Massey Ferguson...

Notice this article...

Yeah,

WHY?  I have yet to hear an answer to why drop the orange. I had an Agco man call me the other day from Dulth. They didnt like my comments on Facebook. Asked if they could have my phone number so they could ask me some questions. Todd Stucke called me and we had a good half hour talk. He soon new they had lost me as a customer,but he just like all of the others I have talked to have no answer to why they did it. It makes no sense to piss off customers. I told him I am done with Agco and Deere has plenty of machinery to sell.

Didn't Deutz do pretty much the same thing? Seems like I've heard it said Deutz had the attitude of, "The American farmer doesn't know what he wants. We will tell him what he wants." We all know what happened from there...

Massey, Deutz, AGCO, they are all the same. None of them seem to give a big pile of crap weather we are happy or not. Hopefully this comes back to bite them. Now this is my opinion but don't people buy things that they have had good luck with in the past? For example, If, for say, I bought a new Allis tractor that had the durible motor and setup that gave it a good reputation. Then when I want another tractor to put with my Allis I go back and they no longer have the legendary motor and other components because they decided to go with a motor that they could manufacture for half the cost but has a bad reputation for blowing head gaskets right and left. This is what I imagine AGCO has done. To gain back the trust of people AGCO should start producing things that had good reputations and performance to back it up with. Around here Massey Ferguson is laughed at because people who want to buy a tractor go to Case IH, John Deere, Kubota, or New Holland and Massey is just that other red tractor. The best decision, in my opinion, would be for AGCO to put those classic names out there instead of letting them sit on the shelf. I'd bet a new Allis-Chalmers, Oliver, or Minneapolis-Moline would sell more than MF and put AGCO back out there.

That is what I told the guy the other day on the phone. I told him it was guys like me that were AC guys,then Duetz Allis,Agco Allis,then Agco.Along with my silver combines through it all. It was guys that stuck around,that even made Agco a possibility. He said I want to personally thank you for your past purchases. But I didnt work with them until they became AGCO.'

                                                   IG

I've said it before, it sounds just like the bunch of fools in DC that are running our country (in the ground) right now. If Agco tried to turn around right now it would still be hard for people like IG and Redline to come back to them because you have already been burnt once and you figure they could change back any time. Same way with DC, even if the tide changes people like me will still be very leary because the next election could change it all back again.JP 

Some how I doubt they change the name of AGCO.  They have challenger and fendt, which sell big in europe. 

Other than JD, what do you do?  CNH for the most part tries to market their tractors as two distinct companies while they are not, Most tractors are the same models with different sheet metal.  And CNH is dropping parts support of older tractors quickly.  Hell have seen problems with early 90's case/IH tractors getting simple parts(discontinued) such as a 7120. 

Seems the only one that has been supporting their customers any more is John Deere, and you pay "deerely" for that support.  Sorry for the pun. 

One thing I wonder is how Caterpillar is going to take this?  Caterpillar owns/produces perkins.  AGCO is selling their challenger tractors through Cat dealers, some which have been grumbling I have heard due to lousy small/utility tractor support from AGCO.  Cat doesn't take kindly towards these kind of things.

When the truck manufactures decided that they were all (except Navistar) going to build their own engines which forced cat out of the truck market(especially paccar) cat bowed out and then decided to form a joint venture and sell CAT branded trucks which are supposed to come out next year. 

When GE and EMD(both make/made their own engines) wouldn't let customers decide if they wanted a Cat engine(european manufactures do give the customer a choice) in the locomotives, Cat bought out EMD. 

Its my opinion that AGCO is playing with fire, not only on the Allis side but on the challenger side as well, and Massey around here has no dealers.

Disclaimer.  These are MY opinions and not those of my employer.  (sorry I have to put that in to satisfy those that provide my paycheck)


Edited by firebrick43 - 28 Aug 2010 at 10:59am

The White brand carries more weight in my area than MF.  White used to have a great dealer network in MI and had lots of sales here.  There tillage line was top notch too, and AGCO dropped them too.  They can't screw it up much else if you ask me....

AllisChalmers37 wrote: Around here Massey is so bad that they had to bring in this TAFE brand into the MF dealership. They sell more TAFE's in three months than they do MF's in the whole year.

 

It's Duetz all over again.  Remember the old saying, "those who fail to remember the past are condemed to repeat it".  I told AGCO officials this.  Of course they ignored me.  To answer your question, Ratcliff is still around but is out of power.  Which means he has little or no influence.  The other 2 big wigs that knew what A-C meant both went down in the plane crash.  Now all that's left are these 2 bit  bean counters attempting to market a "legacy" addition orange tractor to bridge them through the end of the year.  Then they are going to move on with Messy.  I got a committment from that one corporate VP that orange parts would be supported for the next 10 years.  We'll see if that promise is kept.