Peloton Interactive, Inc. (PTON) Q3 2026 Earnings Report, Transcript and Summary

Good day, and welcome to Peloton's Third Quarter Fiscal Year 2026 Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker, Mr. James Marsh, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Good morning, and welcome to Peloton's Third Quarter Fiscal Year 2026 Conference Call. Joining today's call are Peloton Chief Executive Officer and President, Peter Stern, Interim Chief Financial Officer, Saqib Baig; and Vice President of Financial Planning and Analysis, Scott Burch. Our comments and responses to your questions reflect management's views as of today only and will include forward-looking statements related to our business under federal securities law. Actual results may differ materially from those contained in or implied by these forward-looking statements due to risks and uncertainties associated with our business. Please refer to our SEC filings, today's press release and our earnings presentation, all of which can be found on our Investor Relations website for a discussion of our material risks and other important factors that could impact our results. During this call, we will discuss both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP financial measures and definitions for our user metrics are also provided in today's press release. I'll turn it over to Peter.

Thanks, James, and good morning, everyone. Our Q3 results are proof that the strategy of evolving Peloton from a connected fitness company to a connected wellness company is delivering results. This strategy is in direct response to consumers not only wanting to add years to their life, but also life to their years. Peloton's content, equipment and beloved brand position us to capture more market share within the growing $7 trillion global wellness economy and to achieve ever greater human impact. As I've shared in prior calls, there are 4 pillars to delivering on our strategy: one, improve member outcomes; two, meet members everywhere; three, make members for life; and four, business excellence. Let's start with our progress on improving member outcomes, which is how we empower them to live fit, strong, long and happy. During the quarter, over 400,000 people took our HiLit classes with Rebecca Kennedy. This contributed to 48% growth in our Pilates modality, which is becoming a central plank of our strength program and an area where we are investing both in R&D and instructors as exemplified by the 3 we onboarded last quarter. Speaking of R&D, our work on producing new equipment in one of our existing modalities is progressing well, and I look forward to introducing some exciting new hardware and features to you this fall. In the space of mental well-being, last week, we launched 140th Peloton instructor-led meditation and sleep classes in the Breathwrk as well as daily meditations and [ breath work ] programming that will begin to develop that app into a preeminent platform to help people relieve stress, sleep and achieve better focus. To further our progress in improving member outcomes, I'm delighted to celebrate the arrival of Sarah Robb O'Hagan, our Chief Content and Member Development Officer. Sarah brings a wealth of experience, serving an executive and Board of Director roles for various well-known brands in the fitness space including Exos, Strava, Equinox, Gatorade and Nike. Sarah is focused on accelerating innovation across our content ecosystem, driving engagement and in so doing, deepening loyalty across our community by evolving the member experience. Second, let's talk about our strategy for meeting members everywhere. This part of our strategy is how we grow our Peloton community. Last week, we announced big news in this area, our content licensing partnership with Spotify. This partnership brings more than 1,400 Peloton classes across strength, pilates, bar, yoga, meditation, outdoor and cardio to hundreds of millions of Spotify Premium subscribers globally, exponentially growing our reach. Our work with Spotify provides a powerful entry point into the magic of Peloton, allowing us to efficiently grow our brand through a platform that people everywhere already know and love while also providing a high margin, diversified revenue stream. We expect to bring hundreds more classes to Spotify Premium subscribers each month. Our commercial business unit is another way we can meet members everywhere by reaching people in tens of thousands of gyms across more than 60 countries. In Q3, we delivered another quarter of standout growth in this unit, as revenue increased 14% year-over-year. To build on this momentum, we