Michael Speetzen
Analyst · Raymond James
Thanks J.C., and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. We saw an increasingly challenging environment in the second quarter, resulting in sales and adjusted EPS that came in below our expectations. We will take some time this morning to talk through those results, provide an update on our annual guidance as well as discuss the outlook for our long-term 2026 targets considering the current environment. First, I want to start with the second quarter results. Sales were down 12%, impacted by actions we took in response to macroeconomic and industry headwinds. These headwinds included persistent inflation in addition to a prolonged cycle with elevated interest rates. We've seen consumer confidence weaken, especially for larger discretionary purchases, and as a result, the industry has seen lower retail. Additionally, dealers are conservatively managing their inventory due to the higher flooring costs driven by higher interest rates and are reducing orders accordingly. As we said at the start of the year, dealer inventory was our anchor. And if we saw softer retail than we expected, we would adjust shipments accordingly to help protect dealers. We started that process in Q2 and have now adjusted our full year shipment outlook given a lower outlook for retail. As a result, we have revised our full year 2024 guidance down to reflect the current environment as well as the counter actions we have taken to aggressively manage costs. While this is disappointing, it reflects a more challenging retail environment than we or the industry expected. As I've reiterated several times, we are committed to maintaining dealer inventory at healthy levels, which is why we adjusted shipments and supported inventory in the field with increased promotional activity. We have also implemented more flooring support for dealers to assist with the cost of inventory they're currently carrying. On a positive note, we saw favorable results associated with our efforts to gain efficiencies within our manufacturing facilities, particularly with logistics and materials and were able to further reduce manufacturing spend in response to lower volumes. These savings partially offset the negative effects of lower net price and the loss of manufacturing cost absorption in the quarter. We also surgically reduced operating costs recently to rightsize our cost structure to better match the current demand environment and help streamline our business. Year-to-date, our actions have eliminated 8% of our salaried workforce and we have reduced certain discretionary spending areas such as travel. I was intentional with the word surgical. We took great efforts to make sure we were strategic in eliminating redundancies and preserving key R&D investments. We have seen this before and know that staying on the gas with innovation is key to emerging as a stronger company when the market stabilizes. We estimate these actions equate to over $100 million in structural changes that will be an ongoing benefit and help offset a portion of the headwind associated with lower volumes. Before I move on from this slide, let me close by saying that we were crystal clear at the start of the year. If retail played out below expectations, we would cut shipments to protect dealer inventory. Unfortunately, retail has proven weaker than anyone expected, and we acted to address the market dynamics, which has us bringing our full year guidance down. Bob will cover our guidance in more detail later. I want to spend some time today talking about the strategy we laid out in early 2022 and the progress that we've made. We continue to believe this strategy will help us generate profitable growth, strengthen our position within the powersports industry and generate positive shareholder returns. In fact, our focused strategy has guided choices from elevating the customer experience through innovation, to improving our operations and more recently, focusing on making our business more efficient. It has also guided our actions to carefully manage dealer inventory in a way that supports the profitability of our dealers while continuing to deliver the best customer experience. Despite significant progress on these strategic priorities, the timing to achieve our financial targets has become uncertain given the numerous external headwinds driving this downward part of the cycle. At the time we gave our 5-year financial targets in early 2022, we did not anticipate a powersports and marine downturn. We remain committed to our financial objectives to grow sales mid-single digits, expand EBITDA margins to mid- to high teens, grow EPS double digits and deliver attractive ROIC in the mid-20s. What is in doubt is the timing of achieving these goals. We anticipate providing additional information around the timing of achieving these targets when we see more clarity in our end markets and a return to a more normalized environment. We believe the work we are doing today will position us to have higher earnings power and even stronger cash generation when a recovery occurs. I think it's important to cover some examples about how we are executing change to emerge stronger. First, we made some big decisions early on in my tenure as CEO to prune our portfolio of distractions outside of powersports resulting in the divestiture of GEM, Taylor-Dunn and Transamerican Auto Parts. As a result, we are more aligned and focused on powersports, which has enabled us to be more disciplined with capital allocation and investments, ensuring we have a strong and aligned portfolio will continue to be a focus for us. Rider-driven innovation is the key driver to winning customers, and we have proven time and time again that we raise the bar with the products that we offer. From the notable quality, durability and design upgrades, we made recently to our RZR, RANGER and Indian motorcycle lineups to category-defining products like our all-electric Ranger XP Kinetic, the industry's only extreme duty [Audio Gap] Polaris XPEDITION. We've worked hard to deliver these products with the highest quality standards in the industry with continued pre- and post-sales surveillance to enable the ongoing performance of our vehicles to enhance the customer experience. This includes leveraging industry-leading connected vehicles through our RIDE COMMAND+ platform. We don't believe anyone's come close to matching the level of innovation we brought to the market over the last several years. Turning to Agile and Efficient Operations. We have doubled down on our efforts to increase efficiency within our manufacturing, supply chain and logistics to support margin