mike
Guest
Here were my original comments folowing the discussion of if AGCO was still working on a 4WD or if it had been shelved, which is what the rumor was. Regarding marketing through the Cat dealers I guess that must be a joke. Cat dealers in the St. louis market are a player in the scraper market but are a non-player in the ag market. I think this is typical of the majority of the Cat dealers in the Midwest. Scraper operators want tracks. Period. Why market a wheeled tractor through a dealer network that mostly doesn't want to service the ag market and doesn't have a market for an end user of a wheeled 4x4IJ The AGCO star was a decent start. It would have been much more succesful had it been orange. Originally posted 1_04- I thought they might. But after this Sunflower_White fiasco I'm glad they didn't screw that up as well. AGCO will never be competetive in the scaper business because they cannot service the market. I believe AGCO has one dealer in the 3 Illinois Counties that are adjacent to St. louis. Case has 1 super big dealer and Deere has 2 very big delaers to service the construction customers. If a contractor walked into my local AGCO dealer he laugh his tail off at their service department and their equipment. The flip side is AGCO don't care. When the worlds largest Gleaner dealer went broke in the same geography mentioned above, they made no effort to replace that. I bet if Deere or Case or Chevy or Cat had their largest dealer go under, you can bet they would make sure that they kept those cutomers going and a new dealer started at any cost. Years ago we had more Gleaners and AC tractors than Case and JD together. Today myself and a neighbor had Gleaners while most tractors and planters have slowly switched to red or green. My local red dealer loves that AGCO has no 4x4 offering. Once he gets a 9000 series or STX on the farm the 2wd and FWA's turn red soon after. AGCO doesn't care. They don't realize that they may have to have a line that doesn't make any money just to be able to offer a complete line. A neighbor who is 105% green(had a gleaner and a 8070 -10 years ago) and I were talking lawn mowers. I expressed how much I liked my Grasshopper lawnmower. He said he really like it too, even better than his JD mower. But he likes the idea on one dealer_one color to keep it simple. So he bought a JD mower so it matched colors and he could get all parts and filters at one dealer. A lot of guys will say they want their shed to match. like it or not a lot of those guys are out there.