Vicki Cain <<email>>, Gerolf Heinrichs, and Steve Moyes write:

Whether the Oz Report tries to compare top shelf gliders with top shelf gliders of different manufacturers, or tries to create an artificial standard configuration you still inevitably compare apples with oranges. Just take a short look at your “seriously corrected” basic configuration (http://ozreport.com/12.061#6). You compare two World Championship winning gliders (the Combat and the Litespeed, that is) with two products that have not even been on the charts, yet.

And the very reason certain manufacturers will always try to undercut our prices or throw in extra options with their deals, is that they just cannot match our state of the art product for quality and performance.

Even if different manufacturers are offering different carbon or sail options on the gliders, you need to look more closely at each individual option and see what’s behind it. Not every carbon wrap around a mandrel makes a carbon leading edge or dive stick. Remember, we were the ones to introduce carbon tubing and new Mylar alternatives, while other manufactures were rubbishing these innovations as inferior, unnecessary or unreliable only years later to follow us along exactly the same lines.

It seems to us that while we are developing winning products at substantial R&D costs, others simply take a short cut, just copy us and develop smart marketing strategies to cover up that they are constantly trailing the field.

What makes us proud is to see that whenever new pilots join the Moyes family their personal bests, results or rankings almost inevitably improve. This is even truer, the closer to winning these pilots come. One could as well say, a competitive pilot can just not afford to fly a non competitive glider. It can’t be just a fluke that in the major competitions almost half the field flies Moyes.

It can’t be just a fluke that more than half the top ranked pilots are with Moyes.

So in the end it comes down to the crucial question: Are you looking for a good deal or for a good glider. Most top pilots have well understood this concept, and laugh about ads that claim “unsurpassed performance” without ever showing any proof of it. Unfortunately, upcoming pilots often get fooled with cool ads and smooth talk, just to find that, once they have bought their  "winning machine" it is not really where it’s at.

Moyes is essentially a family business and has traditionally focused on the high performance, winning-glider market. In the near future we will, however, show that we can make a difference in the beginner and intermediate glider segment, also.

We never claimed to be the biggest, we claim to be the best! Although bigger selling numbers certainly always help in cutting costs per gliders, success in hang gliding has never been about sheer quantity, but quality.

You very well address the issue of different product prices for different countries, but this could easily confuse customers and dealers. As you and we know, price differences in different countries come about as a consequence of currency fluctuations or market situations (e.g. different country taxes, shipping costs, facing strong local competition, etc). We think you will agree that a currently low US price has little or nothing to do with US dealers being kinder to their pilots whereas European dealers were trying to rip off their customers. You can believe us all our agents are doing a great job out there, despite no one in the hang gliding industry, neither dealers nor manufacturers, making substantial profits these days.

With a US dollar seemingly free falling at times it is nearly impossible to get the retail prices perfectly balanced between different countries around the world at all times.

Not a day goes by that a dealer argues his case feeling disadvantaged in this game of fluctuating currencies and markets.

Fair pricing, as one gets taught in any marketing seminar one attends, is not achieved when everyone pays the same price, but when everyone can afford the same goods.