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

Ron Josey: Great. Thanks for taking the question. I want to ask a little bit more about engagement trends. As Barry in the letter, you talked about an increase in monthly subscription engagement in the quarter and members engaging with longer classes. Do you think that has to do with more of a seasonal usage pattern or just felt on the strategy of being everywhere, anywhere and everywhere, and with longer and more types of classes that are coming out? And I’m curious how you use this trend of greater engagement to just improve overall brand. And with Leslie here, maybe you can help us a little bit more just about brand perception and what we’re doing to increase that over time? Thank you.

Barry McCarthy: Well, the 6% increase in engagement amongst the all access subscribers is year-over-year. So it’s not a seasonal trend. And Liz, correct me if I’m wrong, I think it’s 12% year-over-year for app engagement as well. So I think it reflects some progress on personalization. We continue great execution like Jen Cotter and her content team and the preferences of the members. So if we’re programming our classes well, and if more people are taking longer classes, it’s because they’re choosing to and we’re producing enough of them and enabling them to discover them on the platform in a way that better serve their interests.

Liz Coddington: I do want to correct one thing really quick. The 6% includes both the connected and the app subscribers total for app engagement.

Operator: Thank you. One moment for questions. Our next question goes from Aneesha Sherman with Bernstein. You may proceed.

Aneesha Sherman: Thank you. Two questions from me, please. The first one is on inventory. So as you’re continuing to clear inventory, what is the normalized level of hardware gross margins you think the business can get to? I know you’ve talked about double digit underlying margins. Does that view change now with the growth of FAS in the mix? And then I have a quick question on POP. You took an impairment of 31 million. Can you give us an update on the work being done on that and what you’re expecting as the outcome? And are you still expecting a sale? Thank you.

Liz Coddington: So, I can take the question on POP first. In the quarter, we actually took an impairment of only $15 million in this particular quarter. So we are still looking to sell POP. We are talking to a variety of interested parties and, you know, we hope to have a — hope to be able to sell it as soon, but we are still working on that. On the other question, which was related to inventory and normalized hardware gross margin, we do expect to see, you know, so we are moving into a more normalized inventory position. We’ve been purchasing inventory as we prepare for the holiday season. And I did want to comment about the fact that in Q1, it was a use of cash and in Q2 to Q4, we expect to have a bit of a tailwind on inventory.

But by the end of the year, we expect to be pretty normalized with regard to inventory and the seasonal cash flow that the business is accustomed to or has been historically accustomed to. Now, in terms of gross margins, we are seeing some benefit on the fact that, we are moving into that more normalized inventory position. We don’t expect to have any more write offs of inventory. We’re being able to better manage our reserves. And then, we do have on a unit economics basis, excluding promotions, all of our skews are a double digit gross margin positive, aside from the guide.

Aneesha Sherman: Okay. And can you talk about how the impact of FAS might change the normalized gross margins going forward?