recently announced the Peloton Commercial Series, which includes a new bike and treadmill specifically designed for heavy traffic gym environments. This equipment, which brings together Precor's industrial-grade durability with Peloton's unsurpassed connected experience, will become available to gym operators in Q2 of fiscal '27 and will help us continue to grow Peloton's international footprint and gym presence. We see tremendous upside in this category as we estimate that we have only a 3% share of the more than $10 billion and growing global commercial fitness equipment market segment. And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention our recent ad campaign featuring Hudson Williams. This campaign went viral because it's a glorious demonstration of the joy of movement that drives everything we do at Peloton. I want to congratulate Peloton's marketing team, led by Megan Imbres, which has delivered more than 60 million organic social views and significant global earned media buzz, helping us put Peloton back in the center of the Zeitgeist, where we belong. Third, let's talk about our strategy of members for life. This is where we work to keep the members we have. Initiatives such as Club Peloton, personalized plans from Peloton IQ and some reactivation offers we implemented in Q3 helped us deliver net churn that was 7 basis points lower year-over-year in Q3, despite the price change we implemented in Q2. These results demonstrate the substantial value we provide to our members. Last, but certainly not least, is our strategy of business excellence. I believe the numbers here speak for themselves, as we achieved an important milestone of positive year-over-year revenue growth in Q3, along with growth in gross margin, adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow. Free cash flow increased $56 million or 59% year-over-year. While our Q4 expectations reflect that our path to sustained year-over-year revenue growth will not be linear, the underlying vectors of growth have never been clearer. As our business model evolves, we expect investors will see our growth materialize in total revenue first, driven in part by revenue streams like the commercial business unit and content licensing. I'm also pleased to share that we expect Peloton to achieve positive net income on a full year basis in fiscal '26, in addition to our previously stated goal of positive operating income. This would be the first time in the company's history that we have achieved either of these metrics for a full year, let alone both. We have rightsized our cost structure, in particular G&A and are now delivering in excess of $1 million of annualized revenue per employee, and we are well positioned to continue delivering innovations in cardio, strength, commercial, mental well-being, content licensing and beyond within a disciplined envelope for R&D spend. Strong financials and consistent cash flow have resulted in a vastly improved balance sheet. We ended Q3 with a 70% reduction year-over-year in our net debt. Add all this up, and from a financial standpoint, we are no longer operating defensively. Instead, we are operating from a position of profound strategic optionality. This enables us to move to a new stage of financial maturity, characterized by strategic capital allocation. In anticipation of the expiration of the prepayment penalty on our term loan at the end of this month, we are evaluating every avenue to maximize shareholder value, including debt optimization, capital returns and accretive strategic investments. With meaningful excess cash on the balance sheet, we have the luxury of patience. We are actively finalizing our holistic capital allocation strategy, evaluating alternatives, including share repurchases, debt optimization and potentially highly targeted investments. Finalizing and executing on this plan will be a key agenda item for our permanent CFO once they are seated. And speaking of a permanent CFO, our search is progressing well. We have met numerous qualified candidates, and we are gratified by the strong interest they have shown in Peloton. As I wrap up these remarks, I want to reiterate my confidence in Peloton's future. We continue to make great progress on deepening our relationships with our members, growing our opportunities to reach new members globally, diversifying our revenue streams and planting new seeds for future growth, all while continuing to strengthen our financial foundation. With that, I will now pass it over to Saqib, who I'm very grateful to for serving so ably as Interim Chief Financial Officer and who will share more details on our financial results.

