Peloton Interactive, Inc. (NASDAQ:PTON) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Leslie Berland: Yes, absolutely. Happy to be on the call. I think we’re very excited as we embark on holiday and we always bring exciting value to both our members and new customers as well. I think what’s interesting to also mention is how we bring these promotions to life. So we’ve really learned a lot over the past couple of months around digital and social media marketing and specifically creator and influencer marketing, which really reframes and contextualizes both this value as well as the promotion. So we’re seeing really strong traction in all of our work in this space and you will absolutely see this come to life during holiday. The other part I’ll mention is you read in the shareholder letter around our partnerships. Much of our partnership work is starting to take form at the exact same time and being in sample Michigan as well. So there’s a great sort of coming together of all these initiatives in the next few months.

Liz Coddington: Okay, So I’m going to go ahead and take the question about guidance for Q2 and the full year. So our Q2 guidance reflects what I believe to be a balanced view based on the macroeconomic outlook and the fact that there is some uncertainty around the performance in the holiday season. But it does reflect a few things. So I want to call out that it does reflect seasonality of our hardware sales, the fact that Q2 is a heavier hardware sales quarter for us. This is the link given all the holiday promotional activity. It’s also a quarter where we expect to see, surprisingly, an improvement in, maybe not surprisingly, improvement in our connected fitness growth margin. And some of the reasons for that and our overall growth margin is coming down seasonally as you would expect.

But connected fitness is actually going to be up in part because of fixed cost leverage that we expect to have from the higher connected fitness unit sales. And we also expect a slight mix shift away from our bike rental relative to Q1 because we expect our rental take rates to be a little lower, driven by the fact that we will have the high promotional activity in the quarter. And then in addition to that, and that is offset by some holiday promotional activity, but net-net, we expect it to be slightly higher. Our adjusted EBITDA guidance reflects the fact that we will have seasonal marketing spend to support the holiday season. It’s important to understand that that media spend actually supports growth in both Q2 as well as Q3. So the timing of that is reflected in the adjusted EBITDA guidance.

Now you had asked about partnerships. The way that we are thinking about these partnerships is they are just getting started. So there’s not really an explicit benefit baked into our guidance for subscribers directly as a result of a lot of these partnerships in Q2. The one thing that I called out earlier about Lululemon would be the exception to that. And so, as we build out these partnerships and the structures start to take shape and we gain more traction, we’ll be incorporating more of that into perhaps future quarters of guidance. Now for the full year, I want to call out a couple of things. Our back half of the year forecast reflects the fact that we expect to see revenue growth acceleration in Q2 and Q3. If you also look at our growth margin that we’re targeting for the full year, that also reflects the fact that our Q3 and Q4 growth margins are expected to be higher.

And a lot of that is driven by the fact that, you know, in addition to the mix shift between subscription and hardware sales, we do expect to see some benefit. It’s very called out earlier from the reintroduction of Tread+, but I do want to call out that we, you know, that is a new launch for us. There is some uncertainty baked into our guidance around it and the performance of the back half of the year.

Shweta Khajuria: Okay, thank you. Thank you, everyone.

Operator: Thank you. One moment for questions. Our next question comes from Ron Josey with Citi. You may proceed.