Jill Woodworth
Analyst · JPMorgan. Your line is open
Thanks, John. I will start with a review of our first quarter results. In Q1, we generated total revenue of $805 million, representing 6% year-over-year growth and an 88% two-year CAGR. In terms of revenue drivers, we had lower-than-expected financing penetration, better-than-expected Connected Fitness churn partially offset by the $11 million adjustment to our return reserve for our tread recalls. We added 161,000 net Connected Fitness subscriptions in the quarter, bringing our end of quarter Connected Fitness membership base to 2.492 million, up 87% year-on-year. Average net monthly Connected Fitness churn was 0.82%. As a reminder, we disclosed last quarter that we will no longer be offering forward churn guidance, but will continue to report this metric. We continue to expect low industry-leading churn and high engagement, especially as we head into colder weather. At the end of Q1, we had over 887,000 app subscribers, representing 74% year-over-year growth, slightly ahead of our internal expectations. For the quarter, we saw modestly better retention than expected, but we're also seeing some challenges related to acquisition efficiencies. As you likely know, there have been some significant changes made by Apple that are leading to some targeting headwinds. Like many other direct-to-consumer marketers, we're seeing some disruptive impact as our teams adjust to the new data landscape. Looking ahead, we remain bullish on our app business and its role as an important lead generation tool for Connected Fitness. Our teams will continue to adjust to the new marketplace reality, and we expect our corporate wellness initiatives to begin to contribute more meaningfully to our app business the year progresses. Moving to gross margin. Gross margin for the quarter was 32.6%, which came in slightly below our expectations. This was entirely due to our Connected Fitness products segment, which had a gross margin of 12% below our guidance of 15%. There were two primary drivers of our Connected Fitness gross margin shortfall, an increase in our return reserve for our recalled Tread products and some inefficiencies seen in freight out and logistics. As we mentioned last quarter, forecasting Tread returns has proven to be very challenging. While we saw an easing of return activity through late summer, we believe the expiration of our subscription waivers motivated a higher-than-anticipated number of Tread+ owners to initiate returns. Consequently, in the quarter, we increased our reserve to account for this activity. As a reminder, the impact of recall-related returns is added back to our adjusted EBITDA but is fully reflected on the revenue and gross profit line. With this increase in our reserve, we are attempting to capture the entirety of expected returns from now until the end of the recall-related return window, which lasts for another 12 months. But there is the possibility that future adjustments will be needed. Excluding the impact of the unexpected increase to our return reserve, our Connected Fitness margin in Q1 would have been 14% and overall gross margin would have been 33.6%. On the logistics front, we saw some additional inefficiencies associated with middle and last mile delivery costs and Precor related freight-in expenses. These negative impacts were partially offset by lower-than-anticipated Bike financing rates and Bike-related reserve adjustments. Subscription gross margin was 66.7%, and subscription contribution margin was 69.6%, ahead of expectations, as we continue to leverage fixed costs associated with content production. As a reminder, quarter-to-quarter, we continue to see some variability, but we now expect to reach our subscription contribution margin target of 70% by Q4 of this year. Turning to operating expenses. Sales and marketing expense was 35.3% of total revenue versus the prior year period of 15.1%. As we explained last quarter, this deleverage was planned as we ramped marketing. Looking ahead, we expect to realize substantial sequential leverage against sales and marketing expense as the year progresses. G&A expense was 29.8% of total revenue versus 14.3% in the year prior. We invested over the last 12 months to scale operations, including significant investments in team, systems and member support. While this led to a series of significant sequential step-up in G&A spending over the last year, nearly all of this investment is completed. Looking ahead, we expect a sequential increase in G&A spend in Q2, but anticipate our Q1 spending level to represent a reasonable approximation of quarterly spend for the second half of the year. R&D expense was 12.1% of total revenue versus 4.8% in the year ago period. The year-over-year deleverage reflects the onboarding of several Aqua hires and the R&D team from Precor, as with G&A we expect to roughly flat quarterly spend for the remainder of the fiscal year. Our Q1 adjusted EBITDA loss was better than expected at $233.7 million. Net loss for Q1 was $376 million, or a loss of $1.25 per basic and diluted share. We ended the quarter with $924 million of cash and marketable securities and have additional liquidity in the form of an untapped $285 million credit facility. Now onto our outlook. We are reintroducing ranges for our guidance. As John alluded to earlier, the overall consumer and logistics environment has been challenging to predict coming out of COVID and we are providing guidance, just a few weeks ahead of our busiest sales season. For fiscal 2022, we are now forecasting ending Connected Fitness subscriptions of 3.35 million to 3.45 million, implying approximately 1.1 million net ads and representing 46% year-over-year growth and a 77% two-year CAGR for ending subs at the midpoint. This equates to roughly a 6% reduction in our forecasted end of year Connected Fitness subscriptions at the midpoint. Our revised full year revenue forecast is $4.4 billion to $4.8 billion, representing 14% year-over-year growth and a 59% two-year CAGR at the midpoint of the range. For Q2, we expect ending Connected Fitness subscriptions of 2.8 million to 2.85 million, implying 333,000 net ads and representing 69% year-over-year growth and nearly 100% two-year CAGR for ending at the midpoint. For Q2, we expect revenue of $1.1 billion to $1.2 billion, representing 8% year-over-year growth and a 57% two-year CAGR at the midpoint. Our revised guidance reflects a reduction in our expected Bike portfolio sales and Tread sales versus our original forecast, given traffic trends over the past several weeks. It also contemplates a greater-than-expected mix of original Bike versus Bikes+ since the price drop. And lastly, headwinds in our commercial or Precore business. Traffic and conversion are the key inputs in our demand forecast. Many of the modeling assumptions