Camping World Holdings, Inc. (CWH) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Okay. Once again, I'm Ryan Brinkman. Thanks for coming to the 2025 JPMorgan Automotive Conference. Very excited to get going with our next presentation from Camping World, including seated to my left, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Marcus Lemonis; and Brett Andress, to his left, Senior Vice President for Corporate Development and Investor Relations. Marcus and Brett, thank you for coming.

You got it. Thank you.

Okay. I wanted to start with the significant market share gains that you've experienced year-to-date in both new and used units. In the quarter just concluded, you were up more than 20% year-over-year in both new and used RV units in a new RV market that we estimate may be down double digit. So can you talk about what is driving that performance? Is it that you have the same type and price point of RVs that people want? Can you also talk about what is not driving that outperformance? You took some time on the last earnings call to refute the notion that you are discounting much more heavily than the industry. So what's behind the sales surge? How much of it is same-store? And how are you doing it?

Yes, correct. So definitely not discounting to your point. When you look at the margin percentages that we put up in both new and used in the second quarter and year-to-date as well. But when you think about what's driving both new and used market share, on the new side, it's really a continuation of the contract manufacturing strategy that we set out years ago that had a lot of good success in 2024, hitting price points that really the industry hadn't seen in 4 or 5-plus years, right? So being able to proliferate the SKU count down into those more entry-level type products, move that volume, increase the turns on the new side, -- and on the used side, it really was, I'd say, a comeback, if you will, from what we experienced in 2024. So 2024 was the first year in the history of the RV industry that had a model year deflation on the new side. So that caused us to step away.

Yes. I think a more scientific -- to double down on his comment, I think a more scientific way to think about how we manage the business is we start with the most important part of the consumers' decision-making, which is the monthly payment. And we reverse engineer understanding what the monthly payment is. We reverse engineer the entire strata of new and used inventory based on price, based on term for financing and based on interest rate to understand where that price band is going to live. And I think a lot of our competitors tend to avoid that, and they think about selling big-ticket items where they're going to make in their mind, good money. For us, it's about velocity and lifetime value. And if we were just a stand-alone RV dealer, much like you see some of the public autos, and we didn't have a robust retail and fixed operations business, and we didn't have Good Sam, our strategy may be a little different. But there's kind of 2 markets that we're serving and why that science matters. The first market is we're serving the first-time buyer market and really trying to attract people into our funnel into our lifetime value proposition because we know that if they buy from us even the smallest, least expensive unit, we're going to see them for more than a decade. We're going to see them trade 3 times. We're going to see them buy warranties, roadside assistance, memberships, credit cards from -- Good Sam, and they're going to visit our retail business. So that's kind of target number one. Target #2 is focusing on the 5.6 million RVs that we know are in circulation. And if anybody is wondering why the RV market has hit a trough in the last 24 months, it has 0 to do with people leaving the lifestyle. In the 25 years that I've been doing this, the number of RVs in circulation has never gone backwards. What does happen is that historically, the trade cycle for a buyer would be 3.5 to 4 years. And so when you see a bottoming out in new shipments or in retail registrations, rather than making the assumption that the industry is pass or it's a fad, we would encourage you to look at the installed base, confirm that it's growing and then understand that the trade cycle went from 3.5 to 4.5 or 5 years. You pick up like an 18- to 24-month window. The reason that I make all those points is that our market share is the highest it's ever been, but it's largely because it's the most data that we've ever had as a company. We don't expect the collection of data and the usage of data for us to get any less sophisticated. And we think the market share opportunity, both on the new and used side, particularly with how we're integrating AI into pricing modules and predictor models could only get stronger.

And what is the very latest, do you think, in terms of retail demand and the consumer behavior? How did demand progress throughout 2Q for Camping World and maybe for the industry as a whole? And what are you observing at your stores so far here in 3Q? Do you detect any changes in underlying consumer behavior?

Yes, I do detect a change in the last 60 days. Our business is getting stronger. And we heard a lot today in meeting with one-on-ones that we're at the trough. We're at the bottom. We don't believe we're at the bottom anymore. We believe we're -- whatever -- however many steps there are to a mid-cycle to a top, we believe we've already started to climb the stairs. Our business, as you mentioned, was up 20% new, 20% used in the month of June. We saw that trend relatively continue into July. New was up high single digits. Used was up plus 20%. And we're seeing -- most importantly, we're seeing growth in our average selling price again, which we hadn't seen in a while.

