All right. Thank you, everybody, for joining us today. My name is JC Weigelt, and I am Vice President of Investor Relations. Today we are hosting our 2025 Capital Markets Day. Thank you for those that are joining us here in Montana, and for those that are joining on the webcast, apologies for the later hour, I guess, for a Capital Markets Day. Again, we are in person doing this on a Mountain Time Zone, so I appreciate you participating at this time. Here is our agenda for today. We have Mike Speetzen that is going to come in and talk for a bit about our strategy overview. We have Marc Suárez, who heads up our ops and Supply Chain for Off-Road Division, that is going to give some evidence of Lean, which we have been talking about for over a year now.
Bob Mack is going to finish it off with a financial overview. We will have plenty of time for Q&A at the end of this. Last but not least, forward-looking statement. The 10-K went out a bit ago, so please review the updated risk factors in there. There will be forward-looking statements today. Those do not necessarily mean that they are going to come true. There are a lot of factors that go into that, so just please respect that when we present those. With that, I will hand the mic over to Mike Speetzen.
Okay, thanks. Thanks, JC. Thanks to everybody in the room for making the trip and for everybody who's listening in. I'm going to cover a few things. I'm going to talk about the current market environment that we're in because it does, you know, it requires some context. What I want to do is spend more time talking about the progress we've made against our strategy. I'm going to talk through a number of the strategic pillars and some of the proof points in terms of the things we laid out and the progress we've made. I want to talk about how we're looking through the near term to the long term and the focus that we've got there.
I'll wrap it up by just talking through each one of our business segments, some of the progress and dynamics that we're dealing with within each of the categories. Just to reemphasize what JC said, you know, we sent the invite back in September. We felt like it was a good opportunity to provide an update. We weren't necessarily thinking about the current environment. We knew that we were going to have a challenging macro heading into that. The point of this discussion is really to reinforce the strategy and talk more long term and the setup that we've got going for the company, which we think is really strong. When we talk about this down cycle that we're in, you know, they define a recession as two successive quarters that are down. You look at each one of our segments, we're well past that.
I know that's no surprise to the majority of you in the room and listening to this. There's been a lot of fallout from this. When you look at the number of competitors who are either exiting categories, shutting down completely, or have filed for bankruptcy and gone through that process, it's a bit staggering. I like to look at how we're positioning the company as we are the best house in a recovering neighborhood, and we're really trying to work on making sure that this company is positioned incredibly well so that when the recovery comes, we're going to be positioned better than anybody else to really take advantage of that and grow the company. One of the things, you know, we get a lot of questions around promo. Yes, it is elevated. We've got consumers who are stressed from a debt perspective. Interest rates are high.
We also have a lot of competitors who have not managed their inventory with the level of discipline that we have, and that puts a lot of pressure into the market. In some of those instances, we are not responding because it does not make any sense, and they are moving really old stuff, and we are not going to discount some of our newer technology. Quite frankly, that is not sustainable share. We are trying to be as disciplined as we can and really make sure that we are pointing promo in the right areas, whether that is targeted offers to specific consumers, broad offers on categories, getting aggressive around financing, given that interest rates are likely to stay high for longer. EV is a category we talked about at our last Capital Markets Day. I still feel good about the positioning that we took.
If you remember back to that time, I did make the statement that I don't think EV is going to move rapidly through Powersports. There's a lot more challenges within the Powersports category. In fact, that's what made us different than most. We really went out and listened to customers and let that guide where we went. You know, we've got XP Kinetic, an incredibly successful vehicle, but it's a small, small piece of our Ranger business, and we knew that going in. We knew that there was a niche of customers who were looking for that type of vehicle for specific applications, whether that be an area that they needed something quiet or they wanted the enhanced performance. That vehicle really has hit the mark.
We're obviously not investing at the same levels that we were thinking we would at this point, just given how much slower that market has developed. We are continuing to make advancements. I'll be honest with you, we learned a lot through this relative to connected vehicles. We've been able to really watch and see how consumers are using that, and that's feeding back into how we're thinking about development of the next generation of vehicles. We also, as most of you know, partnered with Zero Motorcycles to get our powertrain up and running quickly. We've since modified the relationship with them. We purchased a lot of the intellectual property, and we've brought a lot of that development in-house where we've now got the expertise and capability.
We think we've got a good setup there if and when that time comes for that category to reemerge. Definitely dealing with a tough market, tough dynamics. We are really trying to not get distracted, stay focused on the things that we can control and navigate through it as best we can. I lead off every meeting I have with, whether it's with our senior leadership team or with an all-hands meeting, or if I'm in one of our manufacturing facilities, which is that slide has not changed. Our strategy is staying consistent. We believe in what we're doing. When I talk through the strategic pillars here in a minute, you'll see the progress that we're making. We're not going to get antsy. We're not going to get distracted by the next shiny thing.
We're sticking to this, and we're going to continue to execute against it from a business perspective. What we have done is we've adapted to the current environment. The example I give is, you know, a couple of years ago when we realized that agile and efficient operations needed a lot more work than we thought it did, we've pivoted and driven hard into that category. Marc's going to talk more about that. When you look at the company, we changed our structure. When Steve Menneto left last year, we used it as an opportunity to really rethink how we run the company. It allowed me and my management team to get a lot closer to the businesses. It's been a great opportunity to develop some of the talent we have down in the organization.
It allows me to spend a lot more time on product decisions, getting out and meeting with dealers, spending time in the factories. Those are all important things that I think really are where management should be putting its time. It allowed us to take a lot of cost out. We took about 10% of our salaried workforce out. About 20% were reductions in vice president level. That really shows how we flatten the organization. That is going to allow us, as the recovery comes, to keep our operating expenses down and really put ourselves in a position to leverage that as we go into the future. Unwavering commitment to the dealers. Like I said, I spend a lot of time. In fact, Bob and I are going to be with dealers in Nashville in a couple of weeks for a Dealer Council meeting.
We're going to take them down to our Huntsville plant, walk them through a lot of the stuff we're doing with Lean. They've got a lot of curiosity around that. We are listening to what they are talking about. We take it seriously. We want to be the OEM of choice. I've got a slide in here where I'll talk about some of the stats and the things that we're doing to make sure that we really work hard to improve that relationship. For us, it was about getting the dealer inventory down. Given how rapidly the market moved down, that was a challenging thing for us to accomplish. You know, dealers were initially like, "Hey, just stop sending anything in, let the dealer inventory drift down, and then we're good." The reality is we're running an awfully big company, and we've got Supply Chains that are in motion.
We had materials that were on the ocean, you know, four weeks out. We've got factories that we've got to manage. We've got employees we've got to contend with in terms of making sure we're managing that capacity. We downshifted through the course of the year. We helped during that transition period by providing things like extended flooring. We did things like providing additional promo to help dealers navigate through that challenging time period. I'm proud of the fact that we got inventory down 16%. I think in many ways we led the industry in making sure that we held firm to that commitment. We've had a lot of questions about inventory in 2025. There are still pockets that we have to make adjustments to. I mean, clearly the lack of snowfall during season in the flatlands has put a lot of pressure on our snowmobile business.
We have cut build. That was in our guidance to make sure that we get inventory down. We are making a few minor tweaks in the marine segment. Within Off-Road, we are bringing the rec side down a little bit more, just given persistent weakness in that category and pulling the utility side up, given it has remained stronger year-over-year than the rec side of the business. I feel really good about that. The last two things, we remain committed to innovation, and we are going to keep making the investment. You know, we have had a lot of questions around, "Hey, why not take a deeper cut in R&D?" We are not going to do that. We learned a lot through the last down cycle.
The reason that Polaris became number one is because we kept investing, and we outpaced all of the Japanese and overtook them all. We are not going to back off of that. I am going to talk through innovation. I am going to talk through the products we have come out with over the past four years. It is pretty impressive, but it is not going to stop. That is going to be the key because once this starts to recover, we want to have the right products that customers are going to want. We think we got ourselves well positioned to do that. The last is, you know, the targets that we put out, obviously there has been a lot that has happened since we started the discussions around our strategy. We remain committed to these targets.
The targets are probably more like a mid-cycle when we've got better recovery efforts underway and the market's in a better position. You know, you look at our financial performance right now, it's because we're dealing with such a significant downturn in the market. We've taken as much variable cost out as we can, but we've got a bunch of fixed costs that, you know, we don't want to go start taking capacity out because we know that when the market turns, we're going to need that. What we're doing, and Marc will talk about, is making that capacity a lot more efficient. When the market comes back, this business is so much better positioned than it has been historically, will generate better incremental margins, better returns, and be in a really good spot. Staying committed.
