Welcome back everyone after our short Easter break.
As well as, hopefully, you all getting some time to relax over the period, how was business? As I mentioned in my last blog, the long bank holiday weekend has been traditionally seen by many as a kick-off - and indeed a yardstick - for the coming season. Certainly this has often been the case for domestic outdoor powered machinery dealers.
So how was this Easter for you? Did the good weather help with customers wanting to spruce up their outdoor spaces? Or did this market uncertainty that the sector has been experiencing so far in 2025, continue to prevail? If you'd like to share your experiences with our community of dealer readers, please feel free to do so in the comments below.
We have more evidence today from the AEA of just how tough 2025 is proving for our readers who specialise in agricultural machinery sales. The statistics are stark. In the first four months of year, declines in registrations of farm tractors have been seen across all areas of the UK and for all power bands. And it's a similar picture for ag dealers in Ireland, with the most recent figures on the FTMTA's website showing year-on-year falls.
This downward trend has been on-going for sometime now, and these numbers published by our trade associations don't appear to be showing any signs of improvement as of yet.
We do run a story today though, that is good news for one brand at least - and perhaps indicative of a wider trend that we've been hearing from dealers anecdotally so far this year. And that's an increase in consumer interest in boundary-wire-less robotic mowers.
Segway have announced that their Navimow model is now, and I quote, "the world’s No.1 brand for wire-free robotic lawn mower sales volume". This boast is backed up by research by "global analytics company" Euromonitor International, who say sales were measured across all retail channels throughout 2024, including dealerships, Amazon, direct to consumer stores, and offline merchandise stores.
Whilst I'm not disputing the rigour or independence of Euromonitor International or companies like them, I feel it might be helpful for dealers and the wider industry to have regular updates on grass cutting machinery sales trends and brand rankings - the way the figures for agricultural tractor registrations are publicised month-by-month, as well as annually via a chart of tractor brand market share data (admittedly following a one year delay due to competition law restrictions).
Having this monthly update on tractor registrations allows ag dealers to get a handle on how the market is performing. Would an equivalent resource for dealers of lawnmowing equipment also be valuable?
In addition to this, would an annual, accurate ranking of the different grass cutting machinery brand sales, split into product categories (i.e robotic, lawn tractor, walk-behind etc), be beneficial? I do, however, appreciate that this could get pretty complex with the wide variety of machinery variants on the market.
If these stats were on-hand though, one presumes this could be another source of information that could feed into dealer thinking when considering areas such as stocking decisions, understanding market trends and in negotiations with suppliers.
I'm aware that this lack of transparency over mower sales stats, has been something that the industry has dealt with since forever. I'm led to believe that these figures do exist, but they are just not readily available in the public domain.
So I ask you, our dealer readers of grass cutting equipment, would it be helpful to your business if these stats were regularly published publicly? There does appear to be ways of finding out this kind of information with companies such as Euromonitor International conducting their own research - but this seems to require paying for.
Currently without investment, dealers will have a great idea from their own business and industry knowledge of what product segments are popular, but not exactly which brand sold more machines than the others last year? Does that seem odd to you?
