Gas prices boosted sales in 2008 but caused dealers to overorder. Now inventories are high. Is the party over? There’s no denying that 2008 was a great year to be selling scooters in the U.S., but sales for
2009 don’t look too promising. Many distributors of nontraditional brands are carrying high inventory levels, and the Motorcycle Industry Council reported very weak sales in the first quarter. Sales of scooters made by MIC reporting OEMs increased 41 percent to about 77,000 units, but this still was dwarfed by sales of the nontraditional brands. Some early estimates of the total scooter market were close to 222,000 units. Power Products Marketing, however, now estimates that the nontraditional segment actually grew by 155 percent, to 250,000 units. We estimate the scooter segment’s total retail sales for 2008 to be 327,000 units, an increase of more than 114 percent from the prior year.