What I want to do is walk through a few of the areas and talk about the proof points. Talk about best customer experience. Think about things like safety and quality, the partnership we have with our dealers, access to Powersports. You look on the right-hand side and see the progress that we've made. We've brought in over 1 million new customers since before COVID. That's pretty impressive. When you think about the fact that Powersports is a business where we see a high amount of recurring repeat customers, the fact that we've brought in a million, over a million new customers, I think speaks to the strength of the brand. I'm really happy with where we're at with warranty. I'm happy with the progress. I'm not happy with where we're at yet. Warranty is at the best spot it's been in 10 years.
I would argue to say it's probably ever in terms of the new products that we have coming out. We are highly committed. We're going to make sure that we're not just addressing some of the issues we had in the past, but we're going to have the best products out in the marketplace: fit, finish, performance, durability. We're starting to see that come through. I'm really proud of the work that the team has done. Overview ridership. We talked about this a little bit on the call. We've had a lot of questions. You know, the lingering question is, "Hey, did people buy a bunch of stuff during COVID, had fun with it? Now life's kind of back to normal, and they're not using it." Ridership's up 10% compared to the time period before COVID. That's a great indicator for us.
Now, a lot happened from pre-COVID to where we are today. You know, we saw a surge in demand in 2020, 2021, 2022. We also saw a surge in ridership during that time period. Starting in 2023 and tailing off into 2024, we saw ridership come down. I think that correlates pretty heavily to people going back to the office for work, correlates to people going back to traveling international, getting back to doing all the other things in their lives that they did not have time to do before or they did not have the ability to do. The good news is we are returning back to more normal performance. That is a good thing. We see that showing up in the miles that are put on the vehicles. We see it showing up in new part sales.
We see it showing up in oil consumption, tires, all these different indicators. People are using the vehicles, and they're using them more than they did before, which is a really good sign and a good marker for us that there may be a delay, but those repurchase cycles are going to start to kick in, especially on the rec side because we know that people are driven by the next coolest thing. You know, when you're out on the snowmobiles getting that experience, snowmobile riders, really passionate ones, like to get a new sled every couple of years. When you couple troubling economic environment, high interest rates, and in the snow business, a lack of snow, those replenishment cycles do not happen the same. We know those customers are out there because we're watching registrations.
We're looking at rider data, all the things that allow us to sit back with a level of confidence to say, "Hey, look, tough current environment, but we know that the ridership's still there. The interest in the category is still there." Inspirational brands. I couldn't be happier with where we're at. The biggest thing, the mantra I drive inside the company is genuine and authentic. We are not going to do anything to try and make somebody else happy. We're going to do what makes sense for our business, and that's for our employees, the dealers, the customers. I think it comes through here. You look at the partnerships. I think what the team came up with on Call of Duty is one of the coolest things, and there's more to come with that. Safe to say there'll be more Polaris products showing up.
Look at Engage Fans. There are so many spots on YouTube where our products show up, and there's not a lot we do. A lot of these people are just fanatics for our product, and they have another part of their life that they want to display, and our products become a part of that. It's really, really neat to see. Exciting activations. Camp RZR. You know, I'm looking forward to being back out there this October. There is no better way to see the passion around our brand than to go out in the desert, which is not a convenient place to be, and just see how committed people are. It's not just about people out doing high-performance riding. In fact, I'd argue 90% of the people there may not even venture into the dunes or go very far.
It's about being with family and friends and just the whole rider experience, being able to show off the uniqueness of their vehicle. We absolutely dominate in terms of the number of vehicles that are out there. The last is around racing leadership. I had the opportunity to go to King of the Hammers and watch Brock win a race we had not won in six years, which was pretty damn cool. I stayed really close to the Mint 400. Brock was not supposed to win, at least the betting odds, and he did. In fact, I was exchanging Instagram messages with him before I came down, congratulating him on the win. He is just such a great young man and so dedicated to Polaris, as are the rest of our race team. It is just such a cool thing. It is important.
You know, RZR isn't the biggest part of our business, but it shows the passion. Snowmobile isn't the biggest part of our business, but when we're out dominating the races, it shows the passion. It shows our commitment to the category, and it shows the innovation, the performance, what's capable, and it creates a halo around the company. That's a really, really important part. I think we nailed it from an inspirational brand's perspective. Rider-driven innovation. When you look at it, whether it's new categories, redefining categories, or listening to our customers and making enhancements, I think it's safe to say we've set the bar. You know, you look at the top, the XD Ranger, we saw a need from farmers and ranchers where they were using their main primary pickup trucks to do a bunch of stuff. Now they don't have to do that.
When you look at XPEDITION, people were trying to use a RZR or a GENERAL to go do overlanding activity, and it was not an optimal vehicle. We listened, and we created a vehicle that met that. There is nobody else in the marketplace that has vehicles that have that capability. They have got to catch up. That is what it is about with us, we are going to get back out in front like we demonstrated these last couple of years, and we are going to lead the way on innovation and force our competitors to have to keep catching up with us. You look at how we have redefined the categories. The next generation of Indian Motorcycle that launched starting last year has been met with such positive receptivity. You look at what we continue to do with our pontoons. You get inside one of our pontoons.
I know Craig and several others had the opportunity to see inside the dash of the pontoons we had at the Miami Boat Show. Full glass cockpit, probably one of the slickest things you've ever seen. We are going to continue to redefine, whether that's the fabrics, the layouts, the performance of the vehicles. Really exciting what we've done there. The last one is, it's probably the less glitzy part of innovation, but it's about listening to customers. Example I give you is Slingshot. Cool vehicle, looks great, gets a lot of attention. The automated manual transmission didn't shift as great as it should. The fit and finish probably wasn't where it needed to be. We heard a lot of that from customers. We've addressed a lot of that in the model year 2025. I can tell you these things are slick.
The materials, the way the feel of the vehicle, the performance of the vehicle, we have addressed what we heard from customers. We heard from customers, "You have too much front driveline noise." We have gone after that aggressively to pull that down. Something that's really important as you think about more and more cab vehicles being out in the marketplace. This is the lifeblood of the company. If we do not continue to be the leader here, there is no way to maintain that number one share position. We are entirely committed to it. It is why I keep reemphasizing, no matter how tough the financial conditions get, we are not going to cut back on innovation. We will meter it. We will be smart. You know, I talked about slower evolution of EVs, so we obviously metered out our investment there.
We're not going to just shut things down and kind of hunker in and ignore what we need to do to make sure the long-term viability of the company is there. The last one I've got is Agile and Efficient Operations. I'm not going to steal Marc's thunder, but I'm really proud of the progress we've made. I think back over two years ago, we were sitting on calls talking about the fact that we were having trouble getting 40% of what we said we would get out in volume out of our factories. We were reworking more units than the entire rest of the industry produced, and we were doing it at much, much higher costs. Now, we haven't fixed all of that, but as Marc will go through, we are getting better volume performance.
I don't worry, Bob and I don't worry, anywhere near as much as we used to about, "Hey, this is what we said we'd be able to produce, are we going to be able to get there?" Problems do come up. You're always going to have, you know, one-off supplier issues, things like that. We can handle those in a way that we have never been able to handle before. We've implemented some technology to get much better at how we forecast within our Off-Road business, how we work that back into the supply base, how we work it forward into the factories so that we've got the right planning that allows a lot more stability. We have a lot more on this journey, but the progress we've made, it's almost a difference of day and night relative to our underlying performance.
We did it in an environment where volumes were coming down rapidly, which is not too dissimilar from when volumes were going up because that just breeds inefficiency because you're kind of scrambling around. Things are changing rapidly. The team put the right processes and discipline in. Marc will walk through a lot of the metrics. We did that while achieving record levels of safety performance in our factories. We were already well better than the benchmarks, but we were even better this past year. The team's done a really good job here, and Marc's going to spend some time talking about that. I'll switch gears. Clearly, the short-term market dynamics are not great. You know, you think about consumers. Bob and I have talked a lot about this.
They took on a lot of debt during the past four or five years, bought a lot of stuff, a lot of installment loans, second homes. Interest rates are now up. You know, that's created some fatigue. You know, the cost of living is higher, and wages haven't kept up. That has created a lot of pressure. It's my last bullet point, but the tariff situation really makes that much worse because people are worried because they're not sure if their daily life's going to go back to being more expensive. You know, the report today that inflation came down a tick and was a little bit better than people expected at 2.8%. Every article I read said, "But this doesn't have anything, obviously, that the tariffs could potentially impact." I think you have consumers stepping back saying, "You know what?
