Happy New Year!

Welcome to the first Weekly Update of 2017 - it's great to be back with you on a Friday lunchtime, as we will be all year.

We have some exciting things planned for the next 12 months with all things Service Dealer, not least building on the success of November's Conference & Awards. Details of this year's event will be forthcoming, but until then make sure you mark November 16th in your diary!

January spares no time for this sector with a couple of major exhibitions coming up, as LAMMA and BTME are just around the corner. Once again Service Dealer will be splitting itself between Peterborough and Harrogate, as I'm sure will representatives of dealerships and manufacturers, what with the exhibitions overlapping once again (BTME takes places Jan 17-19 and LAMMA 18-19).

But before we even get to those, it's great to be able to kick off the first Weekly Update of the year, packed with such strong stories - a couple of which are positive indicators of the optimism which some manufacturers and dealers must be feeling going into 2017. Another however, is likely to stir up some controversy.

Firstly though, the news that Kubota with Lister Machinery, and CLAAS UK with Manns are investing huge sums in major new developments is fantastic to hear.

Also the fact that both are agricultural machinery focused developments, coming off the back of a year where ag sales were under the weather to say the least, is a confident and bullish move by both Kubota and CLAAS.

And it's significant that each of these manufacturers are placing dealers at the heart of their investments. Mann's state-of-the-art new showroom is planned to be an integral part of the redeveloped CLAAS UK HQ at Saxham.

Kubota meanwhile are using the flagship new Lister Machinery depot in Kent to roll out their new concept in dealer branding which they say is 'designed to raise the bar in the machinery sector'. Rob Edwards says, "This is all about setting the benchmark in the machinery sector and we look forward to hearing the feedback from our end-user customers once this site officially opens its doors in the spring."

Which is all very exciting indeed and should hopefully give dealers across the country heart that the manufacturers must be predicting forthcoming growth in the agricultural machinery sector - and are placing their dealer network front and centre in order to make this happen.

That's in the ag world though. In the entry-level, cordless garden machinery sector, there's slightly different news that STIHL this year will be looking to sell these products through non-traditional dealer network channels. A letter has gone out to STIHL Approved Dealers informing them that the manufacturer is looking to utilise additional routes to market this year for these machines. Retailers such as garden centres and hardware stores are cited as potential partners.

The company do stress this is only for domestic, gardening cordless products, never for petrol machines. And importantly they don't mention using big-box, shed retailers.

But still, it's a change of policy for the manufacturer and one which will likely spark debate amongst dealers.

So straight away in 2017, there's plenty to talk about in this fascinating industry. And as ever Service Dealer always wants to hear your views. So throughout this year please leave comments under articles on this Weekly Update, join in with our surveys and drop me line if there's anything you think we should know about.