John A. Olin
Analyst · Deutsche Bank
Thanks Rod. Again, when you look at our gross margin bridge, we had a lot of strength. Every element was positive and certainly in particular pricing in mix. Pricing was up $14 million, and again that’s a 3.5% price increase that we took earlier in the year, but as a percentage of revenue actually pricing was a little bit of a drag as we had anticipated on gross margin percent. When you look at mix, our mix being up $17.2 million, we look at mix three different levels or three different businesses motorcycle, parts and accessories and general merchandise. All three of those were favorable and that doesn’t happen, all that often. And when you take and look at the motorcycle mix, which was the biggest driver, we were favorable in family mix, model mix and geographic mix. So, very strong quarter on mix, and it also added as a percent of gross margin to the overall quarter. You would ask Rod, what happens as we go forward and we would expect still some strength, good strength in mix in the second quarter behind Rushmore, as it compares to non-Rushmore product right, that will be our fourth quarter of having that in the market. Now that will start to get diluted a little bit, as we ramp up shipments of Street. And so on the second quarter, we’ll continue to ramp up those shipments and that will start to have an adverse impact, but overall mix, we would expect in the second quarter to be favorable. As you get into the back half two things happen, as we start to lap Rushmore sales against itself and would expect the strong mix gains that we’ve had start to dissipate. And at the same time, we’ll have Street into full production and we do expect in the second half of the year that mix will be unfavorable both on a dollar and a percent basis. And remember when we launched Street, we said it would be 0.5 point dilutive of overall gross margin, you’re not seeing that in the first quarter and you will really start to see that in the back half of the year. And you would ask about production versus shipments, we are producing full of our Rushmore bikes and they are selling as they are getting to the dealerships. We are not building any inventory in terms of, we are not building much inventory on our entire line, but certainly not building inventory in the field on Rushmore. Again they’re selling very well and we are very pleased at what we are seeing.
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