Jill Woodworth
Analyst · JPMorgan. Your line is open
Thanks John. I will start with a review of our second quarter results. As you know we pre-released our summary results on January 20th. In the quarter, we generated total revenue of $1.13 billion, representing 6% year-over-year growth and an underlying 56% two-year CAGR. Excluding Precor, which we acquired on April 1st of last year, core Peloton revenue was approximately flat year-over-year. Relative to expectations, our revenue reflected lower-than-expected demand largely offset by a favorable mix towards Bike+ and lower financing penetration rate. Engagement per Connected Fitness subscription totaled 15.5 workouts per month. On a two-year basis, engagement was up 23% over the second quarter of 2020. As expected, we've seen significant month-over-month improvement in engagement from December to January with sequential growth exceeding levels we've seen in previous non-COVID years. Overall, we believe our engagement levels are very healthy particularly when viewed against fitness industry norms and are likely to remain higher than witnessed during comparable pre-COVID periods. Our average net monthly Connected Fitness churn remained low at 0.79% in the quarter. We continue to be pleased with our overall platform retention as our 12, 18, and 24-month retention rates continue to improve year-over-year. At the end of Q2, we had 862,000 app subscribers, representing 38% year-over-year growth, slightly ahead of our internal expectations. App subscribers declined modestly on a sequential basis primarily due to the 60-day free trials offered in November. Moving to gross margin. Gross margin for the quarter was 24.7%, slightly ahead of our expectations, primarily due to our subscription segment. Our Connected Fitness Product segment gross margin of 6.4% was modestly below our guidance. Relative to our expectations, our Connected Fitness margin reflects favorable timing of inventory receipts, a slightly lower-than-planned holiday promotion impact, and a benefit from a modest mix shift to Bike+. These benefits were offset by significant logistics cost pressure and a modest increase in Tread+ return reserve. Subscription gross margin was 67.9% and subscription contribution margin was 71.4%, ahead of expectations. Turning to OpEx. Sales and marketing expense was 30.8% of total revenue reflecting a return to typical holiday marketing this year. G&A expense was 21.9% of total revenue. We've made significant investments in teams, systems and member support, which accounted for this increased spending. G&A will be a significant focus for our restructuring and you should expect dollar declines in this line item versus our first half run-rate. R&D expense was 8.8% of total revenue versus 4.5% in the year ago period. The year-over-year deleverage reflects the onboarding of several Aqua hires and the R&D team from Precor. We believe our investments in R&D drive new product features and functionality that create and sustain our strategic advantage. Rolling everything up our, Q2 adjusted EBITDA loss of $266.5 million was better than expected. We ended the quarter with $1.6 billion of cash and cash equivalents and have additional liquidity in the form of an untapped $500 million credit facility. Before reviewing our outlook, I'd like to start by providing a bit more detail on the actions we're taking to address our cost structure. The restructuring we announced today, will help accelerate decision-making, increase accountability, create a more efficient and flexible supply chain, reduce capital intensity and ensure we are optimizing our spend to support profitable growth. Although it will take time to fully implement, we have spent the past several months developing a detailed plan that provides line of sight to cost reductions that we expect, to drive gross margin, EBITDA margin expansion and improve our unit economics. We expect this program to generate at least $300 million run-rate savings within Connected Fitness COGS by the end of fiscal 2024. The majority of the savings will come from efficiencies in procurement, manufacturing and logistics. We will drive immediate benefits from the significant overhaul of our logistics network, which includes consolidating warehouses and shifting volume to variable cost third-party providers. We still have further work to do, in order to optimize delivery routes, inventory placement and staffing levels, but expect these initiatives to meaningfully reduce our cost per delivery over the next several months. Procurement and manufacturing efficiencies will take longer to fully materialize in our P&L as we sell through higher cost inventory. We also expect a $500 million run-rate reduction to annual operating expenses. Key areas of focus include, reductions in workforce and marketing, changes in corporate real estate strategy, software expense cuts and reduced outside services spend. Every cost bucket is under scrutiny and we expect to drive efficiencies across the board. While some of these expense reductions will take time to complete, we can capture most of the run-rate savings in fiscal 2023. In total, we