto uno Zenith tecnologico con l'Rsv4 e tuoni v4 che mai sarebbe stato possibile senza la Piaggio.

Dovrebbero Ancora farsi fare i motori da Rotax.

E stanno rilanciando alla grande la Guzzi

Inviato dal mio SM-J510FN utilizzando Tapatalk

[adriF4]

Piaggio non pu? permettersi die fare due linee diverse di Scooter (Piaggio e Aprilia) rimarchia e ottimizza i costi.

Ragazzi.... ma piaggio deve fare gli interessi del gruppo.

a LIVELLO MONDO poi...

Ok la passione... ma purtroppo ci sono i BILANCI.....

Piaggio star? distruggendo Aprilia ma i bilanci vanno bene e Aprilia ? considerabile come la parte "pubblicitaria" del gruppo che aiuta a vendere tutto il resto con una immagine tecnologica e di prestazioni superiore.

Secondo me potrebbero osare uno scooter sportivo anti T-Max con estetica tipo RSV4 marchiato Aprilia (non come il Gilera GP800 eh...) ma per il resto Piaggio ormai ? un nome che si fa rispettare forse anche di pi? del marchio di Noale a livello qualit? e affidabilit?.

Che poi ? ci? che vuole lo scooterista (il 90% del gruppo Piaggio) ovverosia poche menate.

s?, certo, vero tutto, a partire dai bilanci di gruppo...
peccato per il bilancio di sola Aprilia per?.....

Ma che il brand Aprilia sia sprofondando, non mi sembra che ci siano dubbi!

stessa cosa di Gilera, marchio andato....

[yoshi55]

s?, certo, vero tutto, a partire dai bilanci di gruppo...
peccato per il bilancio di sola Aprilia per?.....

Ma che il brand Aprilia sia sprofondando, non mi sembra che ci siano dubbi!

stessa cosa di Gilera, marchio andato....

Ma che lo vendessero allora, magari a qualche colosso che sappia gestire, rilanciare e sviluppare un brand come quello di aprilia, sulla falsa riga di quello che ha fatto ducati
Imho

[nbantonio]

Ma che lo vendessero allora, magari a qualche colosso che sappia gestire, rilanciare e sviluppare un brand come quello di aprilia, sulla falsa riga di quello che ha fatto ducati
Imho

Il problema vero ? che un finanziere ? diverso da un imprenditore del settore moto.

Non si pu? pensare di costruire solo moto che abbiano almeno 1.000 euro di margine......

E' necessario capire che deve esistere una rete di assistenza che sia all'altezza del prodotto e
che qualunque modello, anche se valido, ha bisogno di tempo ed evoluzioni per imporsi sul mercato.

Non basta chiamarsi Mercanti per capire di mercato

[Gianluca Salina]

Penso con sufficiente convinzione che i tempi di Beggio all'Aprilia siano definitivamente andati. Il mercato globale di oggi presenta regole molto diverse e per molti versi pi? rigorose di quel periodo dove la passione riusciva ancora a mettere una pezza ad altre problematiche.
Oggi la realt? ? che anche i colossi mondiali producono, vendono, e quindi guadagnano, con scooter e piccole cilindrate. La situazione di Piaggio ? parecchio complessa, con un piano industriale, quello del dr. Colaninno che, pur non avendo ancora avuto successo nella pratica come sulla carta, ? ancora in corso. Questo ha portato a lasciare nella naftalina Laverda (su cui si potrebbero scrivere libri circa le possibilit? di rilancio), a trascurare forse Gilera ed ad una altrettanto in forse stagnazione del marchio Aprilia, tenuto in vita dagli scooter molto pi? che dalla presenza a listino delle varie RSV4, Capo Nord, Mana ecc. Poi si potr? obiettare sull'apparente immobilit? per anni di progetti come Dorsoduro e Shiver e della mancanza di una lineup completa che forse non c'? nemmeno tenendo conto della produzione di tutto il gruppo, ma non si pu? non considerare altri aspetti.
Aprilia arriva da una nomea pessima della sua rete di assistenza, problema che faticosamente si sta cercando di risolvere. Inoltre, a livello di immagine, ? l'unica casa che ha vinto due mondiali in Superbike negli ultimi 6 anni.
Il rinnovamento portato in Guzzi ed in parte dell'offerta della stessa casa di Noale fanno ben sperare e chiss? che qualche sorpresa non ci sia gi? ad EICMA 2017.

[luciocabrio]

Aprilia ha raggiunto uno Zenith tecnologico con l'Rsv4 e tuoni v4 che mai sarebbe stato possibile senza la Piaggio.

Dovrebbero Ancora farsi fare i motori da Rotax.

E stanno rilanciando alla grande la Guzzi

Inviato dal mio SM-J510FN utilizzando Tapatalk

per la guzzi si parla di grosse novit? ai prossimi saloni.

C'? da dire che la crisi delle sportive ha menato forte...

Per? pure loro sono rimasti immobili...
Fare una cxxo di scrambler no? sono moto abbastanza economiche da produrre. Seguire le mode...questo tocca fare.
Per fare soldi e per poter cos? realizzare i modleli pi? costosi\prestazionali

[turbomax]

ci sta gi? da diversi anni, non s? stati boni a vende manco quello

e hai raGGione!! a livello commerciale non si sono proprio mossi!