Polaris Inc. (PII) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. Good morning, everybody. Thank you for joining us. I'm Joe Altobello, a leisure research analyst here at Raymond James. I'm very pleased to introduce our next presentation from Polaris. Today, we have CEO, Mike Speetzen; and CFO, Bob Mack. Welcome to you both. Polaris is a leader in the powersports and marine industries with a presence in off-road vehicles, snowmobiles and motorcycles as well as pontoon and deck boats. The past few years have been a challenge for both the company and the industry as it's how to navigate a softening post-COVID demand and heightened dealer inventories. As we look ahead into 2025, the removal of election uncertainty and the prospect of lower interest rates could serve as tailwinds, though there are still a number of question marks, including tariffs, which we'll talk about later. With that as a backdrop, management does have a few slides that they'd like to go over to provide an overview of the company, after which we'll dive into a fireside chat format, and there will be a chance for the audience to ask questions. And with that, let me hand things over to Mike.

Okay. Well, thanks, Joe. Thanks for everybody coming. I'm just going to cover a little bit of who we are, what we're focused on in 2025, what we think the value proposition, and then we'll jump into some Q&A with Bob. Joe did a nice job of introducing us. We are the #1 player in powersports. Next competitor, we're larger than by a factor of 2. So that provides a pretty good position. You can see the breakdown. Obviously, our off-road vehicle business is the predominant portion of the portfolio and where we hold pretty much #1 across the board. Innovation is the lifeblood of our company. You really don't have to look too far. You look over the past 3 years. We've renovated in just about every category across the entire platform, whether it's motorcycles, boats, off-road vehicles. We've also gone into new categories that other competitors are not present in, things like the Polaris XPEDITION as well as the RANGER Extreme Duty vehicle. And so I think that's a testament to the fact that it's a big focus for us. It's about 4.5% of our revenue that we put into R&D and an area that we work really hard to preserve no matter how tough the external market conditions are. You can see our financial performance for last year, not a great year by any stretch. We saw revenue decline by almost $2 billion, and it was really driven by the fact that we had our category slowing, and we took the lead in making sure that we rightsized dealer inventories. Luckily, a majority of our competitors either followed suit or have followed suit, which is really important because we share a dealer network. About 70% of my dealers, we've got 1 or 2 or 3 of our competitors in it. But we usually are the largest component of their sales. And given a slowing consumer market and raising interest rates, it was imperative to make sure that we manage shipments to get that dealer inventory in a much better position. Now I'll make another comment on that. Our dealer inventory was not out of control by any measure. We look at day's sales outstanding as one of many measures. At the peak in 2024, we were at about 130 to 135 days. That is still below where we were pre-pandemic. But given higher ASPs on the vehicles and given higher interest rates, and what we saw as a slowing broader macro as well as consumer discretionary, we knew that we needed to get the inventory count down even further. And that's why we really targeted to get around 100 days of supply. I feel good about where we ended the year. And really in 2025, our big focus is making sure that the snowmobile inventory levels, which are relatively small to the whole category, continue to get rightsized. We've got a strategically global footprint, which I think in times like this, when we've got the tariffs going on, can serve as an advantage because we've got the ability to move production if we need to. It's not simple and it's not for free, but it does give us some of that flexibility because we don't have a high level of concentration. We do have a pretty sizable U.S. footprint. Capital discipline in terms of how we deploy the cash flow. The #1 priority for us is investing in ourselves, whether that's in the capital and the facilitization that we have or the R&D that really drives the innovation in the company. We know that we get the best payoff there. Returning capital to shareholders is a top priority. I'm proud of the fact that we've got now our 29th year of an increasing dividend. We're a dividend aristocrat. We know that, that's important to a subset of our shareholders, but I also think it's important to everybody because it demonstrates the strength and confidence we have in our cash flow generation. Doing anything different with the dividend as we got into guidance for 2025 wasn't even a question. It was a given. And so we'll remain committed to that as we move forward. And then obviously, share repurchases and M&A become that third lever. Right now, both are in a bit of a pause as we assess the current environment. And I can tell you that M&A is probably in the way, way off in the background. I couldn't see pursuing anything at this point. If we were to see extra cash flow, we're either going to pay debt down or we would lean into share repurchases. And then on the right are just some stats about the company. We got 15,000 employees. We actually did take a reduction in force last year given the slowing market conditions. We took out about 10% of our workforce, both hourly and salary. We used it as an opportunity to slim down our organization. We took out about 20% of our Vice President level. And we did that to allow Bob and I to be a lot closer to each of the segments of our business and quite frankly, get the business ready for when the rebound comes, we've got the ability to leverage into that. We're a 2-step distribution. We work through a global dealer network. You can see there's about 4,000 dealers across the globe, about 2,500 in North America. And we work hard to cultivate these dealers, build relationships as well as make sure that they remain financially viable. And I'm proud of the work we've done over this past year, and we'll continue to do in 2025 to make sure we protect one of our most strategic assets. This is a breakdown of the company, $7.2 billion in revenue last year. You can see almost 80% of our revenue comes from off-road vehicles. You can see the brands underneath in terms of RZR, RANGER, XPEDITION, Sportsman ATV. This also includes our snowmobile business. Snow has been pretty heavily impacted the last couple of years as a result of the poor snow conditions. It's interesting, snow has actually started to pick up in the Midwest. It's a little late to sell snowmobiles. A lot of people aren't going to take that risk, but it does mean people are out riding again, which is good because we see it show up in oil and parts sales as well as selling jackets and ski gear. Off-Road or On-Road is about 14% of the portfolio. This is actually 4 different businesses in there. You've got Slingshot. Slingshot is primarily a North American product, almost entirely