I'm not sure if daily life's going to go back to being even more expensive. I don't know if I've got certainty around my job and is now the right time to go and take a big purchase on. Those are, you know, some of the dynamics that we've got. It shows up in the consumer sentiment performance that we've seen here more recently. Dealer inventory is going to continue to be a big focus as we navigate through these choppy waters. That means the promo environment's going to be dynamic. Bob and I met just yesterday with our Off-Road team. We had rolled out some promo around finance interest rates. We met yesterday to make additional tweaks to that.
You know, the message to the team has been, "We have to remain agile." You know, we can't just, you know, back in a stable environment, put a promo plan together for the quarter and then look at it, you know, every month or two and adjust if we see anything. This has to be, this is a daily thing that we've got to manage in the business. You know, that's something that is a result of where we're at right now. You know, from a tariff standpoint, we're not going to provide any perspective. You know, I gave you some very high-level trade flows, but it literally changes by the hour. Anything that we would say today is probably going to be wrong tomorrow, probably two or three times.
What I can tell you is, internally, we're spending a lot of time looking at where we do business, where we make parts, what those trade flows are. As we get information, we're reacting to that in a way around how do we triage that, how do we contend with it, how do we deal with it. We're also spending time thinking through our government relations strategy. We've got some activity so that we can start to have a greater voice in Washington to at least provide a lot more local context around how this actually impacts business and put it in the context of an American Powersports company that competes against a Canadian, Chinese, and a bunch of Japanese, and where this could end up disadvantaging us relative to our competitors. We're working through that.
You know, hopefully we'll have more to say by the time we get to the earnings call in April. But you know, at this point, we're sticking with what we've got. As we look long-term, I think the key is we've got to get away from the noise in the current environment. We feel really good about the long-term. And it's not just because ridership's up 10%, but we've seen this shift to the outdoors. We've seen a move from urban to rural. You know, and people make an investment in a boat or a side-by-side. These are not things that just get used a couple of times and then left. They become an integral part of what people do. And so, and we see that showing up in the stats. The dealer sophistication partnership is going to be really important as we look out over the long-term.
That's why we're working so hard in the short-term to protect our dealers because we want them to remember that. We want them to be arm in arm with us and understand the true partnership of what we're trying to do as we move forward. I can see that. I can see it showing up in how we have tailored programs, we've simplified programs, we've worked really hard to make sure that that partnership is coming through in a very genuine and authentic way. The last piece I'd make is our demographics reflect that our riders are getting younger because we've done a really good job of bringing all these new riders in and Gen Z riders. That's important because what we don't want to do is take really good care of an aging set of riders and not worry about those coming in.
Now, that does mean we've got to make sure we're thinking about our strategy. You're going to hear me talking a little bit about we're doing a lot more at the entry level of our business because it's important to be able to cultivate, you know, if we bring somebody in who spent time playing Call of Duty, then they go out and they rent a vehicle at Polaris Adventures. The step from there to one of our vehicles is to buy a $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 vehicle. That's probably not going to work. Making sure we get the right entry points that are still attractive financially, but provide really cool products and a true Polaris experience is important. You're going to see that. You've seen that coming from us. You saw it in the Indian business with the Scout 60.
You've seen it in our Bennington business with the SV lineup that they came out with at the lower end, the entry end of the pontoons. You're going to see it in our Off-Road business later this year. The key for us, you know, regardless of this short-term, we believe in the long-term. The focus for us is really around how do we expand margins and how do we continue to grow share in the category. That really comes, you know, with the benefit of generating more cash and we got to reinvest in innovation. That's the big focus here. You're going to see those two themes remain consistent regardless of me talking about the short-term focus that we have to get through the next year or so, the medium and the long-term.
That's going to continue to remain a consistent part of what we're doing. When we talked to our board, we framed up a lot of the strategic activity that we have into three buckets. You got refocus, it was kind of the near-term. We're dealing with the downturn in the market. There's a lot of very tactical things that we have to do, but we've got to keep our eye on the ball relative to the strategy. There is reinvent, which starts to move into a more mature phase. There is the revolutionize, which is where we really continue to get out in front and lead the category. When you look at those three categories, margin and market share expansion remain consistent themes. Every one of these slides, you'll see that same set of buckets.
What's in each one of those horizontal pillars is what we're going to focus on during those particular time periods. You can see in the refocus area, this is about getting ourselves refocused on Lean. You're going to hear Marc talk more about that. It's not just in manufacturing. It's in the design process. Tony, our CTO that's here today, you know, he's working with how do we make our product development process more Lean. We've had a couple of really good examples. One of them I mentioned in terms of a product that's coming out later this year in more of the entry space where we've demonstrated an ability to move a lot faster, more efficient, and come out with a better product. It's about how do we take Lean and start to push that into other parts of the business.
Strengthening process and tools. You know, this company used to take a lot of pride over the past couple of decades that we had the lowest IT expenditure in the industry. That came back to bite us. We saw that during COVID because we could not react anywhere near as fast as we should have. We are addressing that. Now, we are not going to do it all at one time. We have been putting in a lot of edge solutions in the business that have helped us tremendously. Our ability to execute in our Off-Road business has been directly impacted by the fact that we actually put Blue Yonder in to help us manage the sales inventory operations and planning process.
We have done a lot more around how we plan demand where we are using sophisticated AI tools, things that are pulling in so many different data points a human could not even begin to use them in a constructive way. Those are the things we are starting to do to make the business perform better. We have seen forecast accuracy even in a volatile environment like this has improved pretty substantially. Continuous improvement in quality. You know, I like the improvement, but we got a lot more to do. We have got to see that really taken hold as we get through this year. You look at long-term share. For me, it really comes to we got to continue to take care of our dealers. That is going to be a big, continue big focus in 2025.
We got to make sure that they got the right inventory so that we can support their retail efforts. They got to have the right promotional programs. We have got to be there as the OEM of choice to make sure that we help them execute and do so in a profitable way. It is really around innovation and products. We have no room to take the foot off the gas. We have got to continue to push out the best products in the industry. We have got to keep the competition on their toes. They have got to continue to try and catch up with us. We are committed to doing that. When we look at the reinvent, it is really about maturing a lot of the areas that I just talked about.
For Lean, it's about end to end, which means taking it beyond just, say, engineering and operations and Supply Chain, but taking it into the administrative areas of our business. The key behind that for me is we've got the ability to continue to grow the company without having to add cost. This is about how do we get more output of the factories without having to put a lot more input in. That's going to drive the incremental margins that we expect to hit as we move into the future phase of the strategy. Get into more modern tools so that gives us the ability. Is that static on there? Yeah. Get into more modern tools and AI applications. We're doing a lot of testing with this. We want to be careful before we go too far.
I think there's going to be a huge opportunity for us to really leverage AI in a way that does more than just help us plan demand, but take some of the routine work out of what people do that allows them to focus on some of the higher value-add activities. Then sustain quality delivery. Take it away from being episodic to that is just how we do business. It is how we run the company. We've got a consistent level of quality performance. When you look at long-term, deeper relationships with the dealers, deeper customer relationships. We've done a lot with our customer relationship management process. There's more that we can do. We really want to create a tight ecosystem where once you're a Polaris customer, you're a Polaris customer for life. It makes it really tough to leave that system.
Part of that is that quality and innovation that I talked about. Having the highest quality products, the best innovation in the marketplace, that's really going to create a tight ecosystem for our customers. It really comes down to product. You know, continuing the innovation, making sure that we're doing everything we can to stay out in front and lead from a product standpoint. Revolutionize is just about how do we even take this to the next level. You start talking about things like creating new product categories, doing the things that we've done historically and really taking full advantage of the setup that we have within the company. I'm really excited.
We're doing a lot of work inside the company where we're starting to envision, you know, rather than the incremental steps you take in a product, how do you go out 10, 20, 30 years and think about what would that product potentially be, what would the use case be, and you work yourself backwards. A lot of the best automotive companies do that. That really drives us a significant amount of innovation in the near term, but it allows you to have a really well-thought-through path. I would tell you those aren't things that we would have done historically. Those are the types of things that get me really excited when you couple that against us just running the business a lot better. You'll hear a little bit from Marc on some of the early stages of the work we're doing to get that underway.
I talked about dealers earlier, and I thought it was important to spend some time here. On the right-hand side, you got the stats. What I take a lot of pride in is we work with the dealers not just on the selling part. That's important. We also work on the back end of the business. Think about the service operations. That's really important when you're in an environment like we are right now where maybe they're not selling as many new vehicles, but customers are out riding, which means customers need service. Making sure that we're there to support them and do everything we can. Training 7,500 dealer technicians is a big deal. Dealer technicians are in short supply.