Thanks, Peter. In Q3, we achieved total revenue of $631 million. This exceeded our guidance by $6 million and represents positive year-over-year growth. Our performance relative to guidance was driven by higher Connected Fitness equipment sales across Peloton and Precor brands. We ended Q3 with 2.662 million ending paid Connected Fitness subscriptions in line with the midpoint of our guidance range. Q3 average net monthly paid Connected Fitness subscription churn was 1.2% and improved 7 basis points year-over-year. Moving to gross profit and gross margin. As a reminder, in Q1 of fiscal 2026, we began assigning executive compensation and other corporate overhead expenses associated with corporate facilities across the P&L, as we focused on driving more accountability from cost at a functional level. Prior to fiscal 2026, these costs were all recorded to G&A, but are now assigned to COGS, sales and marketing, G&A and R&D. All of the year-over-year changes discussed today reference last year on an as-reported basis. Total gross profit was $327 million in Q3, an increase of $9 million or 3% year-over-year. Total gross margin was 51.9% in Q3, an increase of 90 basis points year-over-year and 210 basis points below our guidance of roughly 54%. Lower total gross margin relative to guidance was driven by opportunistic promotions across our Connected Fitness equipment sales. We operate within strict LTV-to-CAC hurdle rates. And as we saw a 2x LTV-to-CAC ratio, we see an opportunity to get more aggressive. Please refer to our investor presentation for the segment-level breakdowns for revenue and gross margin. Total operating expenses, excluding restructuring, and payment and supply settlement expenses; were $267 million in Q3, a decrease of $50 million or 16% year-over-year, reflecting the continued progress we have made in rightsizing our cost structure. We remain on track to achieve at least $100 million of run rate cost savings by the end of fiscal 2026. We also continued to deliver strong profitability with $126 million of adjusted EBITDA, an increase of $37 million or 41% year-over-year and close to the midpoint of our guidance range. Q3 free cash flow of $151 million represented an increase of $56 million or 59% year-over-year. Turning to our balance sheet. We ended the quarter with a strong cash position of $1.13 billion, a decrease of $53 million quarter-over-quarter. This decrease was driven by paying down roughly $200 million of convertible debt when it reached maturity in February, partially offset by strong cash flow generation in the quarter. The significant progress we have made in profitability is reflected in our net debt of $173 million, which decreased $412 million or 70% year-over-year. Similarly, our gross and net leverage ratios have improved meaningfully to 2.9 and 0.4, respectively. As Peter mentioned, we are focused on strategic capital deployment. A key element of this is managing dilution through a disciplined approach to equity compensation. Our stock-based compensation expense decreased $15 million or 22% year-over-year in Q3. Next, I would like to take time to provide context for the financial outlook for the remainder of the fiscal year. Our full year fiscal 2026 total revenue outlook of $2.42 billion to $2.44 billion reflects an increase of $10 million at the midpoint compared to prior guidance and 2% revenue decrease year-over-year at the midpoint. The increase relative to prior guidance is primarily driven by higher equipment sales observed in Q3. It is worth noting the anticipated content licensing revenue associated with Spotify partnership we announced last week was already reflected in our prior revenue guidance and will be recorded to the subscription segment. Our full year fiscal 2026 guidance for total gross margin is roughly 52.5%, which reflects a decrease of roughly 50 basis points relative to prior guidance and an improvement of 160 basis points year-over-year. Our full year fiscal 2026 guidance range for adjusted EBITDA of $470 million to $480 million is in line with prior guidance and an 18% year-over-year increase at the midpoint. Our Q4 guidance range for ending paid Connected Fitness subscription is 2.55 million to 2.57 million. Our guidance reflects an expectation that our average net monthly paid Connected Fitness subscription churn rate will be roughly flat year-over-year in full year fiscal 2026 despite the price change we implemented in Q2, while gross additions are expected to decrease year-over-year as a result of lower equipment sales. Generating meaningful free cash flow remains a top priority for us. We expect full year fiscal 2026 free cash flow to be in the vicinity of $350 million. I will now hand the call back to the operator for Q&A.