U.S., some sales into Mexico. You've got Indian motorcycles. Indian is very global. About 40% of Indian's retail goes into Europe and Australia. And then you have Aixam and Goupil. And Aixam and Goupil are French-based businesses. These are small vehicles. Goupil is all-electric delivery vans. And Aixam is essentially -- it looks like a smart car, but made for more rural areas and dense cities. And for people who don't have driver's license, they're technically considered a scooter. And then our marine portfolio, which makes up about 7% of revenue. It's interesting. This business has seen some pretty significant reductions as the market slowed. We were one of the first to get out in front of the inventory challenges with our dealers. We feel good about where we're at. We have reinnovated every platform across Bennington, Godfrey and Hurricane. We were just at the Miami Boat Show, very positive reception to a lot of the new products that the Hurricane business is coming out with. We've got a competitor who has a marine platform that they're trying to sell. They're losing a ton of money on. We make a ton of money in this business. Even at the low points we're at right now, we're still making high single-digit EBITDA in this business. Strong cash flow. We've repaid a good portion of the original investment we made back in 2018. So really proud of that portfolio. So in terms of our focus in 2025, dealer network, I talked about this a lot. I'm not going to belabor it, but making sure that they remain healthy, that we remain their OEM of choice, top of mind. I just was with our #1 dealer network right now, meeting the new CEO and the operating guys have been there for a long time. We've always had a really strong relationship. And they remarked on how we are #1 in terms of our sales team, #1 in terms of ease of doing business, and they stress that we just got to continue to work that partnership. They also stress that we've got to make sure innovation remains top of mind. It's why Polaris became #1 coming out of the financial crisis in '08 and '09, and we know that's important, and we're not going to back off. We fell behind back in 2016, 2017 and allowed a couple of our competitors to come into some key segments. We are now back in front. We've innovated in categories others don't have. So they're going to have to play catch up, and we're going to continue to maintain that lead. The other thing we're going to do is stay focused on making our company better. We developed a lot of bad habits during COVID, supply chain disruption, trying to get product out, doing anything we could to get product into the hands of our dealers and ultimately our consumers. But the reality is we probably didn't have the best habits before that. And so we've really taken a step back, and we're starting down in our factories with reinvigorating a truly environment. And it is not some super complicated, sophisticated thing. This is about making life easier for the operator who is assembling our vehicles. Some of it is as simple as how we move and position components that they need to add to the vehicle at the line. It's complex because we have a big plant network, and we've got a lot of folks that have to get trained as we go through this. But we've already seen improvements coming through. Our rolled first pass yield through the factories. Our schedule attainment has improved to better than where we were at before COVID happened. So our confidence and ability to deliver coming out of our factories is raising. Now it's about driving efficiency. You saw that last year. we saw massive volume declines. And when you look at the EBITDA drop rate, we held that thing to around 30%. And quite frankly, we're doing the same again in 2025. And I think that's a testament to the team's ability to really get in there and get after cost. And then the last thing is really driving working capital improvements. Bob talked about this on the earnings call. Cash is king right now. We had a lot of inefficiencies from an inventory standpoint. We're working through all that, both in raw as well as finished goods and getting that work down so that we free up cash flow. That gives us the ability to make some decisions around debt paydown or share repurchases depending on where the broader macro is heading. So we're crystal clear. It's not that we're not going to pay attention to, obviously, everything that's going on with tariffs and the broader macro. We certainly do. But we're going to really focus in on controlling all the levers that we have to make sure that we're keeping our business in a great spot and that we're positioning the business to come out of the powersports recession in a much better spot. This is our strategy. It's pretty simple. It's about delivering for customers. It's about making sure that we maintain and even widen the gap between us and #2 in the powersports and then really make sure we're doing everything we can to position the company for the long term. And then the last thing I want to talk about is why invest in Polaris. Now we're going to have a Capital Markets Day next week. So I'd encourage you if you have the opportunity to dial in. You'll hear a lot more from me. You'll hear from Bob. You'll also hear from Marc Suarez. Marc runs operations for our Off-Road business. So you'll get an opportunity to hear a little bit more about the things we're doing inside the company to make sure that we're running the business much better. Obviously, when I look at the value that this company should be at, there are some things in the near term that are in the way. I mean tariffs is certainly -- it's the big elephant in the room that we're going to have to address. But once we get through that, I think the key is looking at this business, we've got the best dealer network out there, and that's created a pretty big moat. When you look at the level of innovation and the pure dominance we have in the industry in terms of setting the tone, defining new categories and then continuing to evolve those categories to put us in even a better position. That is something that we've regained the lead in. We've regained the confidence and commitment in, and we'll continue to push that going forward. We are focused on improving the business. I know it's tough to sit here and talk about that when we just had a $2 billion drop in revenue, and we've got a challenging '25. But as we get to the other side of this and the business starts to grow again, which we're confident that the market will, we believe that we're going to be in a position to deliver much better-sustained margins and get ourselves up into that mid- to high teens EBITDA. And then from a capital deployment and balance sheet perspective, ROIC doesn't look great today because of where we're at from an earnings standpoint. But if you look back over the last couple of years, you look at the trajectory that we've got as a company, it's a really good investment return. And with the capital deployment strategy around investing in the company that generates high returns as well as the dividend as well as share repurchases, that puts us in a really, really good spot. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Joe, and we'll go through any questions.

