The Pierer Mobility Group is going through a challenging financial phase and has been adapting and restructuring, which includes its involvement in racing. Although it won't reduce its presence, it will reposition the KTM, GasGas, and Husqvarna brands to align them with their respective values and target audiences.
Hubert Trunkenpolz, a member of the group's board of directors, explained to SPEEDWEEK.com: ‘«KTM – Ready To Race» as the brand's core. It will go back to its roots. Short and direct; that is what KTM will represent. This is why motorsport activities will increasingly shift to the KTM brand. That’s why we are leaving MotoGP with GasGas and will compete with four KTMs’.
Regarding GasGas and Husqvarna, the Austrian said: ‘GasGas is intended to appeal to younger people and is also supposed to be a more accessible brand than KTM and Husqvarna. For young people, they will see the GasGas brand in sports – like Moto3. Husqvarna will be prominently represented in all off-road sports’.
Without mincing words, Trunkenpolz acknowledged that the group had overextended the exposure of its three brands, although he emphasized that the objectives had been achieved: ‘We overdid the platform strategy exploitation. Back then, we said that we had certain engine and chassis platforms, and we believed that since the automotive industry did so well, we could do it too. Fundamentally, that wasn't wrong, but we overdid it. The brands automatically came closer to each other in terms of products due to many identical parts. There is a simple reason why we did MotoGP with GasGas: GasGas was unknown as a brand in the motorcycle industry. If you want to make a brand known, if it is just about brand awareness, then I have to look at which motorsports provide the highest brand awareness. In off-road, it's supercross and MXGP; on road, it's MotoGP, by far. It was a purely commercial consideration. […]. This worked perfectly because now everyone knows them. From America to Europe, everyone sees what GasGas is: a motorcycle brand. This means we accomplished our mission’.
A bigger mistake, according to the Pierer Mobility Group director, was with Husqvarna: ‘We had many requests from teams, and we wanted to say we could provide material. We succumbed to the temptation to take a step with Husqvarna that, in hindsight, proved to be less than ideal – specifically, entering road racing. We are now correcting these things. In life, you can become smarter’.
