Thank you for joining us for the Camping World Holdings Group presentation. I'm Craig Kennison with Baird Research. Camping World is simply the largest RV retailer in America. We are so pleased to have with us the team. We've got Marcus Lemonis, who's the Chairman and CEO, Matt Wagner, the President, and Brett Andress, the Senior Vice President of Corporate Development and Investor Relations. This is going to be a fireside chat. I'm counting on all of you to have a few questions. Maybe, Marcus, I'll start with you just to introduce Camping World to this audience.
Camping World, the business that you know of today, was started in 2003. It operates in two distinct sections. The first is a traditional RV dealership network of 200-plus locations. When you think about those, they operate just like an auto dealership. The sale of new and used RVs, finance, parts, and F&I. Our second business, the business that's really the crown jewel of our business, is the Good Sam business. It not only has a membership club, but is a consortium of affinity products like roadside assistance, warranty, insurance. What we love about that business, it's asset light, does a little north of $150 million of revenue, and has $100 million of EBITDA. It's sort of our steady Eddie. We control today about a little over 20% of all new RVs sold in the market. The number's actually a little higher in recent months.
On the used side, when we look at our market share, we combine all of the new and all of the used together in North America. Last year, we were at 11.2%. Our goal was to break 12%. In the early parts of the year, I think we're probably closer to 14% in terms of total market share of all RVs sold, including what happens on the private party side.
Perfect. Thank you for that intro. Maybe, look, you're at the tip of the spear for the U.S. consumer. Talk about the consumer trends you're seeing today and maybe how you're being more successful than your average dealer.
Yeah, I'd say we're definitely on pace to be more successful as we sit here today in the current selling season. We did communicate last week that we look at our Memorial Day weekend, which we call our Camp 5, which is essentially the five most important days of the year from a selling standpoint, was about mid-teens. When you look at the industry based on the metrics we can see on our end, based on what we're hearing from a lot of the other channel sources, you're probably looking at an industry that's tracking March, April, May, somewhere around down mid to down high. Obviously, with what we've disclosed already in April and what we've disclosed already in May, it's a pretty significant divergence on a unit basis from the rest of the industry.
What's the unlock? Is it affordability?
I mean, that's really been the secret to our success over the last six, seven years especially, is identification of certain price points whereby we could drive demand and also grow the TAM of the overall industry. So it's no surprise that over the last few years, we've been very diligently watching our ASPs to ensure that we're hitting the right average sale price to actually induce more consumer entrance in this lifestyle. We suggested heading into this year that we could face some sort of ASP pressure. However, really, our edict was to just meet the customer wherever they wanted to be met and to procure whatever sort of assets we needed on either the new or used side to ensure that we just picked up a disproportionate amount of demand that exists out there.
Affordability has really been the key in an environment like this especially, which really is lending itself to this idiosyncratic story that we're putting up compared to all of our competitors and peer groups out there.
What drives affordability? It's obviously interest rates, and it's the cost of the unit. Talk about, first of all, on the cost side, what you're doing in terms of private label or your own product to drive that affordability.
A big portion of our success over many years has been our exclusively branded products, where today, as we sit here, those account for roughly 40% of all the new assets that we sell. In recent times, we've called them contract manufactured assets because we're really driving the entire process with the manufacturers from beginning to end. For those that follow the industry at large, Thor reported this morning, and they put up very positive results. They actually showed nice margin improvement year over year. That really was a byproduct of us working in connection with them more extensively in development of our private label, our exclusively branded products, because they're able to yield greater efficiencies.
In turn, we're able to enjoy some of the benefits of those efficiencies by driving down our prices, while at the same time, that efficiency of labor really allows them to leverage their fixed cost structure and generate that much more. At first glance, it could appear that, wow, they had that much more margin improvement off of just the dealers. In reality, when you think about exclusively branded products where we're making commitments months in advance, working up the supply chain with different vendors like Lippert and Patrick Industries to secure certain price points, everyone benefits in a scenario like that. That's truly just an optimized supply chain.
How should we think about how the RV industry is processing tariff news and how the RV consumer is thinking about the implications of trade policy?