We work in each of the local markets to try and partner with our dealers to get them tied in with vocational and technical schools so that we can get feeder programs. Some of these start with getting kids in when they're in high school to work at a dealership, changing oil, refueling, and then working them up through more master technician training as they get into vocational training. Proud of the progress we've seen there. We've seen the partnership with our dealers show up in the ratings that we get when we go out and do our dealer surveys. NPS score of 70 coming in. You look at the ranking of our sales team and our service team. That's against all the other OEMs. This is the fundamentals of beginning to build that strong partnership with the dealers.
We know this isn't going to happen overnight. We've got to stay consistent. It's not just being consistent with good promo or being consistent with the right inventory level. It's also about being consistent with all the other things that do not get as much attention in terms of how we run the relationship with our dealers. On the left-hand side, I have a couple of the key points, which I hit a number of them on the right-hand side, but I will come back to the proactive dealer relationship. I can tell you the meetings that we spend, that Bob and I spend talking with our Dealer Council. You know, we will be out on the road here in a couple of weeks meeting with Marine and Off-Road dealers.
Much of that time is really talking about, hey, how do we improve how we're reacting and interacting with each other? I think we get high points for listening and taking that feedback and modifying programs, but then also articulating to them what our long-term vision of what our dealer network will look like. That's important because these dealers, some dealers are getting ready to think about turning their business over. Maybe they don't have a son or a daughter who's interested in taking the dealer. They've got to think about a buy-sell. We get actively involved in that. We really cultivate that. I spend time each month with our team talking through the number of buy-sells we have. We're thinking about larger groups. Think about people like RideNow or the Carl Malone Group out in Salt Lake City.
How do we get them involved to help bring a higher level of sophistication to our dealer network, as well as how do we get the right regional pockets covered? We're spending an awful lot of time really thinking through that. The dealers are going to play an important part well into the future of our businesses. It's such a critical component. We want to make sure that we get away from thinking as a transactional and truly treat it as a partnership. I think the stats speak for themselves. What I thought I'd do is, before I wrap up, just kind of talk through each of our segments and just talk about a few highlights within each of the segments. Within Off-Road, if you think about the ORV vehicles, wreck has continued to be soft.
A lot of the factors I talked about in here today. The good news is utility has remained relatively strong. When we look back and look at the pre-COVID level of Powersports sales and we look at where the industry is now, it's down about 8%. What's interesting is when you dig into the details, it's really on the on-road side, primarily motorcycles, as well as Marine. When you look at Off-Road, it's about flat. Wreck's down, but our utility business is up, which is primarily our Ranger business. I feel real good about that positioning that we have as a company. You think about Ranger as a disproportionate portion of ORV. Those dynamics bode quite well. I mentioned it earlier. The new categories we have have proven to be very successful, both in the Expedition and the XD.
We've done far better there than we had expected. Race dominance, you can tell I love the progress we've made. I think it just reflects the image and the character of the company so well. The Lean focus has really allowed us to address a lot of the underlying issues and start to really push them to the surface. For me, what it's done is it's highlighted that there's even more opportunity than I thought in terms of the improvements we can make in the business. Really excited about that. Snowmobile business, those of you in the room are going to get to experience our exciting products that we have out in the parking lot. Should make for a really fun day. I couldn't be happier about the progress that Jenny and Cal and the team have made in this business.
This business was a problem for us. Bad quality, a ton of recalls. We had overinvested in segments that weren't paying off. Jenny and the team have really brought a lot of discipline. The products that we have coming out, I'm really proud of the products that just got launched. The products that we have coming out in the next couple of years are going to really demonstrate why we have the best sleds out there. It's going to demonstrate the benefits of platforming. There's a lot of exciting elements that come with that. What makes me most proud is we've turned what was our weakness into a strength. We are now top of the charts when it comes to reliability, the performance of our sleds. We took it serious. We're not going to back off. We're going to continue to lead from an industry standpoint.
That is a really important thing. Because when you think about, and you'll get a little bit of this when you're out tomorrow, when you're out in the middle of nowhere on a sled, you want to make sure that sled's going to get you home. We want to make sure customers feel like they are guaranteed that the Polaris is going to get them there. The business has been a little bit challenged, obviously, with the lack of snow. We spent time talking to our board to reinstill the confidence around the fact that nobody's walking away from the snow category. We track registrations. The registrations have remained pretty stable. People are riding if they can. What they're not doing is going out and spending $16,000-$20,000 on a new sled when the snow conditions come late in the season.
The good news for us is when we did see snow hit the flatlands very late in the season this year, we did see our sled sales picking up. We saw oil pick up. We saw garments and parts pick up. Once the snow's there, they're ready to go. We've had two bad years. We're trying to position inventory to be in a really good spot. If we have a good snow season or even a moderate snow season as we head into next year, we should be in a really, really good spot. Government and defense and commercial. Small part of the company. Gov Defense, big part of our heart. We employ a lot of veterans. We're proud of the relationship we have with the U.S. military, Special Operation Forces, in terms of the MRZR and our ATVs, as well as our allied forces.
It is an important mission and something that we take a lot of pride in and get a lot of credit from the military for the approach we take with the partnership. On the commercial side, we have really grown that business significantly. We have positioned ourselves really well with the top rental companies like United Rentals and Sunbelt. That is really good in an environment like this where there is a lot of infrastructure build going in in the U.S. Whether that is commercial building, building out fabs, or just infrastructure build, we tend to take advantage of a lot of that. Off-road is really well positioned. We have some new products coming out later this year that are really going to take us into a whole new category at the entry level. We are excited about what opportunities that provides.
On the on-road side, Indian Motorcycle, you know, we refreshed the lineup. We continue to get the highest marks in the industry. I think we have the coolest bikes. I think our customers think we have the coolest bikes. Our focus in Indian right now is about improving profitability. Obviously, with a challenged market, that's a tough position to be in. The team's done a lot to reposition the manufacturing base. You know, we now have a manufacturing facility in Vietnam where we do bike assembly as well as engine assembly. We are really working hard to try and get this thing positioned so that as the market comes back, we'll be able to improve the underlying financial performance. We think that's going to provide a good uplift in that particular business. Slingshot, clearly our most diverse business.
We learn a lot from this in terms of changing demographics and new customers that we bring in. The big focus here was for us to freshen up the product as well as deal with a lot of the underlying product issues. You know, we're proud this is our 10-year anniversary. You know, it's funny because I'm also hitting my 10-year anniversary with the company. I remember coming to Polaris and I think it was our second earnings call with Slingshot being out in the market. It has come a long way. We're proud of it. It's a neat product. You know, we've got a focus here around improving profitability. This business will, I think, pay off really well for us. Then Aixam and Goupil. We don't spend a lot of time talking about these two.
Smaller businesses over in France and a little bit in Italy. We do not have to spend a lot of time on them. I will tell you, they generate a lot of income and cash. We like them from that standpoint. They are really solid standalone businesses. They marry up well with the on-road category over in Europe. Marine, you know, Ben and his team have done a lot with Bennington and Godfrey. Bennington's number one market share. Godfrey's number three together. We make up anywhere from 20%-25% of the pontoon market. Godfrey was the first pontoon. We have got a lot of legacy here. We have refreshed the entire lineup across Bennington, or almost the entire lineup. We have seen incredible feedback in the changes that we have made. I talked about the all-digital dash. Godfrey needed a complete revamp.
It hadn't been touched in a number of years. The same with Hurricane, which is our deck boat business, the number one position in the marketplace. The neat thing about the Hurricane business is we just launched two boats that take us into completely new segments. We have a 24-foot center console. We have a 32-foot day boat. We had those boats at the Fort Lauderdale and the Miami Boat Show. Receptivity was incredibly strong. A lot of great feedback. What I like about these boats is we went out and looked at all of our competitors. We talked to their customers. We looked at the things they do well. We heard all the things that they do not do well. We made sure we did better on the good things and addressed all the problems.
I think that means these boats are going to do really well relative to the competition. They're pretty slick. If you get a chance, if you're at a boat show, I'd encourage you to jump on one. They're pretty nice boats. The last thing for me before I wrap up, PG&A. We don't spend a lot of time talking about it. I'll tell you what, such an important part of the company. Steve Eastman just retired. We recognized him at our board meeting in January. One of the things I talked about is Steve got to the company, and our PG&A business was $400 million. It was primarily thought of as a parts business, an oil business, and some accessories. Steve really revamped the whole thought process and has turned this thing into a powerhouse, $1.7 billion.
You look at the number of products that we offer, the fact that over 80% of our vehicles leave a dealership with accessories on it. I'll tell you, a large portion of that 80%, we've moved it to putting the accessories on when they come out of the factory. These vehicles are already coming into a dealership ready to go. That's great for the dealers. They make a lot of margin on it. We make good margin on it as well. It is important from a customer standpoint because it allows them to customize the vehicle to meet the needs they have or just to look different than everybody else. The other thing that we have is we have some great aftermarket brands. Think outside of the Polaris moniker, we've got things like Climb, 509, Pro Armor. There's some really exciting things that we're doing.
