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

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Michael Speetzen: Yes. So I’ll take the last first. We know that it’s had an impact. I mean when you come on with a new product, it certainly does. When we look at the Pontoon market, the true Pontoon market, which in theory, the switch doesn’t necessarily qualify just given some of the stimulations the legacy brands held up quite well. And so we’re obviously tracking their performance, and we spent time talking to some potential customers at the Minneapolis Boat Show and I think for the most part, we feel like it’s not necessarily pulling pontoon customers away. It’s probably pulling PWC customers up into a larger version of the product. But we’re going to continue to keep an eye on that. When we look at the improvement that we’re expecting in Marine, I guess I’d characterize it, it’s a tale of 2 sets of businesses.

One is — when we look at Godfrey and Hurricane, there’s been a lot of work over the past several years to turn those businesses around. And the boats are absolutely gorgeous. They’ve done a spectacular job of improving profitability I mentioned it in my prepared remarks, everything from the Mighty G, which we’re seeing tremendous pickup on the electric version of that boat, that’s tapping into a whole new segment, both electric as well as consumers who are looking for a smaller, more maneuverable Pontoon all the way up to the Hurricane 2600, which is an absolutely stunning fiberglass boat. Those are obviously going to drive significant market share performance. We saw market share gains in both those businesses in 2022, and we expect that to continue.

Where we really struggled was Bennington with Ben moving into the leadership role of the entire Marine segment. he’s really going to bring a lot of that same philosophy and approach to Bennington that was brought to pull Hurricane and Godfrey back up to market share gains. And we’re pretty confident given what we’ve seen in terms of product plans, go-to-market strategies that will put Bennington back in a really positive spot from a market share perspective. Part of the challenge we had this past year was just being able to get boats into the channel. We added capacity — there’s some automation moves that are being put in place, and that should improve our ability to deliver and put us back in a share gain position for that brand.

Robert Mack: Yes. I think the thing people maybe miss on the boat business, when we bought it in 2018, Bennington, obviously, the crown jewel and continues to be. But Bennington is also the bulk of the earnings and Godfrey Hurricane really in addition to kind of having dated boats, had what I would call dated financials. And so they weren’t really big contributors to marine profitability. And now we have months in ’22 where Godfrey and Hurricane made more money in a month than they made bought them in 2018. So Ben and the team have done a great job driving profitability improvements, along with quality and design improvements in those businesses. And as Mike said, now Ben is bringing that — some of that same focus, particularly on the design side over to Bennington and we’ll see good results there as well.

But marine profitability has improved quite a bit since we acquired the business, and we’ve got more activities underway to continue to drive that. So it’s been a really good story.

Jaime Katz: Okay. And then can I just clarify, I think you guys had said in the prepared remarks that you were going to start capitalizing on the expansion in Monterrey in 2024. But should we assume that the sort of elevated CapEx goes beyond 2023 for maybe another year before normalizing to pay for that expansion?

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