Sonos, Inc. (NASDAQ:SONO) Q2 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Jake Norton: And then last one from me, I’m hoping you could just dive a little deeper on international trends. Of course, we’ve seen the weakness, but can you just maybe speak to, your market share versus the broader audio segment in those regions? Thanks.

Patrick Spence: You bet. Yeah, so this is one we watch very closely because we want to know how we’re doing relative to the other players that are out there. As I mentioned, we continue to, in fact, gain or hold share in the U.S. home theater and the streaming audio, even though those are down year-over-year, which is what we’re looking at. Similarly, we’re seeing significantly down year-over-year anniversarying, negative year-over-year last year as well, across EMEA and then as well into Australia which is our biggest APAC market at this point. And so those are ones where we are holding our own, we feel like. And so from everything we can see at this point, we continue to hold up well relative to what’s happening in the industry more broadly. And I think when you look at our results in terms of the geographies, they’re very representative of what you’re seeing across the industry as opposed to anything. Sonos is unique.

Operator: [Operator Instructions] And our next question comes from the line of Alex Fuhrman with Craig-Hallum.

Alex Fuhrman : Just from a high level, I’m wondering if you can explain to us a little bit. It seems like your business today is roughly the same size as it was about three years ago when there was a lot more housing activity and now it’s been kind of a multi-year slump in housing velocity. Can you talk to us a little bit about what that’s done to your customer profile, who you have coming into the brand? How many products they’re buying, maybe what’s their first products they might be buying? What steps are you taking to be ready for demand to come back if presumably we do see some type of an uptick in the housing market at some point in the future?

Patrick Spence : Yes, thanks Alex. I think, we’ve actually been working again in kind of the theme of focusing on what we can control. You recall, in Q1, one of the big areas we focused on was bundles, and we had our highest proportion of new homes starting with multiple products in that quarter as well. And so, I think if anything, we’ve shown an ability to try and make sure that we can drive customers, because there are so many we haven’t tapped into as we think about being only in 9% of those homes, is that if we can put the right kind of packages together for our customers, make it easy for them to buy as we showed through the Holiday season. Then I think we can, we to some degree, are bucking the trends. Now, overall, obviously our categories remain under pressure.

I think to your point, housing is something that we think would naturally is a tailwind for us. Ultimately that’s there. And so, I think you prepare for the good times by focusing and getting better in the challenging times on how you execute, how you invest, where you invest, and trying to be as creative as possible. So coming up with bundles, looking at how we do promotions to our install base, all of the things that we’re doing today, the innovation, we’re doing across our product team, the new marketing and brand kind of aspects that we’re doing for our new product. All of these things, I think will benefit us greatly if we get some tailwinds from the categories as well or housing, if you will. And so, all of the activities we’re doing in this challenging period will pay off when we see the tailwinds come back and the categories pick up.

So I think we’re doing all the right things we can and obviously we’ll watch carefully, but we’re going to also manage our business appropriately to make sure we navigate these challenging times successfully and do so profitably as we’ve outlined many times.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Brent Thill with Jefferies.

Brent Thill : Patrick, you get the magic wand and you can kind of wave it. What are the things that you think could really help get the environment back to where you’d want to be? What are the two or three things you’d wave that wand over?

Patrick Spence: That’s amazing, Brett. That’s a great question. I mean, I think tailwinds in our category, so people shifting their investments from wherever they happen to be investing today into audio products would be a great thing for us. That would be the biggest thing, I think to Alex’s point, like housing is one that certainly we expect to be benefiting from. So that would be something that would be underlying it. But again, we’re not going to, because there are no magic wands, we’re not going to focus on that too much. And instead we’re just focused on how do we tap further into that install base, right? And tap into that $6 billion opportunity. And how do we make sure that we’re finding new channels, new countries where we can tap into those homes that we’re not in yet.

And so things like expanding distribution, our product innovation pipeline, and then as well how we deal with our existing install base and find ways for them to enjoy more Sonos products and tell their friends and families kind of where we’re putting all of our efforts.

Brent Thill: And sorry if I missed this. Just on some of the promotional pricing that you put in. I know some of that seemed like it was working, but to what extent are you using that going forward and do you need to lean on that harder or is that something that given your premium product, you don’t want to pull that thread? Or how should we think about that?