MPN magazine recently conducted a short, online survey of its subscribers. The goal was to see if the majority of the powersports dealers were showing sales increases when compared with 2011. The survey was divided into OEM and non-OEM dealerships. There were about an equal number of responses for each of these categories.
I found the responses interesting, and felt it might be useful to share some of them with you.
In the first part of the survey, dealers were asked to compare their total sales for January through May of 2011 with the same period for 2012. Here are those results:
As you can see, more than 50 percent of the OEM respondents reported sales increases. While the percentage of dealers increasing sales numbers was higher for our 20-group dealers (closer to 85 percent), it was still good to see the pattern of growth continuing for our industry. 45 percent of the non-OEM dealers also reported increases in sales. The average increase in sales for the non-OEM dealers was almost 30 percent as compared with almost 20 percent for the OEM dealers. That was a little surprising to me, since customers tend to utilize the non-OEM dealers more during poor economic times. With the improvement of the economy, I expected to see a greater sales increase percentage for the OEM dealers.
17 percent of the OEM dealers and almost one-third of the non-OEM respondents stayed the same for this period. Some analysts might consider this good. From my perspective, failing to grow is the same as going backwards. If others are increasing their business, you are falling behind.
Only 31 percent of the OEM dealers and 25 percent of the non-OEM dealers reported a decrease. The reported loss averaged between 17 percent and 18 percent for both groups.
In the second portion of the survey, dealers were asked to break out their total sales revenue by department for 2011.
From a dollar standpoint, these dealers sold close to 1 dollar in used to every 2 dollars in new units. In the National Norms (averages from all of our 20-group dealers), the dealers were quite a bit lower in used unit dollars compared with new. However, they were selling 1 used to every 3 new numerically. This could indicate that the OE survey respondents might be discounting their new units heavily, which would reduce the new unit dollar volume in relation to the higher-profit used unit sales.
The P&A, apparel and F&I numbers were very close for both the OE and NN dealers. However, the service numbers look quite different. I suspect that the OE survey dealers are reporting parts sold by service in their number, but I could be wrong. From a tracking standpoint, the parts department sells all the parts, regardless of the customer (service department included). The only product that service has to sell (again for tracking and measuring purposes) is labor hours.
I hope you find this interesting. I would like to do some more subscriber surveys in the future, so we can compare them against the data we have from our 20-groups. If you receive a request for a survey from MPN, please complete it as accurately as you can. I think this type of information can be useful for all of us.