I can tell you I've got three Pro Rs. They're pro-built. They've got a bunch of the Pro Armor equipment on it. It's part of our business that we're really starting to focus on. It allows people to make the Pro R, which is already a high-performance vehicle, even higher performance and look very different, a lot cooler than anybody else. These give us a lot of weapons to go out there and play with. In a time like this, when the OEM side of the business is challenged, we make up some distance here. Parts business does really well. People have a vehicle for a little bit longer. They want to put accessories on it. They're using the vehicles. They're replacing tires, doing oil changes. All those things work well.
To have this as a big part of our portfolio, I think really makes us a differentiated player in the industry. The last thing I'm going to talk to before I turn it over to Marc is just to reemphasize the strategy. For us, it's just plain and simple about focused execution. It's focusing in on executing against the strategy with the main goal of improving margins and improving market share. We're going to keep it that simple. There's going to be a lot of headwinds. Trust me, we've been dealing with them for the last year and a half. I'm not sure how all this tariff stuff's going to shake out. We're going to work ourselves through it. We're going to control everything that we can.
I think we're positioning this company to create tremendous shareholder value once we get into a market recovery. It's going to be run better than it ever has been. It's a lot more focused than it has been. It's going to have better financial characteristics than it ever has been. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Marc.
All right. Thank you, Mike. Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Marc Suárez. I have been with Polaris now 16 months. I'm the Vice President of Operations for Polaris, overseeing primarily the Off-Road production as well as snowmobile production. I also lead the global Supply Chain and global materials planning and logistics. When I got to Polaris, I spent the first, let's say, 60 days just assessing, you know, what's happening here, where's the opportunities, what are the issues.
I quickly identified four key themes that needed to be addressed. The first is that our complexity had outrun our process capabilities. We needed to put a tremendous focus on improving our processes. The second is we were not doing a very good job launching our new products into production. We were struggling with a lot of rework and failing to hit rate as we launched those products. That process needed to be addressed. Our Supply Chain was over-indexed to Asia, giving us a very inelastic Supply Chain. I would say they had a COVID hangover of cost that we had to get out of the business. Lastly, we said we were a Lean company. If you went out onto the shop floor and watched the vehicle being built, it was clearly evident that we had a long way to go in our Lean journey.
Those were the areas of opportunity identified. I brought my team together into a multi-day offsite jointly with engineering and other cross-functional members. We brainstormed what do we need to do in 2024 to fundamentally improve the business and take cost out. We came up with what we call our five operations transformation pillars. Those are there on the left. They are to treat our operators like our most valuable asset, which is a paradigm-breaking concept. We want the entire enterprise to think that way. It is the assembler assembling our vehicle that is actually our most valuable asset. We need to treat them that way. I'll talk more about that coming up. We wanted to create a non-negotiable culture of quality. I'll talk about that more. I mentioned we had a lot of rework. When you rework vehicles, that causes quality problems.
We needed to address that. We were already implementing a sales inventory and operations planning journey. We felt it was very important that we continue that. We matured that throughout the year of 2024. We wanted to take our Supply Chain and put an emphasis on total cost, not just bill of material part cost, but the total cost as it affects the enterprise. We also wanted the sourcing organization to focus on how the parts come in, how they're ultimately presented to the assembler. That ties nicely with treating our assembler or operators like our most valuable asset. Lastly, again, we said we were Lean. We really wanted to embark on a journey of true Lean implementation. A lot of work went into that throughout the year. It paid off.
You can see on the right, you know, some of the numbers of what we were able to generate: over $200 million in structural cost improvement for the business that carries forward. I'm going to give three examples here of what it is I'm talking about in more depth so you can really understand what we're talking about here. Treating our operator like our most valuable asset. A year ago, we were bringing in operators off the street into a rolling assembly roll at one of our plants. They would get at most one day of training. In that one day of training, they would get six hours of PowerPoint lecture on HR policies and some safety briefing. Then maybe they'd get two hours of, you know, here's the tools we use, here's how we put the vehicle together.
We would pair them up with an assembler the next day out on the assembly line who would shadow them for an hour or two. They would have to learn four to six minutes of cycle time on the operation they're doing. They would struggle. It was a sink or swim. That was just how we did it. We have completely revamped that. Now we've invested in what we call training dojos, which are just training centers for our assemblers. We are bringing them in for five full days of training. They still get half a day of PowerPoint on HR policies.
They spend the rest of the week actually assembling mock vehicles, disassembling, assembling, disassembling, learning how to use the tools, learning what the tricks are for some of the difficult assemblies so that we are sure that when they go out on the assembly line the following week, they are ready to go. We pair them up with a coach. We put them out on the assembly line with a coach. We get the feedback on how to improve our training for future five-day training sessions. The feedback from the operators has been overwhelmingly positive. What we're anticipating is we will see improved quality of build because the assemblers being better trained will make fewer mistakes on the assembly line. That'll reduce our costs. It'll improve our efficiency.
We will get improved retention of the operators because they're no longer being sent out to sink or swim and frustrated and resigning. Now they actually feel like we're investing in them. They are part of the team. We're going to put the effort in to make them successful. The next step of this journey is skills enhancement. We're going to do that this year. It is to take this concept and say, "Okay, you want to be a certified welder? We'll take you. You want to be a welder? You're an assembler? You want to be a welder? We'll teach you how to weld. You want to become a group leader? We're going to teach you how to become a group leader." Those are the next steps in that journey.
It is all about treating the operator like they are, in fact, our most valuable asset. The next one, non-negotiable culture of quality. When I arrived, one of the biggest issues we were having, we were launching our new platforms, our XD1500 and our crossover platform. We were struggling to hit rate. We were struggling to build cLean. When we reflected back on why, why were we having so many issues with that? It was because we in operations did not partner well enough with engineering early on in the design process to give them the feedback to make sure that their designs were something that we could assemble. Part of the reason we had not given that feedback is we did not have a really good place to do pilot builds.
We invested $8 million across two plants, Monterey and Huntsville, to build dedicated new product introduction pilot build areas. Those are now fully operational. We can mimic all of the assembly processes, all of the quality checks that the vehicle will see in actual production. We bring the engineers on site with the actual assemblers to work together and identify. The assembler can say, "Hey, this is a blind assembly. This doesn't work for me. Could we reroute this harness this way? It would be easier and faster." That is now happening. When we go to launch these new products, the launch is going to be much more successful and be able to get to rate and build cLeanly much, much faster. Lastly, Lean at the plants.
We took the approach instead of saying, "We're going to go full blast and hit Lean at all the plants across the board," we're taking the approach of creating a model line at our main factory, so Huntsville and Monterey. We implemented in 2024 a model line. We brought in former Toyota employee consultants that are working with us on the floor teaching our people how to really build a Lean culture and having this one assembly line that is really world-class. That has gone really, really well. I'll just use a simple example here. You can see on the before and after picture that, you know, the operator used to turn away from the vehicle, walk 10 steps, bend over into a giant Gaylord, pull out a part, take the plastic cover off the part, walk 10 steps back to the vehicle, and then assemble it.
That's the before. Now the assembler turns around, grabs the part that's sequenced in production. The plastic's already off. They can turn right back around and assemble it because a material handler did all that non-value-added work, periodic work. A much more efficient Lean way to build. We're doing that across the model lines. Now I'm going to talk briefly about some of the metrics that we use to monitor our progress. Mike mentioned, you know, we have a pretty good history with safety. Safety is the number one most important metric I've got. It's the one I treat as my most important. To be clear, when I got here, we were already world-class. The metric that is most commonly used for safety would be total recordable incident rate, also known as OSHA recordable rate.
I would say any company with 0.50 or better or lower is world-class. In 2023, we were 0.30. So we were well under world-class. In 2024, we delivered 0.17. So we improved that by over 40%, you know. And this year, year to date, we're operating at 0.15. So we're doing a great job with safety for our employees. Quality, a couple of metrics here. You know, we typically look at whole good warranty, but that's a very lagging metric. It's hard to be actionable real-time on that metric because it happened in the past. So we look at cLean build. As a company, historically, the best we've ever done was about 80%, even looking back 15 years. That means 20% of our vehicles are being reworked after the vehicle's been built. About half of that, 10%, gets reworked within the same day.
The other 10% have to get moved to another area. Maybe it is a day to seven days before those vehicles get rebuilt. Inevitably, you are going to have quality issues when you do that over time, just statistical. It is a fact. What is world-class? Automotive, 95%-98%. I would say 95% average. There are better factories, 98% cLean build. We know it can be done. The question is, how do we get there? We introduced a new metric called rolled first pass yield. That is a much tougher metric, which is to say, are we building it right every step of the way from assembly operation one, operator one, assembly operator two, and so on all the way down the line? We are monitoring every single operator. Are they building it right the first time?