On the new side?

On both new and used.

Sequentially?

Yes, both new and used. Not a lot, but enough to give us the indication that, thank goodness.

Enough to give you an indication that you may not track down 10% to 12% for the full year?

Enough to give us an indication that the year-over-year gap should get smaller. Brett and I, we disagree not about a lot of things. Him and Matter in one camp, they think the ASP full year year-over-year is going to be 10% to 12%. I think it's going to be high single digit.

I think it was a nice try, Ryan, but we are definitely seeing the seasonal progression, if you will, of the ASP trends that we expected to see, which is they bottom out in that second quarter, that May, June time frame, and they start to pick up bottom up.

And if memory serves me correct, I think new ASPs were down 10.4% in the second quarter. And what I had to plug into my model to get to down 10% to 12% for the full year was like 11% and a little bit in the back half. So -- because the first quarter is down like 4.4% or something like that. So that sounds encouraging. encouraging.

Yes. The comps get harder. And I think it's important to note that it's $40,000 in it's $40,000 in Q3 and $44,000 memory in Q4. Here's what I would tell you. Rather than getting really focused on what it was, what's the offset to that? The offset to that is we need explosive volume and we need gross profit. And so for us, it's about are we serving every customer? Are we building lifetime value? And are we improving our GPUs.

Okay. Well, that leads well into my next question, which was a little bit of an unpacking of the impact of lower new RV ASPs on SG&A as a percentage of gross profit. You'd started the year looking for a 600 to 700 basis point improvement in SG&A as a percentage of gross. You're still looking for an improvement, but now more like 300 to 400, right, I think. And -- so what needs to happen within your control to get there? Or alternatively, it's maybe a little bit of a tailwind on the market?

Yes. The 600 to 700 basis point goal has not and will not change. Historically, pre-COVID, we operated with a 73% to 74% SG&A as a percentage of gross. That is absolutely where we need to be. And so there's 2 ways to think about getting there. The first is we need the ASPs to be back up closer to $38,000. They don't have to get back to 40, which is where they were in '24, but we do need them to be $38,000. The second is we've had to make some material unfortunate structural changes to our business. We are sadly down about 1,000 people. And we started to focus on rooftop productivity and the rooftop productivity is up significantly, and we consolidated 16 locations. We cannot sit here today and pin it all on ASPs. It's a huge driver. It's 90% of it, but we can't control the ASPs. The consumer is going to tell us what they want to buy. Our job is to put the right product on the ground that they want to buy that they can afford to get them in our system. What we have to do is we have to make more structural changes to our cost structure. We committed on the last call to take out another $10 million to $15 million annualized. What I would love, which will help us just generally speaking, is as the used business continues to grow and if we can get to a 50-50 new-to-used mix that will have a massive impact even if new ASPs don't get to $38,000 because of the amount of gross profit generated on a used transaction in comparison.

Where are you finding the ability to reduce headcount? Because I imagine the sales force can't be cut if the units are up 20%, right?

Correct. So we've done a very careful analysis of our store base over the last 12 to 18 months, looking at locations that on a relative basis, were underperforming from either top line or bottom line perspective and then looked at our surrounding footprints in those areas and found a lot of, I'd say, very unique opportunities for us to consolidate those locations, keep our market share where it's at, continue to grow that, grow revenue and also keep -- I'd say, a good amount of the people who are performing very well in those boxes combine those 2 to make that accretive. And so that's consolidation has been, I'd say, the biggest driver, and there's also been a lot of focus on corporate.

Yes. We will have -- just so we're clear, in case anybody that's working in one of my stores is listening. We will have headcount reduction for those folks that don't perform. I'd rather have the folks on the floor that sell and service and work their butts off every day, eat more. And so we run our organization like a meritocracy. And so you can actually sell more units with less people if the people that are left are the right people. And so we will have -- we naturally go through our shedding in the fall, and that's actually happening as we sit here today.

