Tiger Woods teams up with Hero

You don’t see Hero motorcycles on North American streets right now, but the Indian manufacturer is continuing to work towards that goal.

According to Bloomberg, Hero now has golfer Tiger Woods on the payroll, promoting their products. We’re not quite sure how well that will work out – Tiger’s known for his swinging ways, not motorcycling. But, this move shows the manufacturer is still intent on moving their motorcycles into western markets.

Interestingly, the Bloomberg article says Hero plans to be in Europe by 2015, and North America by 2016. Last we’d heard, they’d hoped to have their products in the US by sometime in 2015, and before that it had been 2014. Hrm. Could the made-in-India motorcycles turn out to be internal-combustion vapourware?

Right now, Hero has four factories, but Bloomberg’s article says the company plans to have 20 by the end of this decade – they’ve just opened new factories in Bangladesh and Colombia. They want to grow sales to 12 million units in that time frame, with exports accounting for 10 per cent of their production, instead of the current three per cent.

To help them with that, along with golfer Woods, they’ve also hired UK-based Wolff Olins Ltd. to help them promote their products, Bloomberg says. Of course, they have been making other major moves as well (hiring a big-name designer away from BMW, buying a huge stake in Erik Buell Racing).