Hi, good afternoon. I'm Josh Pokrzywinski, Morgan Stanley's electrical equipment and multi-industry analyst. Thanks for joining us for Day 3 of our Laguna Industrial Conference, 9th Annual Laguna Industrial Conference. Joining me for the next fireside chat is Hayward, one of the leaders in the pool industry in North America. With us from the management team today, we have CEO, Kevin Holleran, CFO, Eifion Jones, and VP of Product Management and Business Development, Stuart Baker.
Guys, thanks for joining us. Before we jump into some of the opening remarks from Kevin, I do have a quick disclaimer I need to remind folks of. For a review of our research disclosures, please visit the appropriate Morgan Stanley website at morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures, and for all other questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales associate. With that, guys, thanks for joining us. Good to have you here at the conference. We appreciate you taking the time. Kevin, if you want to lead us off on some opening remarks, we can dive into some of the questions we have for you.
I sure will. Great. Thanks, Josh. It's great to be with you again. This is Kevin Holleran, everyone. We do have a few prepared remarks, which I'll kind of ask you to step through on the uploaded presentation so you can follow along. I'm not going to spend time on a cautionary statement, but please take time to read it here on slide two. It's also available on our investor relations website. I'm now on the slide titled Hayward at a Glance. I realize not everyone listening today is familiar with Hayward, so let me give a brief overview. We're organized into two reporting segments, North America and Europe/rest of world. North America is roughly 80%, which is advantageous, given this region has best margin profile in the industry.
We are a pure play with over 95% of our revenue tied to the pool industry, with vast majority coming from the residential backyard. We have a complete full line of innovative, environmentally sustainable products. Everything that you would need to safely operate any type of pool, whether that's an in-ground, commercial, or above ground. The pool industry and Hayward, we're benefiting from strong secular trends like de-urbanization, migration to warmer climates, hybrid work arrangements, and increased appreciation for healthy outdoor living. New pool construction, it's incredibly important as it adds more pools to the installed base. About 75% of our revenue profile stems from a resilient non-discretionary aftermarket once the pool is built. This includes equipment replacement, upgrades, and remodels. A big driver of this aftermarket is the digital conversion of the pool, or SmartPad, as we adopt it.
As folks add controls and automation, pool owners are pairing it with higher priced, sustainable IoT-enabled products to enhance the enjoyment of their backyard. I'll touch more on this in just a moment. You see our financials on the right side. The business is performing extremely well, with the last 12 months revenue up over 50% to nearly $1.2 billion and adjusted EBITDA over $350. Next slide. Hayward Advantage. This is how we think about our competitive moat that creates stickiness to our share position and delivers growth for our shareholders. Starting at one o'clock, our first layer is this incredibly strong and trusted brand, decades in the making, and a very large installed base that comes from having a complete product line across all pool types.
In the four to five o'clock range comes a large and very strong network of partners, from Totally Hayward builders and servicers that stake their reputation on Hayward products each day, to the channel partners, including distributors, retailers, e-sellers, and authorized service centers that help us sell and support Hayward product in the backyard. Third is operational excellence and our ability to leverage volume at great margins. We manufacture in-market with roughly 80% of our product built in the U.S., and we're vertically integrated, so we have shorter supply chains than others. We're highly automated and have capacity available to build more products with very manageable capital. All this has been on great display in the first half of the year as we've increased production year-over-year by north of 80%. Final advantage in that 10, 11 o'clock range is our innovation and product design capabilities.
Products are our lifeblood. We spend over $20 million a year in engineering. We have extensive IP that we protect with active and pending patents. We have top product performance in many key categories like Omni controls and automation, variable speed pumps, and salt chlorine generation, which are all fueling our growth. It's these levers that give Hayward our advantage. Moving to the next slide, titled Hayward is at the Center of Outdoor Living. I mentioned earlier the strong secular trends in the housing market. I want to explain that a little further. Millennials are becoming a larger segment of homeowners. They're tech-savvy buyers and expect smart home capabilities. They place outdoor living in high priority and appreciate a work-to-live mentality. De-urbanization, a term that you hear often, is occurring, which is moving folks from apartments to single-family homes.
There's increased flexibility to work from home or adopt a hybrid work schedule, which places higher priority on home amenities, including outdoor living space. Migration is occurring to warmer climates, which creates more interest in pools and outdoor living. Finally, there's a shortage of new home stock, and that's fueling remodeling activity, which Eifion will touch on shortly. On the right side of the slide highlights the growing focus on smart homes with predicted penetration increasing from 40% today to 60% in just a few years. This expectation carries over to the backyard, where our leading Omni control system is ushering in greater connectivity of the pool pad by synchronizing variable speed pumps, heaters, LED lights, salt chlorine generation, and water features.