expect this restructuring program to result in approximately $210 million, in onetime charges of, which $80 million will be non-cash. In addition as John mentioned, we have decided not to pursue North American manufacturing at this time. We believe Tonic and our third-party manufacturing partners can support our growth over the next few years. Now on to our outlook. We are reducing our fiscal 2022 outlook as we extrapolate trends that we have seen in the first half of the fiscal year continuing into the second, namely the continued reduction in traffic. We are reducing sales and marketing expense meaningfully in the back half of the year as we intend to use the seasonally slower months in late Q3 and Q4 to better understand our baseline post COVID demand. These cuts will provide critical learning so that we can drive improved efficiencies in fiscal 2023. Our goal is to support our brand with acquisition marketing but with laser focus on efficiencies and clearing return hurdles. Also we anticipate a potential elasticity response to our January 31st delivery and setup surcharges. Lastly, we cannot rule out the potential that our significant restructuring could have some temporary impact on demand generation as our organization adjusts to our new operating model. Based on these factors, we now project $3.7 billion to $3.8 billion of revenue for full year fiscal 2022. Our revenue guidance for fiscal 2022 incorporates Peloton guide sales starting in April. We expect Peloton guide to represent a small contribution to revenue in Q4. We have decided to pursue a soft launch given the time of year and seasonality of our business and therefore the majority of our marketing spend in Q4 will be focused on our existing Connected Fitness products. For Q3, we expect revenue of $950 million to $1 billion. For fiscal 2022, we expect ending Connected Fitness subscriptions of approximately three million implying 670,000 net ads and representing 29% year-over-year growth and a 66% 2-year CAGR for ending subs. For Q3, we expect ending Connected Fitness subscriptions of approximately 2.93 million, implying 160,000 net ads and representing 41% year-over-year growth and an 82% two-year CAGR for ending subs. For our Connected Fitness segment, we are presenting margin commentary excluding restructuring charges that are added back in our adjusted EBITDA calculation. We believe this approach will offer more constructive modeling guidance. As we have outlined, our pricing changes and warehouse restructuring will have significant positive impact on our margin structure in Q4. The Q4 implied Connected Fitness margin is expected to be in the mid-teens and will provide a good starting point for us to achieve continued planned improvements in Connected Fitness margin in fiscal 2023. With the reduction of our demand plan, we now expect Q3 and full year fiscal 2022 Connected Fitness margin of approximately 6% and 11%, respectively. For Q3 and fiscal 2022, we expect a subscription contribution margin of 71%. Rolling up our segments, we now expect total company gross margin up 23% in Q3 and 28% for fiscal year 2022. We now expect full year fiscal 2022 adjusted EBITDA of negative $675 million to $625 million. We expect negative $140 million to $125 million of adjusted EBITDA in the third quarter reflecting the revised demand forecast. As I discussed earlier, we will start to see the benefits of our restructuring efforts in the second half of fiscal '22 which include planned reductions in media spending and slight benefits to G&A and R&D. As a result, we expect our second half operating expense to be approximately $150 million lower than in the first half inclusive of restructuring charges. Moving on to capital expenditures. With the change in plans around Peloton Output Park we now expect total CapEx spend for fiscal '22 of approximately $350 million and that's relative to our initial expectation of $600 million. Coupled with the pause in further showroom expansion we now expect approximately $100 million and $65 million of total CapEx spend in Q3 and Q4 respectively. We intend to continue to build out a shell facility in Ohio. Our total spend on POP in fiscal '22 is expected to be in the range of $90 million to $100 million including $60 million in the back half of the year. We plan to sell both the building and the land by the end of fiscal '23 and recover a majority of the spend upon sale. Beyond this year you can expect a modest CapEx profile as we work towards a CapEx-light model moving forward. Moving on to inventory. From a balance sheet perspective, we expect inventories to decrease sequentially in Q3 and further in Q4. We've slowed production to better match our current demand outlook. Our aim is to get back to a normalized inventory balance no later than the end of fiscal '23 driving a more efficient use of our balance sheet going forward. Before closing, I'd like to provide a bit more context on how the announcements made today connect with our financial and strategic goals. There are three key objectives to highlight: reestablishing Peloton as a sustainable growth company restoring our Connected Fitness hardware