Brunswick Corporation (NYSE:BC) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Ryan Gwillim: Yes. No, you are in the ballpark, Mike. And at this point of the year, it is hard to judge where everything is going to land. Currency certainly it is a bad guy, and it is primarily the first half of the year, where the comparisons are challenging. But gross – I would say gross margins have the ability to be flat to slightly up or slightly down versus a pretty good year, as we think about inflation, some other things, that continues to be elevated by getting a little better and then really the mix throughout the portfolio. So there is both mix within product lines, which we have said is angling more premium, but also just the mix of our overall revenue, a little bit heavier in propulsion and P&A a little lighter in boats as we have said. So that will have help on keeping those gross margins pretty buoyant.

Michael Swartz: Okay. Great, thank you.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Anna Glaessgen with Jefferies. Please proceed with your question.

Anna Glaessgen: Hey good morning, thanks for taking my question. I just wanted to touch on the retail outlook. We have had reports from Marine Max and one water this morning, kind of what is driving the delta between the flattish to slightly down retail with what you are seeing in the market?

David Foulkes: Anna, I think the part of that is trying to understand the shape of the year this earlier in the year is extremely difficult. So I would not be at all surprised to see a relatively wide range of outlooks. Certainly, there are some – I wouldn’t call them mixed signals exactly, but different points of reference at this time of the year, we are continuing to see, I would say, early boat shows more encouraging than we anticipated. We are obviously more of a global footprint than MarineMax. We saw a very strong Dusseldorf Boat Show, for example, somewhat stronger than we anticipated, where we sold higher – our revenues, for example, the Sea Ray brand were up about 10% or something like that and certainly up over two-years ago.

So there might be an element of mix in there. But I think, to be honest, there just isn’t a common set of data points at the moment. I think we – as I mentioned earlier, one thing that is a bit of a delta is Boston Whaler remains a significant part of the market. And you could say that Boston Whaler volume has probably been holding back that portion of the market a little bit. So as we free up more volume in there, I think it is not going to – obviously, we will over index on that, but probably the market will be up a bit more, too.

Anna Glaessgen: Great. And on the last quarter call, you talked about how improvements at Navico could bring the delta narrowed versus the overall P&A business. I guess where do we stand there and when does that provide a tailwind?

David Foulkes: Well, I think you began to see it really in the fourth quarter where we did the first kind of consolidation integration efforts. And mid-third quarter, and we again see the margins flow through. We had a nice bump in the operating margins in Q4, I think, despite top line being down a bit. But there is more to go. We have to – as we go through a big integration like this, when we integrated Navico we are essentially kind of doubling the size of that group. So we have to take it in chunks. But yes, there is considerably more to be done beyond what we have already accomplished, and we are hard at work on that right now.