The RS400 Rumours thread.

Not saying selling at cost OR at a loss, just sacrificing margin on boats to keep the price down. Selling more boats drives an increase sail sales volume, which gives them the opportunity to recover the lost boat margin in the sails at the same time. They have to make money somewhere!

b) I can't see RS needing to push up prices because of lost revenue on 400 sail sales, as I said, they could charge a royalty for effectively doing nothing which is much 'cleaner' profit from their point of view and would require a lot less handling & admin that actually processing orders for sails

Without the financials it's difficult to say, but there is a cost to keeping a class active, and I doubt any reasonable royalty will cover the revenue loss in sail sales. Particularly important if you not making loads on the boats themselves.

c) increased activity in the class CANNOT be a bad thing for RS

Obviously activity is good, but not at the exclusion of everything else. There is an RS ethos which is valuable to the brand, and they'd be foolish to start tampering with it. The slipperly slope arguement starts to come in here. If they start with the 400, what class is next??? Could be very damaging.

d) comparing the Merlin to the RS400 is a nonsense and irrelevant (sorry, sounds harsh but that's my opinion in this case)

Say what you like!  All I was saying is that if the 400 starts to introduce a development element to it, it makes it less distinguishable to the Merlin. I think a main reason why people sail SMODS because they don't want the hassle of development classes. i.e. - all the same, get on with it.

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