How many Hobie sailing kayaks have been sold

Hi all.

I'm a Hobie cat sailor (Miracle 20 and Tiger) who is also researching the history of sailing dinghy design for my blog (. I'm on a bit of a tangent and I'm trying to find out if anyone knows roughly how many Hobie sailing kayaks have been made.

Does anyone have a rough idea of how many have been made in total and how many are made each year? It could give a really interesting insight into the future direction of small craft sailing, but I can't get any indication from Hobie.

Cheers

Hobie doesn't publish their sales figures (no private companies do).

However we can make assumptions based on public knowledge regarding the industry. ( I'm in manufacturing)

It's published everywhere that in 2015 225,000 kayaks were sold in the USA alone. Hobie is by a wide margin the Cadillac of all kayaks on the market and likely the biggest market leader (Number 1 brand out there (bar none)), lets assume they own 25% of the US market (conservative estimate). Their mirage line of kayaks we all know is the vast lions share of Hobies kayak market, so assuming 225,000 x 25% = 56,000 kayaks sold times 90% = 50,000 mirage kayaks sold in the US alone annually. Every Mirage kayak Hobie sells (all lines (revo, PA, Adventure, sport, outback, Oasis, etc) are designed from the ground up as a sail boat, you only need to add the optional sail kit (about $400 bucks), and you have a full blown sail boat, designed from the ground up to sail (almost nobody knows this).

You spiked my curiosity, so I worked up the numbers 3 different ways ( financial disclosures, known rotomolding manufacturing capacities, and available factory space (and counting parking places in their facility (it's against the law to have more employees than parking spaces)). I put their output at right around 100k mirage kayaks sold globally annually. That number also coincides with their estimated sales revenue, assuming 60% of their EBITA business revenue is kayaks.
Assuming the kayaks last ten years, that puts the number of Hobie mirage sailing kayaks out there at around 1 million.
FE
Edit:
Now figuring maybe 5% of the owners get the sailing kit, that gets us to around 50k sailable mirage yaks out there. We have bought and owned 8 different Hobie mirage sailing kayaks over the last ten yrs, I would describe us as average hobie mirage kayak owners.
I'm out on the water most weekends, about half the kayaks I see in this area are Hobie brand mirage kayaks. I'm pretty sure there are around 200 Tandem Islands in the Sarasota area, (Sarasota is a small city just south of Tampa bay.).

Thanks Fusion, that's excellent information. Can I pester you further by asking if there is any industry knowledge about sailing 'yak sales worldwide? It does look as if the cheap and simple Hobie kayak approach is selling far better than the complicated approach that much of the sailing world is now promoting.

I should also add that I didn't realise that my PM to a Hobie representative hadn't gone through until after I started this thread. My apologies to Hobie for saying they didn't reply when it was my own fault! I know they are normally pretty secretive about sales information. Some of the catamaran associations may have been a bit embarrassed by providing false info about Hobie sales to international bodies because of the lack of information from the company.