BRP appoints Telwater as sole Evinrude distributor

At the press conference we attended to announce the distributorship, General Manager Nick Phelan hinted at the long-awaited filtering down of the G2 technology to smaller engines: "We chose Evinrude because it aligns better with our business and our products," he said. "We’ve been partners for about four years now and the products coming is another reason for this move," he added.

Phelan said that packaging the boat, motor and trailer (BMT) for the consumer is key to the business: "We can package the BMT from the factory so the dealer doesn’t have to fit it up," he said. "All he has to do is top up the fluids, give the engine a run and make sure everything is running well, wash the boat and hand it over the customer."

Asked how the new deal would affect the customer in terms of pricing, Telwater’s Damien Duncan was circumspect: "We’re in the market for growth," he said. "We want to make our dealers competitive in the market, ultimately, what they sell the product for is up to them, but want to grow the market share for Evinrude, and part of that is pricing correctly."

"In certain areas (Evinrude) is very dominant but in other areas (it’s) not so dominant. In some areas there is a negative image and we intend to address that," Duncan said. "We have to grow the awareness of the direct-injection G2 E-TEC."

"We will be doing a lot of testing and giving our dealers all the information and data from our products, as well as testing against other products," he added.

Recently Telwater has been marketing the Vortex brand which Damien Duncan said they have now discontinued. "Vortex was cheap and when it came to the market it made the other brands take notice and drop pries of some of their products which was good for the consumer," he said.

"But with the new emission laws coming, Vortex won’t comply, so we won’t be offering it."

While Telwater will be pushing its BMT rigs like this, Mr Duncan said that the "loose-engine dealers" certainly won’t be forgotten.

"We have our boat and motor dealers and we also have many loose-engine dealers who we have spoken to and they’re very happy with the set-up and the future," he said.

"We will be looking seriously at the loose-engine dealers and the repower market," he said.

Asked how long the deal took to come to fruition, Nick Phelan said: "We’ve really been working the deal since the launch of the Evinrude ETEC G2 in Milwaukee [which we attended in this link]. We saw the technology and knew it would filter down to the smaller engines and we were really excited," he said.

Long-term, Mr Pehlan said the company would look at taking on the parts and accessories but at the moment they had enough on their hands: "We are taking a stable approach for the next 12 months at least," he concluded.