Before I turn the call over to the operator, let me ask a couple of questions from our retail investors. Our first question comes from the leaderboard named [ Vic83 ]. His question is, can you clear up some of the confusion around Section 232 tariffs? Are your products exempt? And what is the new view on tariff impact for the year? Do we expect a refund on previously paid IEEPA tariffs? Peter?

Thanks, Vic, for the question. Tariffs are, as you know, a moving target. So we follow it closely. First, the equipment we manufacture here in the U.S. is obviously not subject to tariffs at all. For everything else, based on the tariff policies that are currently in place, imported Peloton and Precor hardware are no longer subject to the Section 232 tariffs on aluminum and steel content, but they do remain subject to all other applicable tariffs, which include the MFN tariffs as well as Sections 122 and 301. Regarding IEEPA, we're closely monitoring the updates from U.S. Customs and Border Protection on when we'll be able to submit our refund request. Our request is somewhat more complicated than the initial round of requests, but we will submit that as soon as the CBP is ready to receive it. The changes that I just described, along with various inventory ins and outs, drive a net benefit to our tariff exposure. So we expect tariffs to represent roughly $30 million of free cash flow exposure for our full year '26, which is a reduction of $15 million relative to the $45 million that we shared last quarter.

Thanks, Peter. Our second question comes from leaderboard named [ John H. Schreiber ]. Please provide an update on the company's capital allocation plan, now that the balance sheet has been significantly improved, thanks to several quarters of positive free cash flow? Can shareholders expect the share repurchase plan to be announced soon? Peter?

Thanks for this, John. It's amazing what a difference 2 years have made in the strength of our balance sheet. And so it's my great pleasure to address your question from where we sit today. As you may know, our $1 billion term loan has a $10 million prepayment penalty that expires at the end of this month. So we haven't wanted to touch that until then. At the same time, we are accumulating cash on our balance sheet, thanks to our disciplined operating approach. And at the end of the quarter, you heard Saqib say that we had about $1.13 billion in cash, and that's after paying down the $200 million of convertible notes that came due during the quarter. We're now approaching zero net debt. And we need a lot less cash than we have on our books to operate our business, given the steady cash flows that our subscriptions business, in particular, generates. So all of this gives us, what I referred to in the remarks as, profound strategic optionality. And so we're working with our banking partners on our plan. We're not ready to discuss the details of that plan right now, and this is ultimately something I want to craft in conjunction with our new CFO once they're onboarded, but I'll tell you the 4-part framework that we're using. First, we're trying to reduce our cost of capital. Our current term loan was entered into at a different time and under very different circumstances. And so we believe there's an opportunity to improve our borrowing rates. Second, we're trying to increase our flexibility. Our current term loan limits our ability to engage in shareholder-friendly actions like stock buybacks, and we'd like to reduce those types of restrictions. Third, and you heard Saqib talk about this, we're working hard to find ways to reduce dilution. There are lots of ways of achieving this. We're already taking steps by reining in stock-based compensation and by moving to net settlement of restricted stock units rather than selling to cover for some of our executive officers. But we're evaluating what else we can do here, including your suggestion of a repurchase. Fourth and last, we're making sure that we have the capital we need to operate our business sustainably and to invest in our future. And this includes rigorously vetted organic and potentially inorganic investments. We'll have more to share on all of this after we've concluded our CFO search. But we have the luxury of time, given the strength of our balance sheet.

Great. Thanks, Peter. Sheri, you can open the line for Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] And our first question will come from the line of Simeon Siegel with Guggenheim Securities.

Peter, I just want to make sure I understand the response to leaderboard member, John, I don't remember the full name, but it was great. How are you thinking about the timing for the strategic actions? Are you suggesting it's a next month thing? Is it a wait for the CFO thing? Just any help on timing, given the balance sheet really is in just such a different place than you were before. So that's been great to see. And then just a quick follow-up comment on the dilution because you mentioned it twice. I think you changed some approaches to how management is paid and incentivized late last year. Can you just speak to your philosophy around executive comp now? And maybe what types of hurdles you think we should be judging you on going forward?

Absolutely, Simeon. And congrats on the new gig, and we are so happy that you're back in the family. I'll take the first part, and then I'll have Saqib talk about dilution and some of the changes on comp. So as I said, first of all, we do have the ability to be patient. It doesn't mean that we feel patient, but we have the ability to be patient here. And as you know, debt maturities can span many years. And so we think it's unwise for us to rush the process, in particular, and I didn't talk about this in my answer to [ John Schreiber ], but we intend to go through a credit ratings process prior to doing any refinancing. And we want to make sure we do that right the first time. It will be the first time that Peloton gets rated. And of course, as you know, the rating has a very substantial implication on the rates that we would pay over the years of that new debt instrument. So we think we get a better outcome, both on cost of capital and flexibility if we're a bit patient and do it right. And certainly, that includes having a permanent CFO in the seat. So once they're there, we would begin that credit rating process. We'll evaluate the results of that credit rating process, and that will basically guide the pacing of any further actions we take, including the refinancing. Why don't we -- I'll go to Saqib now, and he can talk a little bit about the dilution questions.

