Duramax1,
I moved your post out of the Eagle Ridge thread and into its own new thread here in the Heartland General Forum. I feel your comments are worthy of being addressed on their own for everyone's benefit.
As we all know, high fuel prices followed by the financial system crisis have really hit the RV industry hard. For most, RVs and RVing is a luxury and in tough times, the luxuries are set aside by consumers first. Between being a burden just to move your existing RV very far when we had at $5+ a gallon diesel fuel followed by the inability to get credit followed by declining home values, further affecting our ability to obtain credit and therefore RVs, you, I, Heartland and the entire RV industry have been dealt a devastating blow.
We have all watched as RV manufacturers, one after another have ceased operation in one form or another.
That all said, I want to give as much confidence to the base of Heartland Owners as well as prospective owners that "
Heartland will weather this storm". As many of you know, Heartland is privately held. As such, we are not driven (crazy) by certain Wall Street pressures to make decisions that are not in the best interest of the company and customers.
Heartland has no debt and has cash in the bank. Our equity partners, Catteron Investments continues to stan behind us. Nice to have them as a resource.
While the last set of retail registration statistics still show Heartland on the rise, year-over-year, we are not selling the number of units we had planned this year.
As we felt the economy tighten, we took specific steps to guard ourselves. These steps include workforce reductions (production mostly) and alterations to the production schedules.
Changes we have made should not be felt by current customers. It may add a small amount of lead time to factory orders for prospective customers.
That is about all I can say. I work for Heartland and my loyalty is with Heartland. But trust me, I am very high on Heartland and I firmly believe we will come out of the other end of all of this a stronger company. A company with a larger slice of a smaller pie.
Enjoy with us
Jim Beletti
Director of Owners Interests