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KTM's parent company has called a meeting for late January that may reveal whether it has found investors to help it through its current financial crisis.
At the same meeting, Stephan Zöchling, who has been CEO at exhaust manufacturer Remus, among other corporate and investing roles, is expected to join the company's supervisory board. The current chairman of the board, Josef Blazicek, has resigned to make way for Zöchling. The company cited Zöchling's "experience of restructuring in the automotive sector."
The most obvious potential investors who could inject money into the sprawling web of companies and subsidiaries surrounding KTM are two current partners: Bajaj Auto of India, which already owns a portion of KTM's parent company, and CFMOTO of China, which builds engines for KTM and distributes its motorcycles in some markets.
And that's about as far as I care to go in speculating. If you've been reading anything moto-related on the internet, you've probably seen lots of speculation about KTM's future, including some apparently conflicting headlines. It's not hard to see why it might be likely, especially for English-language outlets in the United States that are trying to report on reorganization proceedings in Austria that are no doubt very fluid at the moment. To name just one example, I saw a report on one car-focused U.S. site that quoted a U.S. motorcycle website that quoted a report by a local media outlet in Europe that no doubt had gone through an online translator. Certainly no chance for misinformation to creep into that process, right?
Much of the speculation has centered on the future of KTM's participation in the three MotoGP classes. Based on comments from the reorganization administrator, the Factory Racing division (one of the company's many subsidiaries, and the one that includes the MotoGP teams) will continue in 2025 but not in 2026, when its contract expires. That's unless someone else buys Factory Racing and it continues under different ownership — which has been another entire chapter of speculation.
I'm not going to pretend to have any insight into how this will play out for the various companies under the Pierer umbrella, but we may begin to see outlines of a deal at the late January (no exact date set yet) assembly and probably won't know much for sure until the court-supervised restructuring is completed at the end of February.
