skidoo returns to 1 status

 For more than a decade Polaris has been the Number 1 selling snowmobile brand, but that changes heading into the new season. Ski-Doo officially announced that it has usurped Polaris as the top-selling snowmobile brand in the world.

Jean-Francois Guertin, Director of Marketing for Ski-Doo Snowmobiles, credits his company's 2003 sales success to the introduction of the Rev chassis. "It's no surprise that achieving this important milestone coincided with our launch of the Rev platform," he said in a recent press release, "or that our recent Spring sales continued to build on our strong 2003 momentum with the expansion of the exclusive, next generation Rev platform across most of our 2004 model lineup."

In a separate statement, Guertin outlined the sales percentages for the North American market. Ski-Doo claimed the top spot by climbing 3.3% to 33.5 percent in 2003, bolstered by 17,463 Rev-based units sold.

This is the first time in more than 20 years that Ski-Doo has held the #1 market share position in snowmobile manufacturing. Prior to Polaris' tenure at #1 was Yamaha, which took over market leadership when Arctic Enterprises fell into tough times in the 1980s. Prior to that Ski-Doo had reigned as marketing leader since its introduction of the original wooden ski Olympique in the late 1950s.

Ski-Doo's rise in market share comes off a down year for the snowmobile industry as a whole. The entire industry ended the 2003 sales season down by 10.7% from last season at 164,574 units. Ending inventory climbed 10.5% from 2002 to 60,485 units, the highest level in four years. Still this is a far cry from the devastating inventory levels seen in the rocky 1970s and lasting into the early 1980s.