When we launched that metric, we were pretty close to 0%. By the end of the year, we were in the mid-30% across our plant network. I had not even told Mike this yet, but I just got an email right before this that in Monterey, my site leader there informed me that yesterday we achieved 99.54% cLean build in one day. Okay, it is one day. You know, we are on that journey. They did that with 54% rolled first pass yield. It is all a journey. We are going to get to world-class. World-class is 98% rolled first pass yield. Delivery and cost, I would say when I got here, we were focused on delivering at any cost. Now we are focused on delivering efficiently. I introduced a metric. It is called critical process yield. Essentially, it is a measure of efficient build attainment.
We have improved that significantly, which has allowed us to take our plant variable costs down. As a result of our SIOP processes, we have taken inventory down. We are making very good progress on both of those. I got my team back together at the end of 2024 and said, you know, what do we need to do in 2025 to keep on this journey and keep improving? We came up with six pillars of operations transformation. A few of them are the same because it is a long journey. We are going to keep treating our operator like our most valuable asset because that is important for the entire enterprise to wrap their heads around. I need engineering as an example. They are being great partners in this.
They need to be thinking of not how do I design something for bomb cost, but how do I design it so that the operator can assemble it, design for Lean manufacturer. That is going to remain a very key priority. Non-negotiable culture of quality. I just talked about that. We are still on our journey to 98% rolled first pass yield. Same with cLean build. We are going from maturing SIOP to leveraging SIOP. We spent a lot of time and effort implementing sales, inventory, and operations planning. Now it is time to get the payback. We are going to leverage the fact that we are improving our forecasting ability. Therefore, we are able to operate the plants more efficiently and drive inventory turns improvement. NPI maturity. I already talked about the new product introduction pilot build areas. We are going to leverage that moving forward.
Continue our journey on true Lean. We had a line in Huntsville, a line in Monterey. In January, we kicked off a Lean model line in our Roseau facility, our snowmobile line. Later this year, we will be rolling out a Lean initiative in Opole, Poland as well. The last one is one that's near and dear to my heart. It's operations business process excellence. That's something that we're going to be piloting in the operations area for every one of my functions to identify three to five key business processes, document the standard work for those processes, figure out how to measure those processes, and then get feedback from the internal customers of those processes with the goal of improving our performance on those processes. A lot more to come. We expect to achieve at least $40 million in additional savings.
We made progress in 2024. The results are very much real. We're continuing the journey of building a Lean culture. We have our priorities set for 2025. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Bob to talk financials.
Okay. We focused on process improvement. You know, the benefit of what we were doing in the slowdown in the business is it did give us a little bit of breathing room. You know, we'd come out of COVID where we were just hammered down trying to get product out into the field, get inventories built back up. We took advantage of a little bit of this slowdown in the industry and really got focused on process, all the stuff Marc's been talking about. If you look at the industry, right, there's been a tremendous amount of change.
If you look pre-COVID, the industry is relatively flat with where it was pre-COVID. The change has been pretty significant. ORV flat to up a little bit if you just look at ORV and side by side in ATV. What you've seen is a pretty big mix shift from recreation, sorry, lost my train of thought, recreation into utility. That's been good for us, right? We're good at utility. It's a big part of our business. We have a really strong product line in Ranger. The RZR market, you know, you think of 2017 to 2019, that's kind of the heyday or the late part of the heyday of RZR. You know, RZR's really slowed down. That product category, that high performance rec has really slowed down.
While the industry is, the ORV industry is up about 4%, there is a pretty big change in how the makeup is. What's really stark is the decrease in snow and in motorcycles. They're both down about 30%. That's thousands of units. You see some of that coming through in the financials because those are really big drops. It creates a lot of absorption issues and challenges at the factory. It's hard to cut the fixed cost to deal with that level of a drop. With snow, it's been kind of a seasonal. We just have not had good snow in the flatlands. In motorcycles, it's just been this kind of continuing trend to the negative side in the motorcycle industry. You know, there was some pickup in COVID and all of that.
If you look at it kind of long cycle, there's just been this general decrease in the motorcycle space. That is something we're really focused on. You know, our riders are younger. Scout's been good at bringing people into the industry. That is definitely a structural challenge. Marine obviously is down. Marine is a more cyclical business. You know, we're kind of at the bottom part of, we think, of the marine cycle. We think that'll start to recover. With the industry being challenged, you know, it really has had an impact on production. If you look at 2022 and 2023, you know, we're coming out of COVID. We're trying to rebuild dealer inventory. When we got into 2022, we had almost no dealer inventory. You know, 2023, we still were really rebuilding. We got into 2024.
In the first half of the year, we were continuing to build. We had a lot of new product, Expedition XD, all those things. The industry started to slow down. We took, you know, significant production cuts in 2024. It was the first time in several years where ship was lower than retail. That is the only way to really take out dealer inventory. We took those aggressive actions to get the dealers into a better place, particularly in ORV. When you think about 2025, we have talked about on our last call, you know, we think in ORV, retail and ship will be relatively close. There will be some change between recreation and utility. In general, you know, the category will shift to retail. In marine and in snow, we are going to ship less than we retail.
That is because to make sure we get dealer inventory in the right place, kind of for different reasons. Snow is obviously a seasonality thing. These two bad seasons, we really cut our snow builds to make sure we could drive inventory out of the dealers and out of the channel in the next snow season, even if it is not a great season. Marine, we actually feel really good about where our dealer inventory is. We are down 35%-40% from kind of where we were. We are below actually 2018 levels. We are in a good spot. What we are trying to do in marine is make sure we sort of force the channel to keep the inventory current because there are a mix of '23s and or '24s, not a lot of '23s, but '24s and '25s out there.
When we get into ship in model year 2026, which will be this like Q3 this year, we want to make sure that we do not overship and we kind of force the sale of all the stuff that is out there to make sure we can just really get cLean from a model year standpoint. Obviously, that had a big impact on margins. The biggest impact, obviously, is just the loss of volume. Marc's team did everything they could to make up for that. You know, we had a lot of mix and price-related things. Promo obviously started to get more aggressive. We did our cost cuts both on the OpEx side and in the factories. We did a lot to help ourselves. You know, excuse me, strength of the dollar. Since I became CFO, we have been nothing. FX has gone nothing but against us.
That's, you know, driven by the fact that the U.S. has, through all this economic crisis, been the strongest currency. Just given the structure of our manufacturing and where we sell, the fact that we're a U.S. company and we translate those results back into dollars, obviously what we do in Europe and Canada and places like that with the weakness of those currencies has really hurt us. Let's talk about 2025. Obviously, our focus is going to be on agile and efficient operations. I hope that listening to Marc, you got some sense that this is serious. These are real plans with real actions and real effort behind them and really driving our EBITDA margins back up towards those better levels. Now, that's not going to happen in 2025. You obviously see that in the guidance.
Over time, we're going to continue to see the benefits of the productivity investments we make. We're going to continue to see benefits from innovation. You know, we do see the industry turning back towards more normal volumes. There's a huge group of people who bought units in 2020, 2021, even 2022, who in a normal part of the cycle would have traded those units in by now or at least gone and bought another unit and parked it next to the one they had. That's just not happening. It's because of this crisis the consumer has right now in terms of debt, interest rates, uncertainty about the job market, uncertainty with tariffs and all the other things that are going on right now.
You know, when I was in front of dealers in July, I said, "Hey, the best thing that can happen politically is the election's over in November." I got my wish. I did not quite contemplate the level of unrest and disruption that was going to happen with all the tariff stuff and just what is going on. I think it just, even if people are not directly impacted right now, they feel it. It just creates concern. I mean, you get up, you watch the news, it dominates the conversation. When that happens, it sort of distracts people from making purchasing decisions on the kind of the stuff that we make. Over time, as Mike talked about, we are seeing volumes or seeing volumes in terms of like oil and part sales and all of those things. That stuff is really strong. People are riding.
There is no reason to believe they're not going to come back in the market and replace those vehicles they bought, you know, three, four, and five years ago. It's just a delayed cycle. We do see that turning around at some point. Our big margin improvement drivers, obviously volume. Volume's going to, you know, we think it will start to trend back as we talked about. Innovation drives volume. Going into new segments, we've talked about looking at some of these value products. You know, our products have gotten expensive. Some of that was us. We focused on developing things like Expedition and XD and really delivering that premium experience to our customers. That's been great. That customer has the money. They love that product. They're not necessarily finance buyers, so they're not, the interest rates aren't as impactful to them. They're cash buyers.
