Who would have had thought that such an amazing bike, the Yamaha YZF – R3 would come up with a duck in the sales figures. A bike which Yamaha had predicted to sell nearly 2000 units by the end of the year has managed to sell only 256 units in the month of September and that is pretty much it. It is interesting that a bike that showed a lot of promise and public opinion of the bike was also pretty good, managed to record such low sales.
The reason for that could be a lot of factors; for starters, the cost of the bike way more than the competition. Yes it is true that the bike does not really have much competition in the segment other than the Kawasaki and now Mahindra, but again shelling out over 3.25 lakhs for a bike that does not even come with ABS on it, seems pretty much a dud.
The second reason is where Yamaha really screwed it up. Instead of cashing on the opportunity of selling the R3, reports have indicated that Yamaha has been putting up a lot of conditions on the dealers. To receive one unit of the R3, the dealers needs to sell 20 bikes from the regular lot this includes the commuters and the 150cc units. Now that seriously makes absolutely no sense if you ask us and ultimately it was about to tank since the other models have a lot of competition in the market while the R3 does not and secondly this has made the dealers very lethargic and opt ultimately to not sell the R3 at all resulting in the poor or rather the no sales figures.
On top of all this Yamaha’s PR is really not that great, the reason why it has received so less coverage in the media as a whole. So all in all even when Yamaha has a true winner in its hands, they managed to screw it all up which turned out to be in favor of others. But we hope Yamaha are able to unscrew the situation and are able to improve the roll out by at least a little that can go a long way for the company.