Thanks for that, Mike. I guess first question, and you touched on this a little bit in your prepared remarks, but the retail environment, it sounds like you're expecting that to continue to be challenging. How do you see that playing out for the full year? And maybe how does that differ between the first half and the second half?

Well, I mean, before tariffs entered the equation, I think we -- the trajectory we were seeing in the fourth quarter, we weren't expecting to all of a sudden just because January 1 hits, move back in a different direction. And so we knew that the first half of this year was probably going to continue to be challenging. And then the view was that we'd start to stabilize as we got into the back half. Now snow is a whole different category within that, but I'm talking more broadly around what we were expecting for the motorcycles, ORV and the marine portfolios. Tariffs has put a whole different lens across this, both specific to the company in terms of how do we handle the costs that get added as a result of the increase coming out of China as well as Mexico and Canada and then the retaliatory. But I think it's a bigger question around the health of the consumer. Consumer confidence was already low. We knew that consumers are struggling because they've got elevated debt levels, interest rates are high, inflation is persistent. At our earnings call, I made a comment about inflation being around 2.5%. And then I think right after that, the print came out at 3%. So it's actually kind of moved in the wrong direction. And I think there's a broad consensus that if these tariffs really remain in effect, especially with Mexico and Canada, inflation is going to start to move back up. And I think that's why you see the market reacting the way it is, both to our category, but even more broadly. So it's really tough to make a call on the consumer right now. It certainly is getting worse, not better. And so we're spending a lot of time thinking through both near term and long term and how we contend with the tariffs and the relevant moves that we're going to have to make.

So the EPS guidance for this year, $1.10, obviously didn't anticipate any additional tariffs. We've seen them go in place today. Can you talk about what your exposure is on the tariff front and what you could possibly do to mitigate that?