Yes, sure, Peter. The impact of stock-based compensation on share dilution is top of mind. And reducing the dilution over time is a top priority for us. So we are taking steps to reduce dilution. We are doing it through a net settlement program for equity vesting for select executives as well as ongoing disciplined approach to equity compensation. Let me give a little bit more color on that settlement program. So in that program at equity vesting, the company withhold some of their vested shares rather than issuing and selling shares in the market to cover for employee taxes and deliver only the remaining shares to employees. Regarding our disciplined approach to equity compensation, you all can see that in the sequential improvement we have been making in our stock-based compensation expense, stepping down from $300 million in fiscal '24 to $230 million in fiscal '25, and we are tracking around $200 million in fiscal '26. Looking ahead, we see this expense continuing to step down in fiscal '27 and beyond. We have also taken significant steps to pay more on performance-based awards in our organization, and we have structured our SBC awards to better align with this approach going forward. One thing you guys can also note is we are awarding fewer RSUs over time. For example, if you compare our 10-K disclosure in fiscal '25 versus fiscal '24, you'll notice a substantial reduction in the number of shares granted. And one thing I would also like to highlight is because the compensation structure has a multiyear grant, we recognize the benefit over time due to the impact of grants vesting from prior year.

One moment for our next question, and that will come from the line of Arpine Kocharyan with UBS.

So churn has surprised to the upside for more than 3, 4 consecutive quarters for Peloton here. Peter, do you see churn turn stabilizing enough for you to then think about the delta between subscribers that are churning annually versus gross adds and how you look to close that gap over time?

Thanks, Arpine. We feel good about our Q3 churn results. Ultimately, your question goes to, I think, when do we reach the point where the two lines of our gross adds and our subscriber churn cross such that we get to net adds in subscribers. So let me talk a little bit about what we're seeing there. On gross adds, while the number is still declining, the year-over-year rate of decline in gross adds in Q3 of this year is lower than last year. So we're seeing a decelerating rate of decline. And then on churn, after adjusting for the impact of our pricing changes, we're also seeing that our net churn rates are improving on a year-over-year basis. Putting those two things together, if that keeps changing in the ways that I've described, then we would start to see subscriptions growth. And a big goal for us as a management team is on how we accelerate the pace at which that convergence happens, while making sure that we do it in a sustainable and profitable way because as you can tell from our results, we remain really disciplined in our marketing spend, so that our burden, LTV-to-CAC ratio remains efficient. In other words, we will not engage in unnatural acts to bend this curve. Ultimately, the way forward here, the way to move the needle on gross adds is through our investments in R&D, which will result in us introducing new products that are more accessible in our existing categories while launching new categories as well. I do want to point out that in the meantime, while we wait for subscribers to turn, we have a lot of vectors for revenue growth that don't result in paid Connected Fitness subscriptions. So you'll likely see inflections in growth -- in revenue before you see them in subscribers. And this past quarter was an example of that. So some of the vectors that are at play this quarter and will be in the future are selling additional equipment to our existing members. That doesn't generate more subscriptions, but it does generate revenue. The revenue from our commercial business unit, which we talked about earlier, and that grew 14% year-over-year in the last quarter; that's predominantly equipment based. It doesn't come with very many subscribers. The Spotify deal that we just announced is a revenue driver. But those aren't our subscribers, those are Spotify's subscribers. The pricing changes, again, that was a real positive impact in Q3. No subscribers attached to that, but real high-margin revenue. And then even the promotional levers that you saw us pull in Q3, which helped us beat on revenue, don't come with particularly more subscribers or it's an indirect connection, but it does generate the revenue. So that's a little bit of which should help tide us all over while we wait for the ultimate growth in subscribers.

One moment for our next question and that will come from the line of Youssef Squali with Truist.

Nice to see you guys making real progress on some of these important KPIs. So maybe a couple of questions. One, maybe talk a little bit about the promotional intensity you saw in Q3. I think you called that out as one of the drivers of gross margin. And try to reconcile basically your Q4 guide for Connected Fitness subscribers with your comments around churn being relatively flat. So maybe just give us some color as to what's going on outside of maybe the seasonally weak period that is this quarter we're going into. Is there anything else going on maybe you're pulling back on the promotional intensity that you've done in Q3? And then just one last one. Peter, you talked a little bit about new hardware coming in this fall. Maybe can you just provide some preview of what those may be? I think, new modalities -- would strength be part of it? Would a cheaper tread be a part of it? Just any kind of color you can provide, knowing that, obviously, you'll provide a lot more this fall, more details.