Our Omni system can interface with other backyard features not sold by Hayward, like landscape lighting, irrigation systems, or be part of whole home smart system like Crestron or Savant. Next slide, U.S. pool market SmartPad conversion. Let me dive into this SmartPad conversion a little deeper and highlight what it means for Hayward and for our industry. Starting from the reasonable assumption that an existing pool owner wants similar control and features that new pool owners are getting. New construction is installing controls about 2/3 of the time, or 65%, where the installed base is in the high 20% range, 27%, 28%. This digital conversion itself, at say $1,500 for a control across this incremental 40% of the 5.3 million in-ground pools, represents a $3 billion growth opportunity by itself.
Once the controls are in place, as I said earlier, this ushers in things like variable speed pumps, LED lights, salt chlorine generation heaters, to name a few, which are highlighted there next to the blue bar in the middle of the chart. To quantify just a couple of these other upgrade opportunities, the energy conversion story with variable speed pumps, there's about a 40% difference between the installed base and new construction. About a $1.6 billion opportunity to move the installed base up to the 75% take rate or adoption rate for variable speed on new pool construction. Then finally, this chemical conversion, where you see folks moving from chlorine tablets to a more natural form of sanitization through salt chlorine generation. That represent about a 25% delta between installed base and new construction. That's another $1.3 billion market opportunity.
This SmartPad conversion is a big part of what we started to see prior to COVID, and it certainly played out during the pandemic. Still feels like we're very much in the early innings of this transition. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Eifion just to walk through the final two slides.
Great. Thanks, Kevin. Turning to the next slide, the sustainability of growth. We believe the pool industry has inflected. It has strong structural growth dynamics. If you look at the top left-hand new pool construction graphic there, you can see new pool construction is forecast to grow at a rate of close to 8% over the next five years, increasing from 96,000 pools in 2020 to 140,000 pools in 2025. This is the rich end of the market, the in-ground pool new construction market. We see strong secular trends, and we talked about this frequently on one-on-ones, but we see suburbanization taking place, the clear migration to the Sun Belt, and now millennials entering their peak earnings years, which support new construction activity. Home investment, in particular around renovation, continues to grow, with renovation spend up 35% year-over-year in Q2 of 2021.
The financial health of our target audience is improving, with improved home equity and lower interest rates certainly providing further tailwinds to continued outdoor living and, in particular, pool investments. When we think about remodeling activity, LIRA, the leading indicator of remodeling activity, forecasts annual growth upon renovation and repair of 8.6% through mid-year next year. This is the highest over three years, and the Remodeling Market Index, produced by the National Association of Home Builders as a gauge of remodeling investment activity, that index is at 87. This index has never really exceeded 60 over the last 10 years. A tremendous amount of remodeling activity taking place in and around the home, including the outdoor living space. All of this to say investment into the home and outdoor living area is thriving and delivering good tailwinds for the new pool construction and remodel industry.
When we think about the next slide, which is our 2021 financial outlook. Last time we publicly met the investment community on our Q2 earnings call, we gave guidance for net sales growth of 54%-58% year-over-year. Adjusted EBITDA of $405 million-$425 million, which will be up 75%-84%. We have strong results for the first half, as Kevin mentioned earlier. We have increased visibility, particularly in the building element of our marketplace into 2022 and through our order file, which is strong. The ongoing inflation trends driven by material availability and logistics continues to be managed by the business. We continue to post solid results in spite of that through the first half.
We do have a broad-based strength across our products, and we're coming out with some really innovative and well-appreciated new technologies with our Vitality Index, which is a measure of new product introductions growing notably in 2021 over 2020. We'll have an opportunity to talk about those, I'm sure, through the Q&A. All that to say, again, as I mentioned previously, we believe the strong market trends that will continue to support really healthy demand in 2021 and beyond. Okay. With that, I'll send it back to Josh.
Excellent. Thanks, guys. Appreciate the comments there. Maybe just to start off on one of the more topical elements that we've had all week on supply chain. I mean, I understand you touched on that a little bit. How has that progressed over, say, the last 30 to 60 days? If you had to pick out some particular areas of the portfolio that you're watching more closely, that would be helpful as well. I guess, maybe just to round out the discussion, because everything comes in threes, how that puts the price-cost equation in your view.
Yeah, sure. Certainly, the environment has become more challenging through the last two months. We continue to be agile to work through those challenges. It is a tougher environment. When we think about our raw material purchases, we have basically four broad categories of commodity exposure. Resin, which goes into our plastic products, steel, copper, and then a specialist metal that goes into some of our pool automation end products. The environment there for raw materials is still gnarled up. It's challenging. We believe we are probably better placed to deal with some of these challenges than those that have a more disparate supply chain. It's challenging. We continue to deal with it.
We have a fantastic operations team that has learned over the course of many years on how to grind through and be successful in these periods. There's no doubt, Josh, it remains a challenging supply environment.