From our perspective, we feel like we've been able to buck any sort of trend that exists out there. In so much as our consumer base clearly is buying into the products that we're securing and procuring, just as well, we're not deaf enough to suggest that there couldn't be some sort of impact, especially on new invoice prices over the ensuing months. We, however, have the greatest hedge, which is really our used segment in particular. It actually benefits us when new prices go up just a marginal amount, anywhere from 3%- 5%, because our used assets then become that much more valuable, and we could secure that many more used assets in the marketplace to just ensure that consumers that could afford a certain monthly price point are satisfied. We know that this is a combination of cost, term, and interest rate.
We have been diligent, as we have published a variety of slides over the last few years, to ensure that we are hitting a certain monthly payment threshold as a percent of total disposable income that consumers have available. We know that they are going to be disciplined in financially planning whatever they want, need in terms of their recreating, as well as what they could afford. We know that there will be price increases. Manufacturers have suggested in the industry that it will probably settle into an average of about 5% year- over- year. That is first blush. Obviously, there is going to be a lot of negotiating up and down the supply chain.
However, regardless of what happens there, we can continue to leverage the used space, our Good Sam business, as Marcus alluded to earlier, and our service business, which our service business has continued to enjoy the benefits of an environment like this.
Craig, I'd like to maybe just take a step back for a second. For those folks that are new to the space, I'd like to oversimplify it a little bit. In the 40-something years that RVs have been in existence, one key measurement stick has been the number of RVs in circulation. How many people come into the lifestyle, and how many people stay versus leave? What are the different things that would drive people into the lifestyle or drive people out? A good fun fact is that in those 40 years, there has never been a year where the number of RVs in circulation goes down. Never. Not one time. When interest rates were 17%, not in the great financial crisis of 2008 and 2009, never.
There's also another misnomer that COVID was this blip that created a mass entry into the space, and then there was a mass exit. That also did not happen. In the most simplistic view of this business, it is a choice that people make to spend discretionary dollars, of which are not as high as you would imagine. For most people that think about the RV space, they think about a big bus, something they saw on TV or a rock star or an athlete. That is not what we sell. We sell predominantly travel trailers with an average selling price in the mid to upper $40,000s, excuse me, $30,000s. They're financed anywhere from 180 months to 240 months. So the average payment that we're actually selling is $330-some-odd dollars.
The reason that our company is so idiosyncratic against everybody else is that we build our inventory, we stock our shelves, and we advertise with one premise: an affordable monthly payment as an alternative to any other recreation or any other vacation. When the market moves, interest rates go up, prices go up. All it does is change the stocking levels because we do not believe that consumers' affordability around monthly payment moves. If they stay locked in at $275-$375, when prices go up on units or interest rates go up on units, or the opposite happens where they both go down, all that does is move them around on the type of unit that they are going to buy, but it does not change that.
What we've learned over time in the 20-something years that we've been building this is that we have to really figure out how to be so nimble that when a topic like tariffs comes up or a topic like COVID comes up, that we can pivot really, really quickly. This is an unregulated industry, unlike the boat business and the auto business, where the manufacturers in our industry do not drive the outcome. Distribution drives the outcome. I think it's just important to level set around why used is so important. There are two and a half times more used sold in the United States, largely driven by private party transactions, than all of the new units manufactured and sold. Two and a half times.
When you think about investing in our business and you look at our dominance on the new side and our not dominance on the used side, it isn't because we're not selling more used than every other dealer. It's because the private party transactions. I buy it from you. You buy it from me. We try to trade in our neighborhood. It's such a big part of the business. That's where Good Sam comes in. I just think it's important. It's not a complicated industry. We buy these things. They're not robotically made. They're made in Elkhart, Indiana. It's in a steel and aluminum frame with some fiberglass and some wood. It's not complicated. They're towed one by one across the country. There's a cost prohibition around moving them. Consumers essentially use them. Not every day. There's not as many full-timers. It's not a movie.
They use them three, four times a quarter. Sometimes they'll use them once a month. Sometimes they'll use them three times a month in a variety of different functions. Not a complicated industry.
You mentioned some significant share gains this year. I wanted to probe the used side of it. There's a lot going on under the surface at Camping World to drive a, to really create a platform, I would say, to be strong in the used market. Talk about the key pillars of that platform, if you would, Matt.