Thanks, Youssef. There's a lot in there. So let me do my best to try to cover all of it. As I said in my remarks, we use an LTV-to-CAC framework to drive our marketing and our promotional spend, right? And that -- we like that framework because it's inclusive of everything from how much money we spend on marketing to how aggressive we are on promotions. And what we saw about a month or so into the quarter was that we had real marketing efficiency. And so we took that opportunity to do a couple of things. One, we had a promotion that was planned to expire sometime toward the end of February, and we extended that promotion an extra week or so. We also saw an opportunity to take a little bit of a deeper price promotion on a variety of our pieces of equipment throughout the sort of back half of the quarter, in order to take advantage of that. And we were still able to land our LTV to CAC at 2x, which is in our long-term goal range for LTV to CAC. So that's basically what happened in Q3 on that front. We don't have any plans to repeat that activity in Q4, so our guidance reflects the expectation that our gross additions will continue declining year-over-year, and that's just us remaining disciplined and also being increasingly, I think, sophisticated about the best times to be promotional, right? So we've done a lot of work, looked at our successes and our failures in the past. And we see that the periods where we acted in Q3 are some of the most productive ones. And Q4, as you mentioned, seasonality on the churn side, is also of a seasonal period for equipment sales as well. So now turning to your question on gross adds and our guide, the seasonality we just talked about, you raised that as well, that is something well known in our business. I also talked about pulling back on promotional intensity and remaining disciplined in our marketing investment. And so all of that basically adds up to the Q4 that we're projecting. With regard to the question that you had about our new equipment, for competitive reasons and because it's an earnings call, not a big product reveal moment, I'm not going to comment specifically on our unannounced hardware today, but I'll just elaborate a bit and say that, one, bringing more price accessibility in our existing modalities is a top priority for us. We have the ability to do this in the bike category because we've been able to take advantage of the large reservoir of refurb inventory that we have available to us, but we have not had a similar opportunity in our other categories. And so that's really driving our R&D in that area. With regard to new modalities, I want to note that they do take a little longer because we're building from the ground up. But as you mentioned, I will remind you that we're already a leader in the strength category. We have roughly 2 million of our members engaging with strength every quarter. And we see an opportunity to broaden our equipment portfolio in that category, and I wouldn't even view that as a singular opportunity. I think there are multiple opportunities for us to pursue that category, which we define as all forms of resistance training. So I hope that tides you over.

One moment for our next question. That will come from the line of Doug Anmuth with JPMorgan.

It's Bryan Smilek on for Doug. I guess just two questions. Obviously, good to see the acceleration on the commercial series and revenue overall. Could you just elaborate more on the demand pipeline and how the product and go-to-market strategy is changing, especially as you launch the new products in 2Q '27? And then I guess, more so on the marketing side, Peter, you talked about managing towards that 2 to 3x average LTV to CAC. Can you talk about some channels where you're seeing some of this efficiency and spend that allowed you to get those deeper promos throughout the quarter?

Yes. Thank you. I can start with the commercial business. So we -- just to double click on the Q3 performance, as Peter covered in his remarks were that CBU grew year-over-year 14% in Q3. As we look ahead in Q4, we expect CBU revenue growth to be a little softer in Q4 due to elevated CBU revenue in Q4 of last year, as we experienced increased demand ahead of tariff surcharges, which were announced in Q4 of FY '25. So I just want you guys to have a context with that. When you think about the long-term growth potential for the commercial business, we see tremendous opportunity. We estimate that we roughly have around 3% of a growing $10 billion commercial fitness equipment segment market share. The commercial fitness market is expanding as we observed rising global health awareness, we're seeing growth in gym and corporate wellness centers and also an increased demand for digitally enabled fitness facilities. And all of these things drive demand for our high-quality equipment. And we believe we have multiple growth vectors. A lot of them are going to play in the long run, but some of them in the short term as well. First, growing the legacy Precor business, and we can do that through sales enablement, channel partnership, investing in our strategy account. This is the core of our CBU business today. Second, we see an opportunity in investing in commercial product road map. As you just highlighted that this quarter, we announced the Commercial Series, which will feature a bike and tread built specifically for high-traffic gym floors. This is a milestone that combines Peloton Digital fitness leadership with Precor trusted industrial scale. And we have received great feedback, two of the leading industry events in this space and look forward to bringing these market -- into the market in fiscal '27. The third thing that I would like to highlight is the opportunity for international expansion, which is a big opportunity for CBU by leveraging Precor's existing global presence to grow the Peloton brand. Currently, we believe CBU is underrepresented outside of the U.S., and we believe we have significant room to grow our market share internationally.

