A company called MotorCycles Data publishes vast amounts of data on motorcycles and the motorcycle business. A recent story touted the fact that the global motorcycle market set an all-time sales record in 2024. Globally, motorcycle manufacturers sold a total of more than 61.8M motorcycles. That’s a gain of 2.7 percent over the previous year, which also had good sales figures for most regions. Further, MotorCycles Data predicts that world motorcycle sales will continue to grow in 2025 at a rate of 2.8%. So, motorcycle sales are growing everywhere, right?

While motorcycle sales worldwide set an all-time record in 2024, with parts of the world excelling, other regions struggled. So which regions of the world sold more motorcycles and which regions faltered? As you might have guessed, places where motorcycles are used for daily transportation, not recreational activities, saw the biggest gains. But there were exceptions.

Big Winners

The winner of the sales data is India. In 2024, it was the world’s largest motorcycle market, posting a sales increase of 14.1%.  East Europe’s sales boomed by 34%, helped by a surge of motorcycle sales in Turkey. Latin America also posted big gains, with Brazil up 17.4%, Nicaragua up 45.5%, Costa Rica up 41.7%, Honduras up 28.3%, and Panama up 32.6%.

North American sales also set a new all-time record. But the gain may not have come from the places you expected. What propped up North American sales were the sales made in Mexico, which saw an increase of 20.1% over the previous year. Western Europe (including the UK) also scored its best sales of the century by selling 7.2% more motorcycles than in the previous year.

Not So Rosy

With world motorcycle sales overall booming, was there anywhere where sales weren’t so good? Yes, there were. Two regions of the world saw sales drop, and they may be regions you wouldn’t have expected. Surprisingly, China’s sales fell by 13.7%. ASEAN nations (Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Laos, Indonesia, Brunei, and Myanmar) fell a more moderate 1.8%.

With so many potential customers, and many of these nations using motorcycles for daily transportation, the drop seems somewhat unusual. Unfortunately, MotorCycles Data did not provide any rationale for these drops other than to say the relevance of the motorcycle industry is shifting in these countries.