improvements. While some of these changes took longer that we would have liked, we are now seeing the progress we need to enable us to improve efficiency in the earnings power of Polaris into the future. Some examples of the actions we've taken are driving the near-term shoring -- near shoring specifically from Asia in the North America for both our Mexico and U.S. operations, leveraging new dealer vehicle unloading capabilities to save on specialized equipment charges and improving our suppliers' operational requirements such as on-time ship and packaging standards. Most importantly, in our 2 largest plants, lean model lines are identifying methods to significantly reduce line downtime and improve productivity. The changes are resulting in dramatic improvements in manufacturing efficiency of 15% or more. We are now achieving well north of 90% of our production schedules, which is a massive improvement on the performance from last year. While there is still much more to do, we are seeing much needed progress and targeted improvements, which gives me confidence that we will achieve the desired level of operational efficiencies. Lastly, we continue to execute against our capital allocation objectives and remain on track to our targeted share buyback goal. There are several headwinds that factored into our decision to push back the timing of our financial targets. For example, interest rates, along with stubborn inflation, have had a negative impact on consumer sentiment and discretionary spending. The share of customer wallet for discretionary items today is less than it was prior to 2021. Debt-to-income levels have reached a peak and consumers either maxed out or banks are hesitant to lend at these elevated levels. All these factors have negatively impacted the industry retail environment and resulted in a need to lower inventory dealerships. Elevated interest rates are also impacting our dealers. Higher interest on dealer inventory, coupled with weaker retail and broad macro concerns as many dealers looking to lower their inventory and costs. Even though dealer inventory is below pre-pandemic levels, dealers want to further reduce their inventory given higher per unit interest costs. Not surprisingly, this mix of lower retail and higher inventory has also resulted in elevated promotions across the industry to entice buyers. This is made worse by the number of OEMs dealing with heavy, noncurrent inventory in the channel, driving additional promotional activity. Consistent with last quarter, Polaris is still one of the healthiest in terms of days sales outstanding and noncurrent when looking at CDK data on the health of dealer inventory in the channel. We believe these headwinds are temporary and the question is timing, which we are watching carefully. I want to be clear, we're not abandoning the strategy we laid out for 2022. We remain committed to the journey and the financial targets we laid out. I have never been more confident in our company and remain optimistic about the future. Let me go back to the quarter and discuss recent North American retail trends we're seeing. Within Off-Road, Utility was flattish, driven by a decline in ATV, which was offset by strength in RANGER side-by-sides. We expect ATV share to pick up in the back half of the year with the recent launch of our all-new 2-Up Sportsman and believe RANGER will remain positive for the balance of the year. Recreation remains soft, particularly within RZR. While RZR has been weak, we have seen continued strength in Polaris XPEDITION, especially the North Star Edition vehicles. We believe we took over 5 points of share in the crossover category during the second quarter. On-Road retail was driven by softness in the heavyweight segment given recent competitive launches and the industry weakness. We expect On-Road Retail to modestly improve in the third quarter as we see the impact of the newly launched Indian Scout lineup. In Marine, we continue to see consumers pulling back on more expensive discretionary purchases. Given more of the boat-selling season is behind us now, we await feedback from dealers during the fall ordering season to understand their outlook for 2025. But we do not see a meaningful improvement in Marine for the remainder of 2024. I do want to touch on innovation one more time because we recently started shipping new products that we believe will positively impact our third quarter. The all-new Indian Scout models began shipping late in the second quarter and should help offset some of the pressure we're seeing in the heavyweight side of the business. In Off-Road, we recently started shipping the new 2025 full-size RANGER and the 2025 Sportsman 570 2-Up, built for both work and play boasting unmatched comfort, strength and versatility in the 2-Up space. The other product worth watching an off-road is the 2025 RZR XP lineup. We completely redesigned the product last year and are bringing trim-level enhancements this year as well as new features and lower pricing across all trim models. Again, this should be proof that our foot remains on the accelerator when it comes to innovation, while providing customers with the experience and added value they're looking for. I'm also excited for our [ Auto ] dealer meeting that will be held next week in Las Vegas, where we will share more product news and talk to dealers about the state of the business and plans moving forward. As noted earlier, we're working with dealers to decrease their inventory in this current environment and have decided to provide dealers with several months of free flooring to help offset the increased impact of flooring interest on their business. The decision will have a negative impact on margins, but we believe it's a worthwhile investment to help ensure our dealers are successful. We aim to be dealers OEM of choice and believe in the long-term collective success of Polaris and our dealers. Overall, dealer inventory dropped 4% sequentially, and we've updated our SIOP and production plans such that we are targeting a 15% to 20% reduction in dealer inventory versus last year, which is a more aggressive reduction than we had originally targeted for 2024 at the start of the year. While we recognize this action negatively impacts our full year outlook, we believe this is a prudent decision that benefits the long-term health of the channel and provides dealers a bit of relief from softer retail while we await a cyclical recovery in consumer discretionary spending patterns. I'll now turn it over to Bob, who will summarize our second quarter performance and provide updated commentary around our guidance and expectations for 2024. Bob?