Doug (sic) [ Bryan ] let me cover the second question that you asked, which was about the various channels that we have and their impact on our LTV to CAC. So let me focus on our first party versus our secondhand sales versus our third-party sales. In 1P sales, we saw good efficiency on web. And of course, a lot of that is driven by our e-mail marketing. We have a team that is just absolutely a crack team at working the funnel and getting ever more efficient at customer acquisition with the leads that we generate. Within our first-party retail, we continue to see really encouraging results from our micro stores. And that is relative to our in-line stores, where I think our micro stores are actually now despite being, give or take, 1/10 the size of our in-line stores, they're significantly more productive than the in-line stores, and it shows some of the things that we've learned about the positioning of those stores. And that has given us the confidence to begin investing in the next round of micro stores that we'll have in line for our fiscal '27. We also saw a good customer acquisition from secondhand sales, which in the quarter generated more than half of our gross adds. And that is influenced by our marketing, right? What we have found in our path to purchase research is that when we market to members, then that begins a process for them of discovering all the ways that they can get access to Peloton equipment. And some of them choose to do so, for example, through Facebook Marketplace or through our Repowered marketplace. And that has turned out to be very productive for us. Relatively less productive in the quarter were our third-party retail and our Fitness-as-a-Service rental business, so those, I would say, just to round out the answer to your question, were among the less productive channels.

One moment for our next question, and that will come from the line of Brian Nagel with Oppenheimer.

So Peter, the first one I'm going to ask, I mean, I guess a little bit bigger picture. Recognizing you haven't provided official guidance beyond this current fiscal year, but on the commentary around the evolution of Peloton to more of a wellness company and some of these green shoots you're starting to see on that front, how long -- again, what's the duration? Do we see some type of -- within the total company results, a real inflection as a result of these efforts? I mean is it -- I guess is it an event that we could expect in the next fiscal year, or are we waiting longer than that? And then my follow-up question, just to kind of tie this all together, again, I appreciate all the comments with regard to the balance sheet; the forthcoming balance sheet rework, how critical is that in order to drive this next leg of growth within Peloton?

Yes, Brian, thank you. So I think the question you're asking is how long do we have to wait until we get back to sustained growth? And there's a couple of ways of looking at that, right? One is subscriptions, the other is revenue. And as I've shared earlier in the call, what we can expect is revenue to come ahead of subscriptions. We're not ready at this point to call when we get back to subscriptions growth, but I was very pleased that we were able to deliver a Q3 with positive revenue growth. While we won't see that likely sustain in Q4, based on our implied guidance for the quarter, I think we're now in a stage where hopefully we'll see some step forward and some steps back, as we right the ship. And the ways that we do that are not only by continuing to build on our leadership in cardio but as we talked about on this call, starting to expand our impact into some areas like strength, where we know that there is substantial untapped opportunity and we have a really ambitious R&D agenda. It's also in things like what we're doing in mental well-being, where we're generating now Peloton content for the Breathwrk app, and that will generate revenue, but app subscribers, not CF subscribers, which are the ones that we typically see investors tracking. We're also making progress in some other areas like nutrition and hydration, and we'll have more to share about that hopefully in the not-too-distant future. And we also find, of course, that when members engage in multiple modalities, they stay with us longer and that can positively move the trajectory on subscriptions as well as revenue. And so for example, the category of sleep is one where we're already a leader in sleep meditations. I made sure to take one last night before this morning's call, and I'd encourage everyone to do that. So those are some of the categories in the areas that will first get us back to revenue growth and then ultimately set the stage for the subscriptions turn. With regard to the balance sheet, we don't need to refinance in order to be able to drive the strategy that we described, but we'd be foolish not to because we are, from where we sit right now, paying more interest than we need to. And so that could generate additional funds for free cash flow or for investments, and that refinancing would also give us the flexibility to engage in shareholder-friendly actions like buybacks that could help reduce the float and address the dilution that we know is on many of our investors' minds. So all of those things are absolutely on the table along with the fact that under the right circumstances, and it would require the right price and real discipline and rigor because we've worked super hard to accumulate this money, so we're not going to fritter it away. If the right investment or acquisition opportunities come to us, we'll take those really seriously as one of the -- not the only public company in our segment of the fitness market, we are pretty common port of call for companies looking for an exit. And if we find the right one at the right price, we would at least seriously consider that. So those are some of the things that we can do with our excess cash. But first and foremost, it's with the goal of serving our shareholders.

