Friday, September 5, 2008

New moths, a boom?

The two year Bladerider boom has had anamazing impact on the Moth class. Suddenly people arre seeing moths as a growth industry with profits to be made?
Simon Payne has anounced a new production moth in association with AMAC and McConnaghy.
This must mean AMAC has disposed of his Bladerider interests and must also have something to do with why Bladerider has left McConnachy's.
Although Bladerider has made about 200 boats its not really clear to me that they are yet profitable. Its because of all the expensive Australians in Melbourne and flitting around the world, who must be soaking up a lot of the revenue. Add to that the first year when they seemed to need to replace about half the output due to failures. And now they are moving factories and starting up new product lines which must all be costing a motza. And I wonder if they will still be buying KA sails from AMAC?
And now the Mach 2 (Payne/AMAC) moth is going to start the whole process off again, more tooling, more development and associated failures and rework, more money invested and hopefully a whole lot of new moth buyers.
Meanwhile John Ilett has moved his hull production offshore and will concentrate his small workshop on foil production and boat assembly.
And Velociraptor in UK are promising some improvements after the WC exposure to potential customers.
I just hope that the total production capacity does not exceed the market volume.
In the past 5 years two other successful moth builder have decided their business time is better spent on other classes. Both Thorpey and Full Force decided that the continuous development of the moth was not worth chasing. The both had some serious money invested in molds which now sit idle, not goood for business.
While more builders and more boats is great for the class, there must be a finite limit to the number of people who have the $20K to spend on a toy which many will not even be able to sail first go.
Businesses going broke and upsetting customers would be very bad for the class, so I hope no one gets burnt.

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