I mean, we went through a lot of numbers on the earnings call, so I'd kind of point you back to that. I mean the key is we've got about 60% of our off-road production comes out of Mexico. It's about 1/3 of the production for the company because we've got other businesses that are solely located in the U.S. We've done a couple of things. There were near-term things that we did where we got as much content on the water coming from China because there is a grace period before they will enact the China tariffs. And we also repositioned a fair amount of inventory out of Mexico up into Laredo, Texas. We have a pretty good flow where stuff coming out of our factory moves to our distribution centers, but we picked that flow up. We pushed our production schedules as much as we could. And then we also tend to have vehicles that are going through a light rework process, having decals and hang tags and things like that put on. We repositioned all that into Texas to allow us to avoiding the tariffs. And when you take that, plus we've got about 100 days of inventory sitting at our dealers, we should be able to insulate consumers at least from a short-term price impact. But the reality is, if there's a 25% tariff on vehicles, I'm shipping up from Mexico, we're going to have to figure out what a surcharge is. And the team is working through that. We've got some preliminary numbers and strategies around which categories and where. If this looks like it's going to be more sustained, there's probably a couple of steps we would go through in terms of production moves out of Mexico. First of all, we couldn't move -- we could move everything, but that takes years. I mean our square footage down to Mexico is 2x what we have at our Huntsville, Alabama plant. There are some near-term things that we could move that leverage the existing lines that we have in Huntsville that we would obviously look at as a potential, but it's not free, and it's not easy. And I sure want to make sure that these things are in place for the long term before I go and commit us to spinning that. Now -- it's hard to -- I mean, these things just went in place. We're trying to watch the news as much as we can. Canada and China were quick to retaliate. Canada put theirs in 2 steps, and I think that just reflects that they think there's a chance that something can get negotiated away in between. Mexico came out and said they're going to put theirs in place on Sunday. So I'm still holding out a little bit of hope that at least from a North America standpoint, we come to a different conclusion. I think China, I think that's going to stay in place. And we've been under tariff regime since 2018. I think we talked about in our guidance that we had $60 million or $70 million worth of tariffs built in from the List 301, 1, 2, 3 and part of 4. And we have been working that down. We worked out a couple of hundred million dollars of procurement out of China. We've gone to alternative sources. So we still have about $0.5 billion coming into the company, half of that goes into Mexico, half goes into the U.S. that half into the U.S. is what fell under the prior tariff regime. We have continued plans to migrate out of China. The reality is, is that these supply chains were built up over decades. You don't just turn around and get out of them in a matter of a year or two, but the team has plans in place. It doesn't get us completely out, but it does take the level of exposure down pretty dramatically. I've annoyed Bob. He's gotten the benefit of being the head of our tariff team. It touches so many different parts of the business, but he sits in a good spot to be able to understand all the implications. We are looking at everything. I mean we're looking at transfer pricing. We're looking -- we looked heavily at free trade zones. Those obviously aren't going to work under this new tariff methodology. And then we're looking at what do we do in Washington. I don't think now is the time. I think there's enough stuff going on that are not necessarily paying a lot of attention, especially to small companies like us. But there will come a time when we have to be in D.C., making our voice heard and continuing to carry the banner that we are the only American powersports company, and we need to make sure we're not getting disadvantaged by trade policy.

You mentioned surcharges, have those gone into place yet?

No. We've gone through an evaluation process. It's tricky. It impacts how much promo you put in place. So there's a number of things. And the team has come up with a first pass that Bob and I also have to spend a fair amount of time running through with them.

Yes. But like Mike said, I mean, we've got 100 days of inventory on average in the dealers. We've got a fair amount of products sitting in Texas right now from the Mexico plant and then 40-plus percent of our off-road business, the product is made in the U.S., snowmobiles are made in the U.S., Indian motorcycles are made in the U.S. So we're not as exposed as some of our competitors to Mexico. The thing we didn't talk about tariff-wise, the steel and aluminum tariff, what you're probably hearing as you've been here in a couple of days, the bulk of the tariff really is on imported raw steel and aluminum from outside the U.S. Most U.S. companies don't import a tremendous amount of foreign steel and aluminum. But U.S. providers raised prices immediately to match what it would cost bringing it in tariff. So we're about 60% hedged right now for our steel buy for the year. So we've been able to mute some of that impact. We've actually done some more advanced buys pre-tariff, same thing with aluminum. So I think relatively muted impact of the steel and aluminum tariff. The piece that isn't getting as much attention, there's a derivative tariff on components coming in that have steel and aluminum content in them. That's a little more challenging because you're trying to figure out, well, how much -- if you're bringing something in from Germany, how much steel is in it, and it's German steel, so it's going to be tariff. And so that's not in place. It's in place theoretically, but the government in its wisdom does not know how to calculate it yet. So they've deferred the tariff until they can actually figure out how to charge it. So that one is a little more complicated. We don't think that's going to have a significant impact on us at the moment.

So if I think about your off-road vehicle business, your largest competitor is actually relatively more exposed to tariffs since they manufacture in Mexico and Canada. On the flip side, other competitors are primarily Japanese, which somehow get around the tariffs. So does that put you at a disadvantage relative to those other players?

