MV Agusta is amidst a renaissance. Even the brand’s head of marketing Stefano Campaci freely admits that the Italian firm was “For many different reasons a forgotten brand,” but it’s now firmly back on everyone’s radar.
At EICMA MV revealed the super expensive, super exclusive LXP Orioli ADV, and as I chat to Campaci at Motorcycle Live, the brand is benefitting from increased cooperation with the Perier Mobility Group first announced in October. KTM AG now takes care of the supply chain and purchasing for MV Agusta, and its bikes are now distributed through Perier’s massive worldwide dealer network. Perier will eventually exercise an option to take a controlling share of the brand.
That might make you worry, though, that MV Agusta is about to be diluted, but Campaci - who has stints at Ducati and Triumph on his CV - insists that’s not the case. “We remain MV Agusta. We remain built in Italy. We remain developed in Italy and there will be no shared platform with the KTM range to keep it exclusive,” he says.
Where the bike is made is particularly important to MV. “All the other brands in the world - they produce [in] Thailand, India, Vietnam, so you don't really know where that bike comes from,” Campaci explains, adding, “Some bikes that you see from our competitors in the US, they come from the Thai factory, some bikes that you see in the UK from our competitors come from factories that are based in Asia.
“The quality of those bikes is equally good, but that I think takes a little bit away…The exclusivity of a brand is very linked to its history and the territory from which the brand is from,” Campaci says.
MV Agusta has its reputation to think of, which is as the “Ferrari of the motorcycle world,” apparently. And that’s not a claim from Campaci - he’s quoting customers reflecting on how much MV is charging for the LXP Orioli. “A couple of customers told me that when I was telling them about the price,” he recalls. Reaction to the new bike has been extremely positive, he adds.
This isn’t the only brand comparison Campaci wants to talk about, though - he digs up another from the world of fancy watches. “The moment somebody wears a Patek Philippe watch, you immediately see that person say ‘OK, he's wearing something extremely exclusive’,” Campaci says, adding, “MV Agusta wants to go in that direction, to become an upper premium luxury exclusive brand.”
That’s why there’ll be an annual production cap of 15,000 bikes, despite the fact MV Agusta’s Varese factory has “a production capability of way more” than that. “You want to make sure that the customers that invest their passion, their money, their energy, their time on MV Agusta, feel that it has something exclusive and also that bike maintains the value.”
That said, we can expect the reworked triple and new steel beam frame of the LXP to be used beyond that bike’s 500 units. “It's safe to believe that we don't develop the platform just for 500 pieces, so there will probably be some more of these,” Campaci says.
Thankfully, there’s plenty of talk about how exciting MV Agusta’s new bikes are going to be to ride, along with all the talk of exclusivity and investment potential. “I tried the prototype, and it's amazing,” Campaci says, adding, “I literally came back and I looked at my colleagues and said, ‘My driver's licence is going to last 15 minutes with this bike…’”
