John Olin
Analyst · Wells Fargo Securities
Okay, Tim. Well, I'm going to start with the second question first, is the impact of the York transformation on the third quarter, and then we'll talk a little bit about the guidance that we presented. When we look at gross margin, the story in the third quarter really comes in 2 areas. One is in the impact of the York transformation and the other is in the currency. Certainly, the transformation and the aspects included in that were expected. They came in 2 flavors. One was mix was impacted, so we saw unfavorable mix in the quarter of $26.6 million due to the disruption in the temporary capacity constraints due to York restructuring. And when we look at that, several things happened in mix. One is that, given the temporary capacity constraints, we relied more on product coming out of our Kansas City facility, which typically have lower margins. So we shipped less as a percent in Touring and custom motorcycles than we did our Sportsters. And the temporary capacity constraints also affected our model mix. And within the quarter, we shipped lower content in lower priced bikes and, again, that was due to all the activities that we were going on in this facility. And finally, our geographic shipment mix was affected by the magnitude of change at York. And just one second on that, again, Keith had mentioned we took 4 families of motorcycles, some 22 models and put them all under the same line so all our employees are building all of our bikes. And within that change, we had 95% of our hourly employees are in or will be in new jobs in a short period of time. So again, we experienced a lot of downtime. So a lot of it manifested itself in mix. And in the second piece where it manifested itself was on the manufacturing line. And we saw the manufacturing temporary inefficiencies on a year-over-year basis were unfavorable by $3 million. I would like to point out, though, on the manufacturing line, we did deliver $20 million of favorability. And if you look back in the first quarter, that was actually a negative $21 million improved to a favorable $7 million in the second quarter. And then, again, this quarter at $20 million. So the second part of your question, Tim, was on the gross margin guidance. So as we look at gross margin, as we sit through 3 quarters, we are at 34.0% and the gross margin guidance that we had was 34% to 35%. So with roughly 80% of the revenue behind us and the uncertainty related to the currency situation, we felt it was prudent to lower the range by half a percentage point. It's important to note here that there is nothing concerning to us about our core business or the restructuring. We're very pleased with the retail sales, our shipments and certainly the restructuring.