Yeah.
In terms of the t he other area I would say, Josh, is the logistics side. The logistics both through the ports, the container market, and to a certain extent, the truck line market, those continue to be challenging as well, and we're seeing worldwide container rates go to unrecognizable levels in the recent past. Again, we continue to work through the logistical side of it with reasonably good success here. In terms of the price-cost dynamic, we have taken action out of cycle this year as we've seen inflation coming through. We took a 5% price increase in March. We came out with an early announcement of 5%-7%, which is the normal seasonal price increase we put in October 1st. We came out early with that announcement to give the heads-up to the channel, as well as giving good advance to the building community who are quoting into 2022.
If we need more price to cover the continued rising inflationary market, we'll go get it. I think that's understood by the channel, that this is unprecedented times. We have the ability and the agility as an industry to get price. Recognizing that a 10% increase, and I think I've quoted this before, a 10% increase in equipment costs really only amounts to about a 1% increase in the overall new pool construction cost, given equipment is about anywhere between 7%-13% of that installed pool cost. The short answer is that there tends to be low sensitivity equipment pricing in new construction. The remodel market and the upgrade market are maybe a little bit more sensitivity, but in the current environment, the outdoor living trends support our ability to get price through.
Excellent. Maybe just on the product availability side and the ability to meet demand in the marketplace. We had what I guess you would call a partner or someone else in the pool supply chain on the actual physical pool itself speaking earlier today, citing the pool pad and the equipment as a bottleneck for installs. It sounds like you're managing that fairly well based on your comments, which would sort of point the finger to maybe some of the other competitors that you have here in North America. I think there are probably two of note. Do you think you're picking up some share, as maybe some of the other folks have not fared quite as well as Hayward on that ability to meet demand?
Josh, this is Kevin. I think we have picked up some share. I think it's the result of a few things. I think we've had some great recent product launches that we've had great early adoption. We called it the Big Bang because there were enough of them between late last year and early this year, that I think we really distinguished ourselves and reinforced leadership position in some of those. I think secondly, which speaks to the stickiness in our mind of the share gain, is the recent success we've had adding Totally Hayward dealers, which is the name for our loyalty program, bringing folks in under the Hayward tent. In the first half of this year, we've grown that membership by a little north of 15%, which is a fascinating number of growth in such a short period of time.
I do think that the competitiveness of the product line and expanding some of our dealer and channel partnerships has really led to this share gain opportunity, and we feel confident that it is sticking.
Got it. As you think about those dealer relationships that you've gained, is the common feedback coming down to the new products or "Hey, we're not going to be able to meet our commitments if we don't actually physically have product"? Is it an availability thing or is it kind of a new product thing?
Yeah. I'd say yes to both, honestly. When we're bringing someone in, I'm not sure that we know exactly all their motivations. I do think that from a product development standpoint, I think there's strong high confidence in where we're going, in the support that we give the channel and the dealer base out there. They know that innovation is core to what Hayward stands for. I think that there's some evidence that from an operations standpoint, a supply chain management standpoint, I think that we've been able to get after the demand environment better than some. I think it's a combination of a lot of different factors that ultimately gain the audience and ultimately bring them in to the Hayward family.
Got it. Just on backlog visibility, kind of the broader demand environment. Clearly strong today. Probably stretching out a little farther than you normally would at this point in the season. How does that kind of inform your view on 2022? How do you feel about kind of the seasonal ebbs and flows you would see, like the 4Q early buy that you sometimes see in this industry? How does that kind of sit with you these days?
Yeah, there's a lot there. Backlogs, historically at this, on September 15th, might be about as low at any point in the seasonal year, right? This is when you're wrapping up the seasonal year, which ends September 30th. Early buy or the winter stocking is starting to come in. That's what we build and ship in Q4. Much like last year, the order file is very different than it has been historically. There's still a very robust order file from this seasonal year that despite expanding capacity by north of 80% in the first half of the year, we still haven't been able to meet full demand by any means. I think that that's going to continue to keep us busy into the fourth quarter of this year. We did announce an Early Buy program. It's a much more scaled back version of early buy.
Eifion mentioned earlier this announcement back in July. That's when we announced the parameters of our Early Buy program. I'll just cut to the chase and say that as the dust has settled, we've basically collected to our expectations. We take that as a very good sign that the folks even closer to the backyard feel very confident. Confident enough to place early buy orders with their checkbook heading into 2021. We wouldn't expect to really be able to supply much of any of that until the new year. Because of all those reasons, yes, there's much more visibility into 2022. I think the bullishness or the optimism still seems to be there with channel partners and with the dealer base.
Got it. If we could just spend some time on mix within your portfolio and kind of the broader pool pad and how that's evolved. I think relative to maybe some other consumer industries, pool is seeing a pretty good amount of trade up. Maybe kind of put that in the context of sort of the range of options on a typical pool pad. Where do you think we've kind of come from and are at today over the past 12 to 18 months?
