John A. Olin - Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Management
Thanks, Joe. So, the shipment ramp in the second quarter, so let's kind of run through where we're at. Where shipments were down 1.4% in the first quarter, our guidance for 83,000 to 88,000 motorcycles in the second quarter is down 5% to 10%. So, if you work that math out, you're down about 3% to 6% in the first half, which has an implied growth in the back half of about 16% on average. So, we are backloading the second half, the reason being is all of the, basically, the 6,000 units are coming out, we're taking out in the second quarter, another opportunity to exercise our flexible manufacturing. If you remember a year ago in the second quarter, weather was very difficult and we ended up with higher inventories than we had wanted at the end of the second quarter. And we fixed that in the third quarter. And at this point, we will bring inventories down in the second quarter. So, taking the $6,000 guidance reduction out in the second quarter and fixing inventories or bringing inventories where they should be at the end of the second quarter requires us to have more shipments in the back half. We feel very comfortable with that split. And, again, as we've always said and we've certainly demonstrated, we're going to aggressively manage supply in line with demand and make sure that the marketplace is clean as we move forward. The second question that you had, Joe, is with regards to the north and the south and weather and so on and so forth, if you look at – the overall weather from the weather services was pretty even on a year-over-year basis, both in terms of average temperature and precipitation. But when you look at it, this winter was a harder first quarter than last year because of the timing of when the weather hit and certainly the excess of snowfall in the northeast. We have seven sales region and of those, seven three of them were down considerably. That represent about 40% of our volume, and the Northeast being down the most, which was down double digits. Now, in the areas that didn't have the weather issues, sales were very strong, and we feel great about where we're at. And that was led by the West, which was up double digits. And that's a second year in a row that the first quarter was up over double digits in the West. So, again, it was clearly a weather issue. It was not a product or mix or the inventories that we had in those markets or uneven competition. It was clearly the weather.