That's been really good for us. As we went through COVID and as costs accelerated, the lower end of our products has gotten kind of expensive. There is a big segment of customers out there that want the quality, the dealership service, the brand that Polaris brings, but we are just not at that right price level. You know, we are focused on that. We are going to start to introduce some products this year that give an offer to that customer who, you know, might otherwise choose something else. We think that will help us grow the market and get back towards some more volume. The Lean, Marc obviously hit all this. We have got a fair amount of capacity. We added capacity in Mexico over the last few years.
A lot of it was back shop, but some of it's assembly because we added assembly for the new products. You know, we've kind of got to grow back into that. It's not like we have unabsorbed, but we are absorbing what we budgeted to absorb. We just have capacity. We will get good leverage, and we need to leverage that capacity. The work Marc is doing with Lean will really help us in that journey. I think we'll see better incremental margins than we would have historically in this company. Price has been a bit of a moving target lately. You know, coming out of the end of last year, obviously dealer inventory's down.
Some of what we were seeing in promo was really being driven by that higher dealer inventory because all the manufacturers were driving a lot of promo to try to get dealer inventory down. You know, two ways to impact dealer inventory, ship less, retail more. And that's what we were trying to drive. As we got through that, you know, we expected to see some kind of normalization of promo. What we're seeing is, as Mike's talked about, there are some manufacturers who still have heavy amounts of inventory in certain segments of the market. They've been heavily promoting to get rid of kind of older products or products that aren't selling well where they're heavy on inventory. We're also starting to see a more aggressive environment where everybody's just trying to drive volume because the industry, you know, has just struggled through this noise post-election.
Everybody's trying to drive volume to keep factories running. It's a little bit tough to say where the promo environment's going. There's been very little price taken in this industry since COVID. You know, we kind of all had the price increases during COVID. The last couple of years, price has been really pretty flat on an MSRP basis. With promo, it's down. I don't know that I see, you know, other than select price adjustments, where we get price is innovation. When we launch new products, we bring stuff to market that other people don't have. There's an opportunity to get a premium. That's where, you know, we talk about we're not going to back off on innovation because that's how we can drive margin and value.
I've showed this chart before when we did our capital markets day. I think we showed it for the first time. We tweaked it a little bit. You know, we still think that in mid-cycle for this industry, we can be mid-teens. I actually think if things go our way, we can be better than mid-teens. There's just so much noise right now. It's really hard to sort of figure out how you're, how some of these things are really going to play out. We've hedged that a little bit. You know, if we just start to see some normalization, you know, you've seen us perform in the fourteens in quarters from an EBITDA margin perspective. You know, there's a clear opportunity to get back to that low teens as we start to get some normal volume back.
If you really look at the top three, that's kind of where most of the money is. They're all linked together, right? It's getting to normal volume, leveraging the structure we have. With the Lean work Marc's done in the plants and what he continues to do in his team and what we've done on the OpEx structure, we can add a lot of volume to this thing and not have to add much cost. There'll be some variable cost in the factory, sure, because you'll run machines more and you'll have to move more material around. We won't need to add any fixed cost. Our CapEx is really low this year. I expect that to continue for the next few years. On the OpEx side, we didn't just reduce the headcount. We changed the structure.
We feel like we have a structure now that can be leveraged. As volume comes back, we will not need to add people and headcount on the operating side. You know, we really think those three are in the short term where the most impact is going to be. The modular design and platforming, that stuff is going really well. Tony is around. Certainly talk to him tonight and tomorrow. Marc is involved in that too. We are starting to see some really good wins and progress and change of culture there. You know, we go to a meeting now on product and the engineers cannot wait to tell Mike and I and Tony and everybody else how much part reuse there is or how much part commonality there is in a new product. That never used to happen. That was never a discussion.
In fact, I think they were afraid we were going to ask that question. Now they volunteer the answer and they're proud of it. It really is changing how we are engineering products. It's going to allow us to get better volume, more simplicity for the operator because it's the same parts, faster product development, cheaper product development, less testing and verification because the stuff's already tested. Really good benefits that will phase in over the next few years. You know, that's a bit longer term. Price, again, I think it's going to really depend on what happens with promo. That's really going to be, I think, economically driven. You know, if the industry stays in a tough place, promo's going to continue to be hot. You know, if we start to see some normalization, it won't be inventory driven anymore.
It'll be really retail driven. Hopefully we start to see some improvement there. Flooring, it's not a massive cost. It is coming down. You know, our typical dealer right now, it's 100 plus days of inventory from a day sales outstanding standpoint. Depending on where they are in our programs, we're paying 60-90 days of that. You know, their flooring costs have definitely come down. Interest rates come down about a point and a quarter. You know, we've obviously taken their inventory down a lot. That's starting to be felt by the dealers. Obviously we have a piece of that too because we're paying flooring. Foreign currency and tariffs. I'll talk about tariffs here in a couple of slides. Foreign currency, like I said, it's a bit of a mixed bag for us. It has been a struggle being a U.S.
Dollar denominated company in the last few years because the U.S. dollar has been so strong. Cash flow. Cash flow has been a big focus. It's going to be a big focus in 2025. You know, we're going to drive about $550 million or $500 million of free cash flow. We'll invest in the business in terms of CapEx. We're going to keep our dividend. Then our focus is going to be on paying down debt. You know, we want to keep, if you look at the lower left, we want to keep our debt to EBITDA ratio. Our goal is to be one to two. Obviously, we're higher than that right now given just the falloff in EBITDA. You know, when we return to a normal part of the cycle, that's where we want to be.
We'll look to be paying down debt this year before we do anything else with the cash. Return on invested capital, obviously impacted by the earnings. We believe the model still will be a very high return model. Actually, with the Lean work Marc's doing and the better leverage, I actually think we'll get to higher numbers than we've had historically. That's just going to take getting that volume back. Obviously, you know, we've got to get that earnings recovery. I think we've got some opportunity on working capital. You know, we've made good progress on raw material inventory. This year we're going to actually produce less than we ship, which we have not done in my time here at Polaris. That's because we built some finished goods last year as we were kind of winding and slowing down the factories.
This gives us an opportunity to get that finished goods through the system. I think as we continue to focus on Lean, we'll be able to run the enterprise on lower inventory levels, which is really the biggest part of our working capital. Obviously, in our Polaris acceptance model, we get paid pretty quickly. We do not carry a lot of receivables. We have an opportunity to have a very efficient working capital structure. I think we've got opportunities to continue to drive that. I do not think you'll see us do any big M&A anytime soon. We are focused on fixing the house we live in and driving the most value out of that. Things improve over the long cycle. You know, obviously we'll get back and look at that and how we can continue to grow the company.
Right now we're going to be focused on investing in ourselves and debt pay down. Really three big strategies. Invest in the business. We're going to maintain our dividend aristocrat status. It's important to a percentage of the investors. It's a good yield right now, which has brought some people into the stock. We're going to pay down debt. Tariffs. Obviously a dynamic situation. I was looking at my phone before I walked up here. There's been like three new crazy announcements that we're trying to parse out between Europe and Canada and retaliatory and what's going to be in where. There's really some major buckets we're focused on. Obviously China, which we've talked about. We were already subject to the China tariff. We source about $500 million of components and parts out of China. Half goes to Mexico. Half goes to the U.S.
That has come down actually fairly substantially since the tariffs originally came in in 2018. We have got work to do. We have got plans in place to take a pretty good whack out of this in 2025. You know, we continue to look for opportunities where we can develop suppliers, you know, here in the U.S., in Mexico, near where our manufacturing is to try to continue to drive this number down. As Mike and I have talked about, these Supply Chains have been built over decades. It is not that easy to just unwind them. There is a lot of quality testing. There is a lot of verification. There is a lot of supplier development. There are things that are mostly supplied out of China that really are very hard to find anywhere else in the world. That is just where the Supply Chain has gravitated.
It is not that simple to just move it. We obviously understand the dynamic of the tariff, and we are going to focus on that. You know, it does take some time. It was very difficult to do that during COVID because you were trying just to get supply. There really was kind of a stalling of the move of supply base out of China from 2020 to 2023. We are back on the gas and we are working hard on that. The Canada situation is complex. The retaliatory tariffs do not exempt USMCA, which is sort of interesting given that a lot of the products they are tariffing are USMCA compliant. I suspect that is going to draw some interest from the U.S. government. You know, they have kind of announced lists.
