Johnson Outdoors Inc. (NASDAQ:JOUT) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Diving is a different story altogether. But it’s in good shape. So it is different by category. But again, our job is to put activity out there to pull it through. And bringing new innovation to get the retailers excited about what’s next. So it depends on which market you’re talking about. But hopefully, by the end of the season, we’ll be in good shape.

Anthony Lebiedzinski : All right. Sounds good. My last question in the press release, you guys talked about investing in strategic opportunities to strengthen the business. So I was wondering, if you could expand on that as far as what you’re seeing, as far as maybe possible M&A? I know you guys have talked about that for a while, but just wondering if you could expand on some of the opportunities that you see in the future.

Helen Johnson-Leipold: Well, I think there’s two things. I mean, strengthening the business and looking for opportunity, we are focused on improving our supply chain situation so that we can benefit from efficiency. So I think strengthening the business in that respect, we are always looking externally for opportunities in the marketplace. And again they have to do very strategic and fit with our strategy long-term. And again it’s — there’s less activity going on out there. But again we’re not letting up on our research and our visibility to opportunities.

Anthony Lebiedzinski: Got you. Okay. And then I guess as a quick follow-up to that, I guess as far as your R&D expenses, I mean typically they’ve been around 4% of revenue? I mean, do you think that will continue, or do you think you need to step up that spending? How should we think about that?

Helen Johnson-Leipold: Again as we said, I think innovation even becomes more important during times of — when there’s a lot of competition it’s a challenging market. So I think we would expect that to be most likely growing from that point.

Anthony Lebiedzinski: Understood. Okay. Well, thank you very much, and best of luck.

Operator: Thank you. Please stand by for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Anna Glaessgen with B. Riley. Your line is open.

Anna Glaessgen: Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking my question. First, I’d like — if you could provide some perspective on sell-in versus sell-through, or any color on POS as we’re trying to understand end market demand in light of how distorted retailer inventories are to get a real sense of what’s going on in the field?

Helen Johnson-Leipold: Well, we — it reflects our comments on the softening of demand that we are seeing across the board. But — and again I think the Watercraft business is the one that — the consumer demand piece has been challenged, but we are seeing pull-through and Fishing again at a level that is lower than it has been during the pandemic, and actually the Fishing business has been pretty resilient from a demand standpoint more so than the other categories. So it’s starting to normalize now, which is a little later than the most. But I do think we’re seeing that the consumer demand is normalizing from the swing of the pandemic. And either our Watercraft business, we’re going to work on pulling that through, helping that through because that a little bit tighter than the rest of them.

Anna Glaessgen: Got it. And more of a clarification. Did you come into the quarter with a backlog? Was there any benefit from that?

David Johnson: We had a bit of backlog coming into the quarter, but that — we’re down to like normal levels now of orders. So, yeah, I think we’re in a normal level of order activity at this point.

Anna Glaessgen: Got it. So basically as we move forward thinking about the coming quarters, it should be a relatively balanced sell-in, sell-through. Expiring like Watercraft or places where there’s excess inventory or you still normalizing inventory?

David Johnson: Right. Yeah, yeah.