Polaris Inc. (NYSE:PII) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Robin Farley: A couple of little clarifications. You mentioned retail in January, you said sort of outpacing what you’re shipping. Can you kind of put that into roughly like a retail year-over-year, how January is pacing so far?

Michael Speetzen: No, I don’t know that, that would provide a whole lot. But I think the point is similar to what we experienced, if you remember the call back in October, we talked about the fact that dealer inventory had moved quite a bit coming off the third quarter. But we were watching, specifically at that time, it was RANGER and ATV retail sales, and they were 2x overstripping what was sitting in the channel as well as what we were able to ship in. And so similar to that dynamic, maybe a little bit different in the fact that we did have late shipments given some of the challenges we had on the utility side specific to RANGER . But coupling that with the recall holds that we had on our RZR business, given some of the fuel system supplier-driven quality issues that we’re working to have resolved here in January and February.

That puts us in a position that retail is going to outstrip, which just means that dealer inventory is going to come down a bit and calibrating what we saw at the end of 2022.

Robin Farley: Okay. And can you quantify roughly what percent of retail in Q4 was presold? I think you’ve been giving out that number in prior quarters. So just wondering where that ended for Q4.

Robert Mack: Yes. I’m not going to give a specific number, Robin, but it’s kind of been down quarter-over-quarter. We did see strong presold, though. And some of that happens because of a model year change too. As the model year change comes in, people stop preordering because they want to wait and get the new model. And for a period of time, we don’t take preorders on new model years. So that dynamic ends up in Q4. But while it was down, we are seeing strong — which we would have expected as dealer inventory refills. So it’s not like people aren’t buying, it’s just that they’re — they can buy at the dealer. But on the products that are in high demand and some of the products that were on hold with the recalls, we had seen strong presold as consumers get in line to get those products. So it’s still well above where it would have been historically. It’s just not in the levels it was during the pandemic.

Michael Speetzen: Yes. And Robin, one of the dynamics we watched it play out in India. As we got more stock on the floor. We would see cancellations in the presold, but all of those were moving to folks buying bikes off the floor rather than waiting for a bike to show up in a month or 2. And we’ve essentially seen that dynamic playing out. And as Bob indicated, now it’s becoming a little bit better indicator around the demand where we don’t have dealer inventory levels at the adequate level or we have product that’s on hold and we’ve seen that playing out specifically around the high-end RZR as well as RANGER products right now.

Robin Farley: Okay. Great. No, that makes sense. Just 1 quick final clarification, if I could. In your market share numbers, I guess dealers have been talking about some OEMs imports from China growing share. And I think initially, those were not in sort of the included in the market share data that you gave. Are those other brands now in your market share numbers or not yet. It’s still kind of just a legacy competitor brands?

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