Yeah. We really did start seeing higher priced pads pre-pandemic, and it's really only been reinforced since then. What I think is driving it, we talk internally around really three broad conversions that are occurring. In my prepared remarks, I spent a little bit of time on this digital conversion. I think oftentimes when you think of the digital conversion, going from something mechanical to something more electronic and IoT, bringing that in for the first time, that's really kind of a volume thing. That's not really trading up as much as it is introducing something new to the pad. Once that's in place, you start to see some of these other things, like single speeds being traded up. That's a mix to a variable speed or a white incandescent light going, trading up to a multicolor LED light.
That certainly has some mix element to it. Then I'd say the third conversion is this chemical conversion that we're seeing from chlorine tablets to some more advanced type of water treatment. That's a bit debatable whether that's volume or mix, frankly. We tend to look at it more so as volume. The long and the short of it is I think it's both volume and mix have contributed to a pretty stellar growth, both for us and for the industry over the last couple of years.
Got it. You mentioned that a lot of the business is really geared around replacement versus new construction. Has that relationship historically started with something that required a product to break? As you're seeing the business come in today, obviously, there's some anecdotal component because you don't know what's driving every order. Are you seeing more upgrades without a product that's necessarily broken or getting replaced as a function of the order?
It's a good question, Josh. As a general rule, folks do not accelerate the replacement of a functioning piece of equipment. However, we are aware of the fact that there is some upgrading that's going on. You're not going to replace a functioning single speed pump with another single speed pump. If someone sees the energy or appreciates the energy efficiency story that comes with an upgrade to a variable speed pump, we treat that as an upgrade. I think that's how you phrased it in your question as well. That really is what's driving the aftermarket right now.
We're seeing some folks add some equipment or upgrade from one piece to something higher functioning. When folks are taking their pools down for a full-scale remodel, they're sweeping the pad and ultimately putting a much richer, higher functioning pad in through that remodel. That really is what's driving the strength of the aftermarket right now, is adding some incremental pieces to increase functionality or bring in a more connected, higher functioning pad altogether.
Great.
I think one point to highlight, Josh, there is as we continue to have good success in the Omni app, we're getting more face time with the consumer. That's creating a dynamic that we haven't had previously. It's creating a cool dynamic through the channel. As we come out with more informed, innovative products over the next couple of years, we'll have that direct connectivity through the app to inform the consumer much more so than we've had in the past.
I guess related to that, automation seems like it's really taken off over the past few years, certainly the past year. What do you guys hear is kind of the big use case that puts someone over the top? Obviously, there's sort of a number of reasons to do it, but is there a killer app in the process that kind of solves a pain point?
Yeah. I think a couple of things drive it, and you're absolutely right. Automation is one of the high growth categories more recently. I think some of it, frankly, is just demystifying some of the fear. This Omni is very intuitive. It's very user-friendly with its interface. What I think some of it is as this millennial generation comes of age, they expect it, frankly, Josh. These are table stakes for them to be able to control both inside and outside the home with a smart app. What you get with the control and the automation is this seamless control of things like water temperature or cleaning schedules, water features and light features and water chemistry. These are all great functions to be able to control in the palm of your hand, and that's frankly what's driving this conversion.
There's still, as I said in my prepared remarks, nearly 40% of opportunity between what's in the installed base with the 2/3 of new pool builders or owners that are opting for automation. That's a lot of runway that we believe will be harvested over the next several years.
Got it. I asked the question, what I'm about to ask, we get it a lot on our end. Is higher pool usage playing into strength at all? Folks just being stuck at home, not traveling as much, either wearing out parts quicker or kind of creating a need? Obviously, there's an awareness factor, but is it creating some sort of mechanical trigger to make a purchase that otherwise wouldn't happen if you weren't in the pool as often?
It definitely does. Increasing the usage. The first investment someone might make is a heater. Extend the pool season, get in sooner in the spring and stay longer into the fall. You're just spinning the wheel a little faster. If you're using it now 11 months a year where you only used to use eight months, clearly that's going to put more wear and tear on the pad equipment. Another very tangible example would be, say, the salt cell. If you're just putting more water through the salt cell, using it three more months a year, obviously that's going to accelerate the replacement cycle.
Again, having said that, really what's driving the aftermarket, our growth and the industry's growth is really increased investment right now, whether that's new pools or whether it's adding a never had before piece on the pad or a more complete complement of equipment on the pool pad during a remodel.
Understood. I see we're at time here. I appreciate you guys taking the time. Hopefully we all get to do this in person in a sunnier location that has a pool, unlike my office, next year. Thanks for joining us today.
Thanks, Josh. I look forward to doing this in person.
Thanks a lot. Be well, guys.
Bye.