margins and generating consistent positive free cash flow to self-fund our business. We are at a critical inflection point in our business. These are the early days of a significant transformation of our operating model to achieve a better balance of growth and efficiency. We are lowering our second half outlook to reflect the short-term headwinds that I discussed earlier, as well as intentional actions to position our company for future success. We understand that this prompts questions about our future topline potential. To be clear we believe we have significant growth potential ahead. The paid fitness industry has a long-term track record of growth across cycles and we continue to believe that Connected Fitness is the most attractive subsegment. The Connected Fitness category grew during calendar year 2021 even against very difficult COVID comps. And in recent months continues to maintain a significantly higher market share than in pre-COVID period. As work-from-home and hybrid remain prevalent themes that are likely to persist into the future, we expect Connected Fitness will take category share and drive growth of the overall fitness category. Our own attitudinal research as well as others published recently has shown that openness to working out at home and Connected Fitness in particular is now at levels much higher than they were pre-COVID. And while traffic levels are reverting to pre-COVID norms, we have seen this improved product market fit for Peloton result in higher post-COVID conversion rates. Importantly, we expect Peloton to remain the dominant category leader. Our engagement retention and NPS scores demonstrate the continued effectiveness value and convenience of our platform. And although our recent performance has fallen short of expectations, we nonetheless grew our share within the Connected Fitness category over the past 12 months. Moving on to hardware margins. As I discussed earlier, we now expect an even more pronounced Connected Fitness gross margin contraction in fiscal 2022, which primarily reflects fixed cost deleverage from lower volume. Currently, we are not generating nearly enough hardware profitability to achieve our goal of covering customer acquisition costs, which means it is critical for us to rebuild this margin structure. On January 31, we took the first step by adding delivery and installation charges to Bike and Tread in North America and similar surcharges in our updated all-inclusive pricing in our international markets. This pricing change will positively impact Q4 Connected Fitness margin. The restructuring program we announced today will provide further tailwind with our COGS savings primarily driven by efficiencies in logistics procurement and manufacturing. We expect logistics savings from our warehouse restructuring to meaningfully reduce our delivery cost beginning in Q4. Our procurement and manufacturing savings will also be considerable but will primarily benefit fiscal 2023 and 2024. In total, these actions should have a material positive impact on our Connected Fitness gross margin and enable us to trend closer to net CAC neutrality over the next several quarters. Going forward, we do not intend to rely on the capital markets to support our growth. Our use of cash in fiscal 2022 has been abnormally high, and we are confident we will see meaningful improvement in fiscal 2023 and consistent positive free cash flow in the near future. There are a few factors underpinning our confidence. First, our EBITDA improvement opportunity. We expect our restructuring efforts to generate at least $800 million in run rate savings by fiscal 2024. Supply chain savings will take more time to be fully realized, but we expect the majority of OpEx savings to benefit fiscal 2023. Our recent pricing actions should also be a material tailwind to EBITDA. Second, the improvement in operating cash flows going forward. Our much higher-than-normal inventory balances this year are obviously creating significant cash headwinds in fiscal 2022. Given our current inventory is nonperishable and non-seasonal we expect to sell it at full price. As we work down our inventory balance, we should see a considerable cash flow tailwind in fiscal 2023. We are implementing stronger processes and greater discipline in our inventory management and intend to bring our days on hand down over time with the goal of a more neutral annual cash impact going forward. Third, we have opportunities to lower capital expenditures. Within CapEx, our fiscal 2022 outlook includes $90 million to $100 million in spend on POP, as well as material spending on systems implementations, product development and other non-recurring project-based investments. Finally, the $130 million in restructuring-related P&L cash costs will be heavily concentrated in fiscal 2022. Ultimately, we are comfortable with our balance sheet position and we expect to end fiscal 2022 with approximately $1.2 billion in cash and $500 million of additional revolver capacity and have a line of sight to improve cash flows next year. I will now turn it back to John with some closing thoughts before we get to questions.