Harley Davidson is winning in Europe — without a trade war
WILLI Breuckmann could have gone for the BMW motorcycle-it was a comfortable and affordable machine. And it made sense for him to stick with a ride made in his own country, Germany.
Instead, he chose a HarleyDavidson. The Road King.
“It comes down to a feeling,” said Breuckmann, a 54-yearold web developer who lives in Dortmund, in the nation’s northwest.
The Road King is a big bike, starting around 24,000 euros ( RM115,200), long and low with the iconic V-Twin engine and dual exhausts growling the sound that made Harley famous. It’s a smooth ride for long trips and perfect for autobahn cruising. Over the years, Breuckmann added custom paint and a backseat for his wife.
“The BMW is also very comfortable,” he said. “But it was a dream of mine to get a Harley.”
While President Donald Trump rails at Europeans for restricting trade and a reluctance to buy Detroit’s vehicles, the Milwaukee-based manufacturer of iconic motorcycles proves every day that consumers across the Atlantic are willing to buy American. One of Harley’s biggest German dealers says it sells 500 bikes a year. The company almost doubled its market share in Germany in the past decade, to 6.4 percent in 2017 from 3.3 per cent in 2006, by attracting customers like Breuckmann in Europe’s biggest economy who crave the openroad American lifestyle from atop a powerful machine.
American car companies haven’t been as fortunate. With less than 1 percent market share each, high-performance American brands like Cadillac and Chrysler haven’t been able to chip away at the dominance of BMW or Mercedes.
With sales in the US falling, the European market has become so important to Harley that the company is willing to invoke Trump’s wrath, announcing a few months ago it would shift manufacturing abroad to skirt retaliatory tariffs enacted in the president’s trade war over steel and aluminium shipments. The European Union is imposing a 25 per cent tariff on US motorcycle imports in response to Trump.
Harley’s success in Europe is evidence that American companies can compete and even flourish there, without a trade war-if the products are good enough. The company built a strong network of dealerships and made some adjustments to the products to suit European tastes: slimmer bikes, special customisation options and even wifi on board.
Harley’s approach- catering to local tastes with a distinctly American product- couldn’t be more different than Cadillac and Chrysler, which haven’t developed cars with Europeans in mind, said Felix Khunert, an auto analyst with PwC in Germany. Europeans prefer high performance that German engineering is famous for, he said. Plus, Germans still largely use diesel-less expensive than gasoline- and the Americanmade cars generally lack diesel engines. General Motors went so far as to sell its European operations last year, while Ford has struggled to grow there, and Chrysler has exploited Italian partner Fiat in its effort to penetrate the market.
Cadillac’s 12 dealerships in Germany have been doing better lately: They sold 510 cars in 2017, up from 330 in 2016. This year, they’re on pace to match last year’s numbers. And the company might be able to bypass the question of diesel entirely. GM will introduce at least 20 allelectric vehicles, many of them Cadillacs, by 2023, said Rene Kreis, spokesman for Cadillac Europe.