that predict e-commerce traffic that we made in August were too optimistic. Our baseline traffic forecast reflected our unchanged view of the growing consumer interest in Connected Fitness, our growing market share in the category, our leading brand awareness and expected increased word-of-mouth. However, it is clear that we underestimated the reopening impact on our company and the overall industry. Importantly, we also expected the price drop to further drive a traffic uplift and increased conversion. While the price drop led to conversion rates that exceeded our forecast, overall traffic has not met our initial expectations. We have also seen richer-than-anticipated mix of Bike versus Bike+ further impacting both revenue and our gross margin expectations. As we've said previously, we are agnostic to which entry point members choose given that the LTV of our Connected Fitness subscriptions remains highly attractive. Moving on to Tread. We started selling our own new Tread on August 30 and began our media support on September 27. We noted on our last earnings call that the rollout of Tread would be slow to start in order to ensure that our members are receiving a positive delivery experience. And we take the time to reposition inventory to match demand by region. Since launching media for Tread, we have seen a progressive increase in Tread sales and remain bullish on the category and our ability to grow from our currently low product awareness. Our primary test today is educating the consumer about our own new Tread and how it differs from other treadmills on the market. However much like our Bike portfolio, our revised traffic estimates will also impact our Tread forecast for the balance of the year. Lastly, we have reduced expectations for our commercial channel or legacy Precor business given both supply and demand dynamics. While the commercial gym industry has made significant gains as a country reopen, overall visits remained below pre-COVID levels, leading operators across some commercial segments to delay capital investments in new equipment. However, more importantly, sourcing certain component parts is become materially more challenging since we gave our guidance in August. This has led to supply concerns some Precor products, leaving us unable to fulfill some of our commercial demand. Moving on to margin. The reduction to our demand outlook is creating margin compression in our Connected Fitness segment, as we have a significant amount of fixed costs associated with our supply chain, particularly within middle and last mile logistics. Migrating from quarterly sequential growth during COVID back to our pre-COVID seasonality has proven challenging. However, we plan to optimize the mix of our own delivery and third-party networks to help drive savings in the coming quarters. On the variable cost side, hardware cost efficiencies and ocean savings that we expected in Q2 won't start to materialize until the second half of the year, given the lower than expected demand profile for Q2. On Tread specifically we are locking in better long-dated right. We also intend to shift towards in-source unit production at Tonic and evaluate other strategies that will benefit our cost structure and future quarters. Also, within our commercial business, we are seeing incremental pressure and additional sourcing constraints that will weigh on our margins for the remainder of the year. In light of the current cost increases in units, freight and delivery, and while we expect some of this pressure to abate in the back half of the year, we are evaluating ways to improve our fixed cost efficiency and move to a more variable cost structure in addition to other strategies to better balance, growth, profitability and member experience. All-in we now expect the Connected Fitness product gross margin of 7% in Q2 and 16% for fiscal year 2022. As we said before, we are more focused on Connected Fitness gross profit dollars than margin percentage with the goal of using those gross profit dollars to offset our sales and marketing expense. This is an extraordinary year where this goal is difficult to achieve. But we are committed to making material improvements to our cost structure that will help us get back towards being net cash neutral in fiscal 2023. For our Subscription business, we expect a contribution margin of 69% in Q2 and 70% for the full year with the improvement to last year reflecting continued fixed cost leverage and some benefit from identified cost savings. Rolling up our segments, we now expect total company gross margin of 24% in Q2 and 32% for fiscal 2022. Turning to OpEx. In response to our revised sales and margin outlook for fiscal 2022, we have identified material savings across our operating expenses. So, some of these actions may take a quarter or two to show improvement. Some of these identified areas of savings include making significant adjustments to our hiring plans across the company, optimizing marketing spend and limiting showroom development, identifying areas of efficiency, improvement in member support and streamlining our product development teams, while maintaining a focus on new products and expanding software features. Inclusive of the headwinds and COGS and planned cost efficiency initiatives, our current estimate of adjusted EBITDA loss for Q2 is between $325 million and $350 million. Our revised outlook for full year fiscal '22 is a loss of $425 million to $475 million on an adjusted EBITDA basis. Despite these near-term headwinds and our reduced revenue outlook, we continue to expect to be adjusted EBITDA profitable in the back half of fiscal 2022 and for the full fiscal year 2023. While making the necessary adjustments to keep us on our path to profitability and our long-term view of our opportunity is unchanged. We have confidence in our Bike portfolio. We're seeing growing momentum behind our all-new lower price Tread and we are optimistic regarding new products in our pipeline, the commercial and corporate wellness opportunities and continued international growth. Turning to CapEx. We are evaluating ways to optimize our U.S. manufacturing expansion and costs, but continue to believe that this is the right long-term move, especially in light of the supply chain challenges we are facing today with freight and delivery costs, needed supply chain flexibility and the benefits that will come from stateside expertise in manufacturing. As we look to manage our costs, we now expect approximately $400 million of CapEx spend through the balance of fiscal 2022. While the next several months present a forecasting challenge in our business, we have many levers to control our costs. And we'll implement the appropriate strategies to support our continued growth in our member base revenue and path to profitability. I will now hand it back to John.