[RideApart] - Yet Another Rumor About Ducati’s Future Ownership

[Ninjette Newsbot]

Yet Another Rumor About Ducati’s Future Ownership

With the future parent company of Ducati still up in the air, the rumormill has been working overtime generating unverified claims from equally unverified sources naming Polaris Industries, Bain Capital, and even Benetton as potential suitors.

Ducati isn’t going anywhere, there’s no real question about that. The Italian bike maker's upcoming ownership and direction*is, however, still crazy iffy. With each week bringing forth new speculations and unsubstantiated theories and claims, it's hard to even have a tenuous grasp on the reality here. This week is no different, but as unexpected as this week’s characters involved in the speculation are they’re all*companies that have the financial means to theoretically float the monumental purchase that is buying Ducati. If you thought the Bologna-based brand’s bikes were expensive now, then prepare to be amazed as this two-wheel producer has been valued at well over a billion dollars.*There are a handful of extraordinarily motivated people involved in making this deal happen - regardless of which company involved in this those people work for or which side of the deal they’re on - as even a minute percentage of this sale in the form of a commission, fee, or what have you, is going to make said people very very rich.

Ducati's current owner Volkswagen*has supposedly gotten multiple bids from the Benetton family’s investment firm Edizione Holding, proverbially sliding a piece of paper face down with 1.2 billion written on it across a desk to Ducati. The Benettons are a well known Italian family who have been major movers and shakers in a myriad of quintessentially Italian industries like fashion, dining, and the Italian auto business.

This would be a huge, and possibly risky move even for the incredibly affluent Benetton clan. Other parties who initially showed interest in buying the Italian bike maker, such as China’s Loncin Motors and apparently Harley-Davidson, backed*off after their initial interest.*Due to this, it’s easy to imagine the folks at Edizione Holding getting cold feet. They're still allegedly making a bid for Ducati, though. After all, the family is made up of proud Italians who may place a sentimental value on the manufacturer. That sentimentality could be the final motivation needed to go forward with the purchase

Bain Capital is another rumored to be*actively making a bid for Ducati. Bain Capital owns a stake in BRB, which is the company behind Bajaj Auto (Motorcycles), Ski-Doo, and Eicher Motors which controls Royal Enfield. The U.S.-based company is literally a buyout fund, so picking up Ducati would essentially be business as usual as this type of buyout is just part of their modus operandi. Despite every corporate entity’s primary concern being profit, Bain Capital happens to own a few companies that sometimes (like a lot of sometimes) cut corners and deliver a product that falls short of being as high-quality as it easily could have been. This type of thing would desecrate everything Ducati stands for and everything dedicated customers have come to expect. Therefore, if they do become Ducati’s parent company, they hopefully take a novel approach to managing the elite brand, or fail to do so at their own peril.

Then there's Polaris. Word around the campfire is that Polaris*made a bid in an effort to take on the Italian brand and hopefully turn it around under their leadership. It's not like Polaris is new to saving iconic bike makers either. Aside from their success with Indian, in 2005 the company*purchased a piece of KTM, so this isn’t its first rodeo when it comes to acquiring a high-end European motorcycle company. It also invested heavily in electric scoot maker Brammo Inc.

In addition to making the motorized vehicles you probably know it for, Polaris Industries also has the insanely lucrative Polaris Defense division which has had the fortune of getting a piece of that sweet sweet US defense contract money. In 2015 Polaris Industries had over 4.7-billion-dollars in revenue, a net income of over 455 million dollars and assets totaling over 2.38 billion dollars. This in theory should allow Polaris to take a bigger gamble on Ducati than other bidders will. While the quality of management Polaris Industries ran Victory with is debatable,*you can't say that they cut corners that resulted in sacrificing quality or threatened the integrity of the brand. I’m sure many Ducatistas have recently been losing sleep over that, imagining the future buyer's plans being made behind eyes with dollar-signs in them.

As wildly complex as it is to buy an enormous company like Ducati, there is one more player involved in this deal regardless of who the buyer ends up being. That player is the collection of Volkswagen labor unions who happen to collectively make up 10 of the 20 seats on Volkswagen’s supervisory board and who have already outwardly opposed several of these sales. One unnamed source explained that because of the unions, one of the major factors Volkswagen is considering in addition to price is the buyer’s ability to propose and sign a simple and straightforward deal that wouldn’t negatively impact the workers these unions are fighting for. So believe it or not but the deal Volkswagen takes very well may not necessarily be the company offering the highest bid, but the company with a good enough price and a deal the unions will be happy about.

As words I’ve used like: “reportedly,” and “supposedly” suggest, none of these claims that were first made to Reuters have been confirmed by anyone actually involved in these dealings. At this point this is still just so much conjecture. But between Harley-Davidson, Polaris, and BRB, it would appear that American companies are open to*bidding on European bike makers, a fact which could result in some great things for the US motorcycle industry if all goes well after this hypothetical American buyout of Ducati. One thing that is for sure is that until official documents are signed, the rumors are going to continue swirling with new speculations and new characters so something tells me this won’t be the last time RideApart has to address a Ducati buyout rumor.

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