Yeah, this is where the RV industry is so dissimilar from the automotive space, where there's just been a lack of tech investment and a lack of clarity. In a lot of ways, RV dealers have preyed upon the opaque nature of this industry. However, no one's really been able to leverage the used space like we feel like we've been able to over the last few years, where in our rich history over the last 20 years, we've amassed a tremendous amount of information where we've had millions of RVs pass through our system via either the Good Sam business, via our service business, or just straight up an RV sale of some kind. Through that, we've been able to create what I would regard as the VAuto equivalent that you see oftentimes in the auto space in the RV space.
VAuto, for those that are unfamiliar, has created a market day supply calculation monitoring all the used assets that are being sold in 30, 60, 90-day increments and coming up with the fair market pricing based upon residual value calculations. Nothing like that exists in the RV space outside of our Good Sam RV Valuator. The greatest indicator of our success has been our ability to procure used assets. That's really been the only gating item. There's no supply chain of used assets. There's really no efficient auction houses in the RV industry, which is where using the RV Valuator, we've created an auction business. We've also been able to yield a tremendous amount of leads on a daily basis.
We can literally wake up every day and at least have 3,000 leads of customers that are raising their hands saying that they'd be interested in getting a value for their asset and in turn be willing to sell their asset. It is off of that. That is really our launch pad to continue to gain more supply chain procurement efficiency and in turn start to hit the mark on the other side. We have enjoyed over the last six years now going from about 5% market share in the used space to upwards of about 7.2% last year. Through the first three months of this year, we clipped about 9%. As Marcus suggested earlier, really our long-term goal has been to take our collective of new and used market share combined from what ended up being about 11% up to 15%.
Through the first three months of that survey's reported information, we actually eclipsed that, as Marcus said. We were at about 14.5%-15%. Whether or not that'll persist through the balance of the year remains to be seen. Nonetheless, we feel very confident in our long-term game plan here, where the used marketplace being doubled at the size of the new marketplace. That's really our pathway to limit the volatility that exists on the new RV side of the business, as well as a variety of other businesses, and used just that much more stable for the long term.
More profitable.
Far more profitable.
It's a more profitable transaction, as you would imagine. The front-end margins on a used transaction are more lucrative. I would ask you to think about us like the market maker. People really rely on us to determine used values, the consumer and other dealers. We use our balance sheet and our ability to understand what those values are to grow that used side of the business.
Craig, the other thing I'd add is used values were disrupted last year in 2024. Matt and his team took that time to really take a step back, really reconfigure the used buying process. Now today, it's much more centralized. We essentially have a boiler room of sorts, if you will, in Arizona, where nationally we collect all the leads that we get for customers that want to sell their units. On an average day, we will get anywhere from 2,000-3,000 inbound leads from consumers wanting to sell that asset. The key question that Matt and his team had to answer was, how do we sort that out by the highest priority, disperse our human capital in the right priority to make sure we're buying the right units at the right time at the right value?
I think all of that is starting to, as you can see in our user results so far this year, transpire itself into the P&L.
The used market, as you mentioned, is still heavily a peer-to-peer market, but you are a marketplace. Are there opportunities for you to play a role in some of those peer-to-peer transactions through either, I don't know, valuation services, F&I? Can you get in the middle of any of that?
I think the first thing is we want to do that in an asset-light way. Whether that's consigning units for people, becoming the interchange on the financing side, selling them products and services along with the financing, or providing valuation services, we don't expect that we're ever going to get to 30% of the used market like we have on the new side. The question is, how do we utilize the assets that we have today and the data that we have today in an asset-light way to extract some value out of that?
We think Good Sam is really ripe for that, particularly on the finance side.
Where is Camping World at in terms of the auction market and the opportunity to, again, take advantage of essentially a position as a market maker to liquidate inventory that maybe does not suit your retail profile?
That is where we spun this around a little bit. We still have an online auction that we routinely run. To answer or follow up on the previous question in terms of our opportunity to slide into this private party marketplace, we have launched rvs.com, which is a super asset-light model whereby we are inducing individuals to list their assets. We are yielding revenue off of that. It is much akin to what an RV Trader does, an Auto Trader, a variety of other marketplaces out there to help satisfy either that private party transaction or create more of these timed online auctions. We have realized that those in-person auctions at times can be relatively expensive to host an event like that, put on an event like that. We have still continued to pursue that path.