Maybe a very high-level discussion about 2026. I mean it sounds like you're still targeting the 600 to 700 bps. It's just you pushed it out maybe. Can you get there in '26? And then what other expectations do you have about how the company might perform or how the industry might perform? For example, what happens with new RV prices next year? Where do you think new RV units are going next year? And relative to the things that are within your control, where do you see the opportunity?

I know what I'm going to say. I want to let you go first. So Brett controls our IR messaging. So I'll let him set it up and then I'll smash it.

No, no. It's okay. So when we think about '26 from a high level sitting here today, from a -- I'll start with the 2 pieces. On the new side of the business, and Marcus will have, I think, a different slightly different opinion on this. It's a healthy internal debate we have. More so of -- more of the same, if you will, from the new side, right? Hard to underwrite significant changes in interest rates at this point, significant changes in ASP and the affordability dynamic. Could it get better? Absolutely, it could. But I think it's more prudent for us to think about more of a flattish industry for 2025 and -- for 2026 and us continuing to outpace that and gain share similar to what we did in '24 and '25. On the used side, there is a very clear line of sight, we believe, to us continuing to grow used units double digits. And that speaks to the value proposition of used, I think that we've demonstrated in this environment. It also speaks to the relatively low amount of share that we have in used relative to the size of that market and relative to where we are with new at 30%. We're at about 8% or so on used. So that's more of an idiosyncratic opportunity for us. that we see a pretty healthy line of sight to continue to execute on regardless of what the industry does.

And then new pricing.

On the new pricing, so far, what we're seeing so far with model year '26 coming in, and on to our lots is about 3% to 6%. I would say there's probably an outside probability of additional price increases should tariffs maybe start to trickle in, in a more pronounced way in the back half. But right now, 3% to 6% is what we're orienting around on a like-for-like basis on the new side.

Very helpful.

I agree with the pricing. I think the used -- the runway on used is exponential. As we get better and smarter about the procurement and get sharper on the pricing from the onset, we think that there's at least half a turn left in our LTM turn. Our LTM turn was like 3.2%. We think we can get 3.7% to 4%. We have $684 million on the ground today, and our used business is up materially. So we think we're going to find that high watermark. On the new side, this is where there's a heavy debate in our building. I think the rest of the camp believes that it's going to be more of the same. And I expect there to be -- I think that the new retail could be closer to 360,000, 365,000 a significant jump in 2026, but still relative to history, very low, very low. In fact, pre-COVID, the industry was doing 445,000 units. So when we talk about 360,000 and everybody is a little nervous about that number, I'm not. There's one principal reason why I feel strongly about this. If you study the trade cycles of RVs over the history of time, they're 3.5 to 4 years. And when you look at these troughs in the market, the troughs are created by people just deciding not to trade. In this particular trade trough, which is what I call it, there's really 3 functional things that happened. One, people that bought in 2020, 2021 and 2022 during COVID, paid a premium for their unit. Everybody knows that everything was selling at a higher price than it is today. That created a little bit of negative equity, a lot of negative equity for consumers. Two, the interest rate environment in the first 2/3 of COVID was close to free money. And when people came back to trade last week, last month or last year, at 800 credit score is still looking at a 799 rate. Number three, with the pricing on new moving around so much, the used market hadn't really stabilized. we believe after 2 clear pricing strategies, '23 to '24, which is a drop, '24 to '25, which was a stabilization and '25 to '26, which is an increase, shows me that the new values have stabilized. With all that being said, I think you'll see a little bit of a flurry of people that bought in '20, '21 and '22 finally trading after sitting on the sidelines for longer than normal.

I want to follow up on the interest rate comment. I think a lot of people here at the conference are maybe more familiar with light vehicle average loan duration like 68 months. Maybe just let us know what the average duration is for an RV loan and the impact that interest rates can have on monthly payment there relative to light vehicles. What has been the impact of the higher rates? Has that been really driving a lot, do you think, of the new ASP pressure? And as interest rates come back down, what implications will that have for unit volume, ASPs, SG&A as a percentage of gross? And what have you maybe baked into that 360,000 unit assumption relative to interest rates?

So I think interest rates, and I'm praying to the goods so that my floor plan interest is lower. But I'm hoping that we see 0.5 point to a point between now and the same time a year from now. I have no idea what the cadence is going to be, but that's my hope. That's not in my forecast in our financials. But a portion of that, probably half of it is how I get to 360.

