John Olin
Analyst · Joe Altobello with Raymond James. Please go ahead
Thanks Joe, We’re very excited – first of all, we’re very excited about the Freedom Promise. At this point, we are not looking to extend it. But it has met our expectations and is a great bridge for a new person coming in to Harley-Davidson and buying the first motorcycle and their ability to trade in on their next motorcycle at the same price that they bought in at. But again, I’m very pleased with that. Secondly, inventories are up on our balance They’re up $93 million or 25%, which is a lot. There are three areas of increase. We’ve talked about one of them, is finished goods-made motorcycles. That has increased, and that’s just an issue of timing. We talked about one of the reasons for that timing, and that is certainly, putting more bikes into Europe. The second piece of it is raw materials. And matter of fact, raw materials is about half of it. And with the activity that we have going on in our plants, largely, we are reloading our Kansas City plant manufacturing into our York plant. We are holding a lot of duplicate inventories as we start the – start up production in the third quarter here in York for our Softail motorcycles. And then secondly, as we have talked about, we have a plant in Thailand coming on. We’re starting to bring raw materials into that plant as that production will start up later in the quarter, and ultimately, start shipping in early fourth quarter. The third piece of it is our related products. Related products is up for two reasons. Number one is increased availability, largely through general merchandise also please to see in the quarter that general merchandise was up almost 9%, but we did increase overall availability of general merchandise with our dealers. Second piece of it is parts and accessories, which is up as well. And as you know, last year, we came up with a new Softail, which had three other models to go away: V-Rod, Dyna and our old Softail. And with that, we need to do what’s called life-of-parts buys because those parts we need to continue to service well into the future. So that is also pushing up inventory. So those three, in aggregate, total up to the $93 million. We would start to – expect to see that to come down somewhat by year-end.