In the short term, the more asset-light resolution or solution for this would be that rvs.com play. We have seen a lot of success. With very little marketing, we have been able to induce a few thousand consumers over the first three months of this year to list through and sell their assets through our environment. The question is, how much more can we play into that in terms of yielding a positive ROAS or return on ad spend to continue to get those listers as well as those sellers on the other side?
Brett, I wanted to ask you about some of the guideposts that you've laid out for 2025. My observation, if you just looked at Camping World, you would not know all of the macro noise that was out there in the marketplace because for some reason you've been, I think, tactical about the price points that you're playing in, but you just seem more immune to some of those issues. I guess talk about some of the high-level guideposts investors should think about.
Yeah, I think you said the word immune. I would say responsive to those issues in terms of how we're navigating how the market has manifested itself, whether it be tariffs, whether it be affordability. You think about the guideposts that we laid out this year, very much, I'd say, intact from what we laid out back in November of last year and really just most recently, February of this year. Low single digits on the new side, units. You're going to see low to mid-single digits on the used side. On the margin front, you're going to see historical margins on new and used. SG&A's percent of gross will lever itself about 600-700 basis points. Really the only tweak that we really had to consider coming out of the first quarter was ASP. That goes back to affordability.
What the team has done exiting the first quarter, as those ASPs come down a little bit, we focus on the affordability, drive higher units. We're essentially bringing in less gross profit dollars. We're offsetting that with SG&A cuts that we made at the end of the first quarter. You're also seeing better performance out of our used volume. Those two offsets combined are keeping the goalpost or the guideposts that we laid out intact, just a little bit of levering, if you will, between a couple of points.
The 600-700 basis points is still a big number. How do you get there?
What are you looking to meet for? You were doing so well.
You make tough decisions. At the end of the day, we really believe that we have one issue to solve, and we are not happy with where our leverage is. Our leverage is really a function of depressed earnings. We have to get our earnings back where they need to be. Part of getting the earnings back where they need to be is structurally taking out fixed costs, which could be consolidating locations, trying to get more sales out of every rooftop, tightening up the amount of inventory on the ground at each location, and unfortunately, in some cases, pausing on some initiatives. We believe that the ASP drop definitely provides more headwind than we would have anticipated on the SG&A side, but we think we are prepared for it. A shift to more used will help mitigate some of it.
Our performance in Good Sam, our performance in service, and our performance in used is really a big contributor to that. 600-700 basis points isn't like a hope to, it's a have to, just because we got to rescale our business to a level that people that invest in our company can look at the business today and say, "We like the performance under this macro environment," and the growth of the macro environment would really fall precipitously to the bottom line to get us back to the 8% EBITDA margins we used to operate under. Who is your core customer? And to what extent are you watching things like student loans and that requirement coming back into the equation as a factor that might weigh in? It's a 50-year-old Republican with a household income over $100,000 and a credit score around 700. That is our customer.
The reason that we tend to do better is because we know who they are and we play to the audience. We build our inventory that way. We build our marketing that way. We build our payment presentation that way. We do not think that there is a lot of folks that are struggling with their student loans walking into our stores. We have worked hard to lower the average age of our consumer. A smaller, lighter unit will obviously do that, but that is just a smaller, lighter unit being bought by that same kind of person.
Because of your access to incredible data and I think the insight you have had over decades of running this business, you have a keen insight into the RV consumer. What is your outlook for this year and next as to when we might see a more robust cyclical recovery in this industry?
You almost have to break up this conversation into the new versus used side, which is why we've oftentimes just suggested we're agnostic whether or not we're going to sell a new versus a used asset. Inherently, new assets for like basis are going to be oftentimes about 15% more than a one model year removed used asset. We would suggest that the new marketplace is largely going to behave in this tight band over the next couple of years. I don't necessarily see too many structural shifts on the new side to suggest that we're going to see a dramatic improvement on the new side of the business. However, it's not necessarily bad in the context of history. We, as an industry, will sell about 350,000, a little less than that, new units this year to consumers.