Yes. And I would say we are -- as we just spoke about '26, I would say we're hopeful rates would start to come down, but I think hope has been a little bit of a tired strategy across the industry for a couple of years now. So we're expecting that to be more of the same. But when we think about the impact on ASPs and really what's driving that drive down to affordability, it's 2 things. It's the interest rates, to your point, and it's the invoice cost. On the interest rate side, the normal term of these loans is anywhere from 180 to 240 months, but the average life of the paper is anywhere from 4 to 4.5 years.

I want to make sure people heard that because Ryan pointed it out, if a light duty is 68 months, we're 210 to 240 Yes, there are some that take 180 months. So when you think about our average selling price at less than $40,000 in the $40,000 or lower and you're financing that unit anywhere from 180 to 240 months. When I hear people describe our industry as like it's a luxury, it's really not. It's -- the average payment in the $239 to $339 range for a vacation. And so people don't necessarily think about it as a luxury. However, discretionary dollars do matter. And so when a rate comes down 0.25 point and my mortgage drops, it's not whether I'm going to be in the RV lifestyle or not, it's can I have a bigger, more feature-benefited unit. I keep coming back to interest rates don't determine whether people are in our industry or not, but it does determine what they buy, what the price point is.

And what we watch carefully along with, I'm sure everyone else is the 10-year, given that these loans have about a normal duration of about 5 years. They're priced essentially off of the 10-year, but more so the 5-year. And so there's 2 direct benefits from lower rates. One, on the prime rate, every 25 basis points is about $9 million of cash flow back into our business on essentially SOFR, whether it be the term loan or whether it be the floor plan or the mortgage line that we have. And then depending on what the market does with the 10-year, we'll see, but that will dictate retail rates, right, which will actually dictate consumer demand. So I think there's a couple of ways if we want to be optimistic about next year, which we are to win from an interest rate standpoint.

Great. You recently published a slide deck that lays out your case for mid-cycle earnings power of the company, envisioning $520 million of EBITDA with 200 stores. You have 20 like 199 stores, I think. But Bloomberg consensus has you at $278 million of EBITDA this year, $373 million in '26, $420 million in '27. When do you think the industry gets to mid-cycle? And what are your descriptions of mid-cycle? Because it's easy to say how many units of new RVs, but there's so much else that goes into it like the ASPs, what's going on in the used market. How do you define mid-cycle? And when do you think we can get to mid-cycle?

400,000 units is how I would define mid-cycle and 400,000 new units. And I know that you wanted to bifurcate the new versus the used. The used is pretty predictable. It ranges between 725,000 and 950,000. The 950,000 was at COVID -- during COVID. So it was a little exaggerated. That business is very predictable. And the way that we want you to think about our business is like layers of cake. At the bottom layer, the most important layer, the thing that holds everything up is the -- Good Sam business. And our -- Good Sam business, for those of you that are not familiar, it's an annuity business. Roadside assistance, warranty, insurance, club, credit card, it's a $100 million EBITDA business. The next most profitable part of our business is our service and parts operation. 72% margins on the labor, 37% on the blended parts. That business tends to stay within a tight band no matter what's happening with the market. Then you go to the used business. and the used business is foundationally solid. We know we had a tough '24. We elected to pull back. You're seeing that growth. We expect that growth to continue so that we could have a more predictable earnings power. The cherry on top is what happens on the new side. And the difference between us making $350 million or $450 million and $500 million is, is the industry selling 330,000 units or 400,000 units plus. And that's really how to think about the cycle. Everything else inside of our business is bolstered by it when it happens, but it isn't it isn't really as much of a driver as people would think. The installed base of 5.6 million RVers, that's what the first 3 layers are built on. The last layer is built on first-time buyers coming into the market.

And I want to make one important point on that mid-cycle analysis and that earnings power is that there is -- and I think it's underappreciated, but there is really no significant onus, if at all, for ASPs to bounce back dramatically from where they are today, right? So they don't have to go back to 40. They don't have to go back to 40. They can be back to that 38, 39 type range. And so that, I think, to us is just another buffer, if you will, in terms of how we try to conservatively think about the earnings power of this business through a cycle.

