INTERVIEW

By Glenn Hansen

At Equip Expo in Louisville, I sat down with two executives from Husqvarna— Andreas Rangert, president of Husqvarna’ s Forest & Garden Division in North America, who I spoke with last year at Equip Expo, and Gent Simmons, senior vice president for Global Product Management & Development.

We talked about products a bit, but I was mostly interested in asking about Husqvarna in America. The company has had a lot of turnover during the last two years. More than other OEMs? I can’ t prove that, but it’ s out there for sure. We talked about that. And we discussed rumors about the RedMax brand too.

This text version of the interview is edited down slightly from OPE People podcast version, which you can find in the usual podcast places.

OPE +: I just reported [ on Husqvarna Group’ s Q3 2025 ] that sales were off 5 %. I know that North America has been a challenge for a lot of companies right now, for a lot of reasons. But that is spreadsheets and financial statements. How’ s it going on the ground with dealers in North America? Andreas Rangert: As you said, it’ s been a challenging year with all the political volatility. We were very concerned in the spring. We had a pretty tough quarter one. I think we picked up quite well in quarter 2, and to some extent, through quarter 3 as well. So, overall, I think the sentiments are changing. It’ s still tough on the higher-ticket items. On the handheld side, we had a great year, especially with petrol handheld; that’ s expected for North America. But also a little bit unexpected, because two years ago, in COVID, everything battery was supposed to take off. Now we see a rebound on our gas products. So that has been a good year for us.

Our dealer base is our key channel, clearly, and will remain so for many, many years to come. But overall, I think we tried to really make sure that we have our products available where our customers buy, which is, in some areas, not possible, with only dealers. We are at Lowe’ s, but we also need to expand that a little bit in other channels.

OPE +: What other channels? Rangert: Farm Fleet channels, for instance. And also online. We are on Amazon and it’ s a pretty strong channel for us. We are dominant there on the petrol side; that’ s a smaller market for Amazon than battery. Robotics is coming along quite well online. So that’ s another growing market for us, a growing channel.

22 OPE + December 2025 www. OPE-Plus. com