We have time for one last question. operator.

And that final question will come from the line of Shweta Khajuria with Wolfe Research.

I guess, could you please talk to how you think about the evolution of the business? So certainly, you spoke to the trends that you're seeing in gross adds and retention, implying that net adds could be flat at some point and then turn positive. But as your business evolves, how do you view the overall market opportunity across commercial business unit and partnerships like the one you just announced with Spotify versus hardware sales, whereby is net adds going to be a key metric for you, if your revenue is coming from other diversified sources, so how do you think about that?

Yes, thanks, Shweta, I'll cover that. I mean, we try to be pretty practical and hard nosed when it comes to the business. So quality revenue ultimately is what matters. And by quality revenue, I mean, revenue with good margins and ultimately, really efficient cash flow generation from that. We know that a substantial fraction of that quality revenue for us comes today from Connected Fitness subscriptions. And so that is also an important metric to us. But it's in service of the revenue metric, it's not an end metric in and of itself. That being said, we are acutely focused on that one because we recognize its importance in our profit generation in particular. But we're incredibly excited about our ability to diversify this business, leveraging the power of the Peloton and the Precor brands. So the commercial business growth that we're experiencing is, one, because gym operators are so excited that Precor is back, right? We were such an important supplier to them for many years. I think we took our eye off the ball for a couple of years there. But gym operators, they're all telling us they can see it that we're back, and that represents what we believe to be a sustainable source of high-quality revenue growth for many years into the future. Content licensing is another area that's attractive for us because it allows us to leverage the investment that we've already made in content for our Connected Fitness subscribers and to generate additional high-margin revenue from that existing space. Going back to the commercial business, the Peloton brand is woefully underexploited in that space. Again, gym operators tell us every time we speak with them that the only brand that their members ask for by name is Peloton. And so we've had people lining up to see our products when we've demonstrated at recent fitness conferences. Those hardware sales will come with some subscribers just to tie those things back, but not at the same ratio as a household, right, where you sell one piece of equipment that's basically shared by a couple or 1 or 2 people in that household. In the case of gym, many people share the same piece of equipment. So that's a little bit about how all those things relate to each other. But the evolution of the business is from Connected Fitness to Connected Wellness across all of the categories of cardio, both residential and commercial, strength, nutrition, mental wellbeing, sleep, recovery, realized through high-quality revenue with subscribers as a secondary metric that fuels that high-quality revenue. Okay. Before we wrap, knowing that many of the people who participate in this call are also our members, I want to point out a few items that you shouldn't miss. So first, check out the 2-for-1 Strength class that features Hudson Williams CoStars, Adrian and Tunde. So you too can build muscles like Hudson. I also want to encourage you to join our Live Spring Cross Training plan. Those classes have been dropping Monday through Friday, and they're also available on demand. And finally, if you're training for a marathon, be sure to try our new Pace Your Race: Marathon program that proudly features our cast of global Tread instructors. With that, thank you for joining today, and please join me in wishing James Marsh a happy birthday.

Thank you. This concludes today's program. Thank you all for participating. You may now disconnect.