I wanted to maybe ask about these one franchise store strategy that you've gotten into in a bigger way in recent years. Maybe talk about what is driving that. I thought that was one of the differentiating factors previously was that unlike in the light vehicle industry, you sell multiple brands, Marks across, but it does seem to be behind some of the share gain here. So what has been the result of that strategy?

When we look at the top 100, 150 trade areas in the U.S., depending on the saturation of that market and the difficulty to travel it, i.e., a Houston, a Dallas, Chicago and L.A., it's difficult to have more than one Camping World in the market. If you went to like Des Moines, Iowa or Panama City, Florida, you don't need to have more than one. And what was frustrating to us is that we see high levels of registrations in certain markets -- and we don't want to cannibalize ourselves, but we want to -- but we do want to sell more. And so this idea came to us a couple of years ago that if I thought about the Camping World store as the hub, what are the spokes that are off of it. And we started to test different, what I would call, side-by-side strategies. And what we've learned through the entire process is with certain manufacturers, Jayco is one of them, Forest River is another one that we can open up a small, low-cost, low fixed cost, low footprint store, Jayco of Macon or Forest River of Minneapolis. And they could be a mile or 2 away from our existing Camping World store. They operate differently. They don't say Camping World anywhere on them. The facilities look different. There's no retail experience. And the incremental revenue that we generate are for people that either, a, don't want to buy from Camping World because they want to buy from what they call a local dealer and/or a high proficiency of product knowledge from the salesperson because they're focusing on 1 brand and not 7. We have seen from an NOI standpoint, they're some of our better ones because they don't come with all the belt and bells and whistles around it. How much we want to invest in that going forward, we still think there's tons of white space for Camping World. I mean, just tons. And as we get back into acquisition mode again, we think that the primary priority is to open up Camping World stores. And then if we find these tuck-in markets where we can make some small acquisitions where we can change the name without putting a bunch of capital in to Forest River of or Jayco of or Keystone of, happy to do that.

I thought to ask about the health of the competition. There have been some years in the past where the health of the competition has impacted Camping World. On the positive side, you've been able to buy some Lazyday stores, et cetera. But also there were times where you were concerned that they were overextended on inventory, what that could do to used pricing. And so you kind of pulled back on used acquisition, impacted your volumes and -- because you painted a picture on the 2Q call of your volume growth being so differentiated, up 20% in a market that's down double digit, I just thought to ask -- and you also mentioned that the reason why you might be doing better is because you've got the RVs that people want the lower ASP units. They don't -- I'm thinking, well, they might be like out over their skis on inventory. They might need to slash prices. And if they do, do that, it could hurt Camping World. So I just thought to ask how the competitors are doing and if it's a positive or negative for you.

Yes. So the way I would characterize it, and Marcus, feel free to jump in is I would characterize them as essentially frozen to a certain extent or paralyzed from a certain extent, whether it be from a working capital standpoint or willingness to procure inventory, whether it be new or used, which I think is a pretty large distinction from what you described earlier, which was having too much inventory, right, and having this kind of law of inventory over inventory situation, which we're through that, right? That was kind of a period of time in '22 and '23. So now we're essentially, as an industry, kind of trudging along the bottom with, I think, the risk appetite, if you want to frame it up that way, from other dealers in our view is just is not there, and we're playing offense, and we're taking advantage of that.

We need the other dealers to be healthy. It's just -- it's a better environment for the consumer, a more competitive landscape gives the consumer confidence that they're getting the best deal and the best price. So that's really important, at least to me, to keep the industry strong. I think the dealers sat back in the end of '24 and '25 and didn't take a lot of inventory risks. And if you look at the shipments in the last 60 days, they're starting to get stronger. The confidence of other dealers are starting to get stronger. And we don't believe that the strength of our competitors comes at the expense of us. We think the boats rise for everybody. We have a little bit of a head start. We do know there's a number of dealers that maybe are thinner on working capital than they'd like to be, but I see them resuscitating themselves here. We did buy those Lazydays stores. And typically, our model has been to buy distressed assets. That's been sort of my go-to move for 25 years. Those Lazyday stores, just to give everybody just an example. It's a public company still trades out there today. We bought 5 of their locations. The trailing 12 months of those 5 were negative $10 million when we closed on them in February of this year. We opened them full stop in March and through July, those same 5 stores have made $5 million. The environment is the same. What's different is that we understand the used game and we understand the service game. And so as we look to grow our business, which we're starting to crank back up into growth mode, we want to make sure that our existing stores are performing better. We need more productivity per rooftop. We're really finding white space either with differentiated product lineup or geography and that we're capitalizing on whatever weakness may be out there. But we do need the other dealers to be stronger, and we think they're getting stronger, faster.

