Stefan Pierer steps aside as CEO

KTM’s parent company – Pierer Mobility AG – says it has received ‘several’ offers of finance to help ride out its current position, with the investors expected to take either stakes in KTM or a part of the larger parent company as part of the deal.

Stefan Pierer will stay on in a temporary advisory role

Although no names were mentioned, existing part-owners Bajaj are believed to be among the potential investors, along with KTM’s Chinese manufacturing partners CFMOTO. Pierer Mobility AG says that the size of the offers on the table means it will be able to muster enough financial clout to ‘at least’ match its statutory obligation under the ‘self-administration’ rules currently protecting KTM AG from its creditors to provide those creditors with a 30 per cent quota of the money they’re owned over the next two years.

Pierer Mobility is now in discussions with the investors about those offers, but the man who lent his name to the company and has been central to KTM’s massive expansion since buying the brand in 1992 – Stefan Pierer – is stepping aside as CEO. He’s replaced by Gottfried Neumeister, but will temporarily stay on as co-CEO during the handover process.

Pierer Mobility is dealing with a large surplus of inventory

The company has also revealed more details of the conditions that led to KTM’s problems, releasing early figures for its 2024 financial year. These show that there hasn’t been a drop-off in retail sales, which remained on par with 2023 figures at around 268,000, but that there’s been substantial oversupply over the last few years.

In 2023, Pierer Mobility (including GasGas and Husqvarana, but with KTM making up by far the largest proportion of its motorcycle business), manufactured around 310,000 bikes and sold over 370,000 to dealers. In 2024, production was dropped 26 per cent to 230,000 to help reduced inventories, and 292,497 were sold to dealers, a drop of about 21 per cent. Global inventories were reduced by around 40,000 bikes. That’s an 18 per cent reduction – suggesting there were around 220,000 unsold bikes at the start of the year and still about 180,000 at the end of it.

Other notable figures in the preliminary stats released by Pierer are an anticipated EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation) loss of around €300 million, thanks to ‘a significant reduction in operating performance and one-off restructuring expenses’. The company has also cut more than 1800 employees from its books and reduced motorcycle production to help cut down the amount of unsold stock held by dealers and importers.

Details of the investment deals are expected to emerge in the coming weeks, and creditors are likely to approve the resulting restructuring plan, giving KTM a clear route forward out of self-administration.