I think on a trailing 12-month basis, we're at like 346,000. On the used side, however, we're going to sell about 750,000. That number also continues to move in a pretty tight band. I would suggest that number should continue to improve over time, especially as we could be the actual inducer to grow that marketplace by means of actually convincing customers to either sell their assets to another used party or for us to be able to buy that many more that aren't even being utilized. There are a lot of RVs, as Marcus suggested earlier, just being utilized three, four times a year or perhaps once a year. Those same assets can be actually sold to another individual that is going to use it far more extensively, in which case that fuels our service business, our retail aftermarkets business, as well as Good Sam.
We're incentivized in a variety of different ways to maintain that whole used portion. However, the new business, I think, is actually relatively healthy. I just do not necessarily see in the short term any sort of material shift on the new side.
Yeah. To that point, Craig, if you think about our outlook on the new side of the business, there are a lot of external factors that we can't control, right? We can't control interest rates, but there are a couple of external factors we are keeping an eye on. If we think about the tax bill working its way through the Senate right now, there are some favorable provisions when you think about loan deductibility, particularly RV loan deductibility, which will be included. That's going to hit a very, very wide swath of consumers potentially, much more than any current interest deductions available on RVs today. Not to say there's a silver bullet out there on the new side. We would all love interest rates to come down marginally, but we obviously can perform in any environment.
Should the tax bill kind of swing in our favor, that would be one source.
I love the way that I look at the industry, and this is my 25th year in it, is in an environment like this, those companies who have a large propensity to serve the install base are going to be big drivers. I look at the Lippert's and the Patrick's and the non-new side of our company. I feel like those three are best positioned to not only have market share growth, but to have earnings power growth. It's our expectations that we're going to grow our bottom line by 60%-70% this year. We had really three principal goals: sell more units, make more money, and delever our business. We think as we go into next year, we're not expecting the market to expand much on the new side.
Maybe we get lucky and something happens and it pops to $370, but we're not expecting that, nor are we building our infrastructure for that expectation. More used, more service, more Good Sam, and probably more of the same on the new side. We also think there could be some dealer consolidation here at the back half of the year because this is a volume level and a margin profile that I don't know that many could keep going for very long. What is your appetite for M&A? Probably zero right now. I think we believe that we could get back to a $7 billion top line, 8% EBITDA bottom line, and delever with the store base that we have today.
That does not mean that if somebody does not show up with a clear white space opportunity with brands and style that fits into our company that we will not do that deal. Of course, we will, but we are not out hunting like we typically are. We are really focused on delivering better results.
The industry has gotten into trouble occasionally on too much inventory. It is hard to forecast these things, and occasionally there is an overbuild. It feels like there is more discipline maybe through consolidation. Do you think that is the case?
I do not. I think the industry still does not know how to manage inventory, and it does not know how to create a true flow-through of building stuff at the right time, at the right place, at the right moment.
As much as we have these gyrations of overbuild and then underbuild and overbuild and then underbuild, the dealer body can't really react to it. The manufacturers, I still think, are in the early innings of providing the dealer community sophisticated data. Our growth in market share on the new side, and we reported that May and our quarter is going to be explosive. We had our largest month in the history of our company in May. That's including COVID. That's the largest month with fewer stores. It really is a data science game for us and putting the right product on the ground. I don't believe that the rest of the industry necessarily possesses those same skills.
You're 20% of the market. You weren't always this big.
We're more than that. I just undercut it just because we're sitting here today.
When we report the second quarter, we will be. I mean, through the first three months of the year, we were about 26% of the North American U.S. market, North American new market, excuse me. We would expect that to be probably higher. Probably higher in Q2.
Wow. Maybe with the last 90 seconds, is there an opportunity in the service arena for Camping World?
It is a big part of our business today. We will do on average $50 million a month in service and parts, not aftermarket retail. When you add the two together, it is closer to $60 million on an annualized basis, all combined through consolidation. Yes, there is always an opportunity. We need to get better at our customer pay work. That is customers raising their hand, making the election. We also know that a lot of our customers are DIYers.
This isn't an automobile where you're fixing an engine or a powertrain. This is plumbing, electrical, carpentry, things of that nature. Our bays are full. There's a silver lining in all of it. Our bays are full because we're selling so many used that we're reconditioning that many used. So we're pretty maxed out right now.
Wonderful. We are out of time, but thank you all very much.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Appreciate it.