Okay. I've got some more questions, but why don't I pause and see if there might be any in the audience for Marcus and Brett. Maybe while they're thinking of a question, I'll ask on capital allocation priorities. You raised some equity a while back. You used it, I think, a combination of parking in the floor plan, but also acquire used vehicle inventory. As you generate cash going forward, as the EBITDA recovers, what is your prioritization still toward kind of debt paydown? Or what are you thinking?

3.9. That's where I need to get the leverage in the next 24 months, back to 3.9 or below. And that's a combination of improving the earnings. Our model this year was sell more and make more. We're going to have that model in '26. We will sell more, and we will make more in '26. And build cash on the balance sheet and have the appropriate amount of debt paydown. We've paid down $70 million in the last, call it, 8 months, 9 months. I had a goal of -- we had a goal of getting to $100 million. We still want to obviously shoot for that goal. But building cash on the balance sheet is priority one and making more money.

Yes. No, I agree.

And by building cash on the -- do you really -- is the floor plan offset account, is that what you mean you say?

No, just literally having investors like the ones in this room see cash on the balance sheet. So when they look at the debt, they see net debt leverage coming down. They know that, that cash is not essential to the operations of the business. So it's not like we're robbing Peter to pay Paul. We want to have good working capital in our used and our -- we own about $250 million net of mortgage without mortgage. We have another $200 million of parts. And we have about $600 million of use. We ended the quarter with about $118 million of cash. I'd like to see that number continue to grow, and I'd like to see our debt continue to pay down. But 3.9, I'll just keep saying it internally and externally. We got to get back to 3.9 or below fast.

And one thing I wanted to ask on is, I mean, you've been very acquisitive over the years, and this is a sector roll-up opportunity. There's a lot of things to be said for that. You get the volume purchase discounts whereas competitors don't. On the other hand, we've also seen you buy stores and close stores at the same time. And is that because you didn't anticipate closing the stores? Or are you accomplishing something by opening and closing by like enhancing your geographic profile, buying better locations? Or how should we think about the pace of acquisitions kind of going forward?

I'll start with the first. Every acquisition that we make doesn't always work out. And out of every 20, could not work out. And what you'll find with our company is when we make a mistake, we don't need to have pride of authorship or we just double down and continue to not have it work. Two, we're also picking up brands when we consolidate markets, when we buy a dealer. And so if you take a big store in Dayton, Ohio, as an example, and we buy somebody not 30 miles away, we know that if we do put them together, we end up building a giant supercenter. I think the last piece is this business in its DNA is an acquirer. We don't really know how to do anything else. We operate and we acquire and we operate and we acquire. And our goal was to try to scare $7 billion in top line this year. That's definitely a goal for next year. I know we don't put out guidance, but that's a goal. Part of the way we do that is we have to have ASP growth, we have to have same-store sales growth, and we have to have acquisition growth. And what we want to be careful that we don't do is we don't ever make acquisitions that are just going to chase revenue. So if you told me that we could go buy a big MotorHome dealer who makes good money and the guy just wants to throw us the keys, we would probably pass. That's not in our DNA. We don't -- that's not -- that's like asking McDonald's to buy a hotdog company. That's just not what they do. And so we have to stay disciplined and we have to stay true. We think our earnings power is going to come in the next 12 months from used, from growth in ASP on new and from some innovative things that we're working on in -- good Sam, which doesn't get talked about enough. And whether that's opening up different parts of the risk profile of -- Good Sam or making acquisitions or getting into flow-through partnerships with big private equity that wants to have loan origination and wants to make money. Good Sam really needs to be a Spark, used needs to be a Spark and the ASPs have to come back.

Okay. Well, great. We are out of time. So please join me in thanking Marcus and Brett.

Thank you.

Thank you. Appreciate it.