Yes. I mean it's part of the argument we made back in 2018 and '19. Now we did -- at that time under the prior Trump administration, we did get some dispensation. I think they gave us about a year, 1.5 years of exemptions on a portion of the tariffs. But the message was loud and clear that get out of China. Now I think they understood that there's a portion of the supply chain that doesn't exist elsewhere, and we're going to have to work through that. And hopefully, we can demonstrate to them that we took them serious and we did make moves. But it is certainly creating some disparity in the marketplace and it's disadvantaging the 2 largest players and favoring some of the smaller guys.

There is -- if you look at some of the Japanese players have assembly facilities in Mexico, as does the one Chinese player in the market, CF Moto. So they'll have to deal with the Mexico tariff the same way we do. CF Moto will also have to deal a lot of their production comes directly out of China. And now the 2 successive 10% tariff increases on China that cover every product, those will apply to them. So it will be relatively, I think, a level field with pockets of advantage and disadvantage depending on where people manufacture stuff. I think the challenge is going to be, to Mike's point, really working through that with the administration and Congress to make sure they understand some of what they're doing, while not intentional, is creating anomalies in the marketplace that actually disadvantage U.S. companies.

So if I look at your EBITDA margin outlook for this year, this was before tariffs, obviously, but it was calling for upwards of about a 2-point reduction year-over-year from '24 to '25. This is a little bit like asking, this is a link and how the play was. But if we put tariffs aside, can you talk about some of the puts and takes from a margin standpoint that you're seeing this year?

Sure. So one of the anomalies we have Polaris, if you're not familiar with the company, Polaris' bonus program is kind of broader and deeper than most companies. It's kind of how the company was historically run. We have a profit-sharing program that we pay down to all the way through the factory employees in the U.S. and then management employees around the world. In 2024 or 2023 year, 2023 was a bit of a challenging year coming out of COVID. That was like kind of a 75% year. '24, we paid a 50% bonus. And so coming back into '25, there's about a $100 million headwind between cash and just the repricing -- not repricing, but equity compensation just with the lower stock price, the GAAP accounting for that got a little more expensive. So that's a headwind, and it shows up through the whole business because a lot of it goes to COGS because it's going to factory employees. So that was a big part of -- if you really looked at a normalized '24 versus '25 for the dynamics of the bonus, EBITDA would have been down $30-ish million on a $100 million revenue drop. So not really bad performance. It's really this anomaly. Other than that, we set last year in '24, we had a target of $150 million of cost takeout of factories. We actually took out $280 million. The challenge was as production went down, obviously, absorption went down. So it didn't -- as much of it did not flow through the P&L as we would have liked. We've got another $40 million in cost reductions this year. And again, a fair amount of unabsorbed costs that's getting difficult to offset. We're in a bit of an anomaly. This business has historically operated where production, shipment and retail are generally equivalent with a little bit of inventory movement at the dealer end. This year, in '25, in '24, we -- to cut dealer inventory, we shipped a fair amount less than we retailed, and that's how you take the dealer inventory down. In -- but to do that, because you can't just shut production off, we built factory inventory. So going into '25, we very intentionally set the plan where the shipments are going to be less than retail, primarily in marine and snow, as Mike talked about, but then production is going to be a fair amount less than ship so that we can drive that factory inventory out of the system, which will generate about $300 million of cash with reduction in working capital. So as we get -- if we can get back to kind of just a more normal cycle in '26, the math on volume will start to look a lot better. And I think a lot of the things we've done will start to be tailwinds. It's just right now, we don't have the volume to see that come through.

Let me just clarify one thing. So when we talk about this incentive comp, we have had a program in place since pretty much the inception of the company, and it's actually called profit share kind of below the senior executive level. So it is a part of the compensation package, and this goes all the way into an hourly worker. We also provide stock to employees as part of retirement through our employee stock ownership program, the ESOP, which owns about 3% or 4% of the company. We want employees to have skin in the game. And this last year, they got impacted by the fact that largely outside of our control, but the markets were not performing. And so I just want to make sure that, that's clear because these aren't bonuses that give people an above market level of comp. This is part of that calculation in terms of valuing the employee the right way, making sure that they feel accountable to the company and benefit or get impacted by the performance.

I promise we take questions from the audience. And unfortunately, we probably have time for maybe one. So if somebody does have a question, raise your hand. Okay. I guess we're good. Mike, Bob, thank you. Thanks everybody for joining us on the conference.

Thanks Joe.