You know, stuff got put out yesterday, pulled back yesterday. I've been here all day so I haven't seen a whole lot today. But, you know, that one's tough to get what the real impact is going to be. We don't source a lot from Canada. Obviously, we sell to Canada. We have a lot of inventory there now. You know, I think this will be relatively muted at least for a while. We can see how this plays out. Europe has launched one list and they've got another list that they've got out there. We kind of know what's on it because they've used it before. That may have some impact on motorcycles. Again, it's kind of early to tell. You know, our original guidance included $60-$70 million of tariffs.
It will certainly be higher than that given, you know, what we know about the China tariffs. Like I said, we're working really hard to try to avoid as much of that as we can. I suspect there'll be some impact of that. USMCA is also complex. There are parts and components and things that come in and out of the country. This impacts all the manufacturers that they may be USMCA compliant, but they didn't have to be before. There's a lot of scrambling going on to figure out what parts are and are not and what we can do and make them USMCA compliant. There's a lot of work on this one. It is something that we are trying to manage through. You know, it is extremely dynamic. We have a team that's all they're doing. I'm spending a lot of my time.
Mike is obviously as well. And so, you know, know that we're working really hard to understand the impacts, to be able to communicate the impacts. It is such a dynamic environment right now that it's really hard to say exactly what those are going to be. We're also obviously very focused on lobbying. You know, this impacts the auto industry significantly. Their structure isn't that different than ours. And so, you know, that's obviously going to be a big push for them. It impacts all of us a little bit different. You know, if you're a Japanese manufacturer and you're shipping parts from Japan, normally you're not paying a tariff. Steel and aluminum derivative tariff will likely impact you on parts. If you are a Chinese manufacturer, well, now you're paying at least the 20% tariff plus whatever base tariff you were paying.
Mexico gets complicated because of where stuff's made and, you know, how it's imported and where it goes. It is an extremely complex situation. We are actively working on it. We'll continue to advocate for the company and for what makes sense for us and our U.S. workers. We're focused on volume recovery. We're going to be ready for it when it comes. We're going to be as agile and efficient as we can. Focus is on margin. That'll drive from that agile and efficient operations and the leverage we can get, driving cash flow and our capital allocation, which is going to be a pretty simple strategy this year, focused on debt pay down, investing in our plants and paying our dividend. With that, I think we're going to move to Q&A.
All right. Can you hear me? Okay. I have a mic. We ask that you raise your hand and I'll walk around with the mic for Q&A. We'll have Mike, Bob, and Marc available.
Thank you, Craig from Baird. Maybe for Marc and Mike, I heard AI planning, which seems to be improving your ability to forecast. I also heard, you know, discussion of your SIOP. And I'm wondering how that impacts RFM. It feels like, you know, this industry had an issue overstuffing the channel. You have RFM, which is, I think, a better signal for your production plants. Do you think RFM will be better? And if so, do you still worry that the industry will not have the same discipline?
Yeah, it's interesting that you ask that because we actually had a pretty lengthy meeting about that yesterday. RFM, there's going to need to be some changes made to RFM.
There were changes that we made during the pandemic time period because of the horizon for lead times from suppliers and the continuity. We are looking at the order window. We have gone and benchmarked against some of our competitors in terms of, you know, nobody does it with the level of frequency we do. We will maintain that component and the replenishment. Building in more flexibility to be able to pivot between, say, a two-seat and a four-seat vehicle or a three-seat and a crew. Some of that is dependent on the work that Marc and the team are doing so that we can build in the flexibility in our manufacturing process so that if we have a change that happens within the lead time window we have with suppliers, we can do that without completely throwing the factory into a tough spot.
The fact that we're having those kind of conversations is really encouraging to me because, you know, the conversations we were having two years ago was, what is going on with the supply base? Why can't we get the product through without having to rework half of it? We're now talking about, hey, how do we evolve to, you know, RFM 2.0 where we can get feedback from dealers, modify what they already feel is a pretty good system, and then build in a little bit more flexibility that allows for adaptation to what we're seeing in the current market. I think the AI tools and the forecasting process that we're doing helps us because then we, because we're going to get the forecast a lot closer. So then the variation's a lot smaller.
If we can build those two together, then I think we're going to be in a lot better spot with dealers. I think I don't know that anybody's system would have seen the precipitous drop that we saw come that happened in the industry. I think RFM, the result of an RFM system, yielded that we're the best when it comes to current versus non-current. We're the best when it comes to day sales outstanding. What we want to do is improve on what is already a really good system.
I guess the only thing I would add, maybe less about the AI part of SIOP maturity, although that is important. Part of our journey of driving SIOP maturity is building out a really capable team. We've done that.
That team came to me with a proposal to increase a certain amount of safety stock to give us a lot more flexibility to do exactly what Mike just said, which is pivot much more quickly, be much more agile to meet market demand shifts. It is all kind of together. We have really built out a powerful SIOP team.
Just as a brief follow-up, is there, I do not know, Marc, if you ever meet with dealers on the trips that Bob and Mike take, but is there ever a plan to re-engineer how you distribute product and maybe keep, you know, product in a warehouse so dealers are not suffering so much from the overstocking issue?
Yeah, there are a couple of things. We have looked at would we be better served instead of using our vehicle holding centers and distributing straight from like a distribution center.
We had our logistics team spend a lot of time. That team works for Marc. We came back and effectively we feel like we've got a pretty good distribution process. We've got a couple of enhancements where we're probably going to reduce rail for some of the longer hauls. That should improve the efficiency of that. As it relates to dealers, when I'm talking about working in partnership, one of the things that the team's working through is how do you get a dealer to be more contiguous within an area as opposed to a dealer buys something in Memphis, Tennessee, and then they go and buy something in rural Ohio. There's very little synergy they can get between those two locations.
Whereas where we've seen things work well, and you can see it in areas like Texas and Arizona where you have dealers that are within a certain MSA and they own the rooftops, you can start to pre-position inventory in a warehouse that they can draw from. RideNow is doing a lot of piloting around this concept. That allows, there's a couple of benefits. One is they don't have to carry as much. They've got more efficiency in that inventory level. The other is they don't have a dealership stock full of this stuff with a consumer coming in and going, boy, you got an awful lot there. I got negotiating power. The other thing we've heard is our vehicles are all, the industry's vehicles are getting much, much larger and they're running out of space for these things. Looking for those opportunities.
When we talk about working in partnership with the dealers, it's how do we cultivate that relationship so that when a buy-sell happens, and we've got some very live examples that will be good for us to bring back and show how working with a really good dealer to help them then take over a dealer in a neighboring county or MSA allows that efficiency to come through. I think that's where, you know, a hundred days of inventory or maybe that goes lower in a future model isn't going to disadvantage us. It's just going to allow the dealer to have a more efficient operation.
Thanks. Last year you started the new model year in April, I think for ORV. It sounded like, Bob, that you said maybe that's going to go back to being Q3 this year.
My question is if that was for everything or if you would still have some things in April. I was going to ask if you got that over the border yet, if that is sitting in a warehouse in Texas, some model year, new model year things. Just to add to that also, how much can you get across between now and April 2? We can think about if you have 100 days at the dealership, how much more time do you, can you get yourself before April 2?
Yeah, I mean, obviously a couple of things. I'll start with the model year first. Last year we had, you know, coming out of COVID, like we had, I think it was Ranger, we launched early because it was done. It was a really good enhancement to the product.
We wanted to get it out in the marketplace and get it out, you know, in time for the season. We kind of pulled that model launch earlier. We still launched a lot of stuff in the fall like we normally do or late summer. What I was talking about model year, I was talking about Marine. Theirs is always like July, August. The date moves around a little bit. You know, model year, it used to be everything launched at the same time. What we found was that actually was not very efficient from a marketing standpoint. It was hard on the dealers because there was so much change. They were sunsetting old model years and bringing in new model years all at the same time across the entire category.
It was hard on Marc's team because we were doing massive model year changeover day. We have started staggering launches. It is a little bit more we try to launch products when they are ready or sometimes we will hold them a little bit and launch them going into season. We are not holding big model launches in April that will really be tariff impacted. There are not any big model launches set for this April. We have stuff more in our normal cadence because we are kind of back on our normal cadence for product development. In terms of what we can get over the border, I would say a couple of things. You know, when the first tariff deadline was there, we shipped sort of everything we had that was shippable or needed minor rework across the border to Laredo. We will continue to do that.
I mean, our regular course, we ship almost what we produce pretty much every day. We do not hold a bunch of inventory in Mexico. We are obviously looking at what we can do to accelerate certain models to get better supply. If you actually look at the Federal Register for the USMCA exemption, it actually does not say April 2. I do not know that that means anything, but what was actually published does not have an April 2 deadline in it. What that means and what the president will decide to do, I think is anyone's guess. We are acting as if the USMCA exemption will end April 2. The reality is 30 days is not enough time for any manufacturer to have made any progress on moving production back to the United States. You know, I know this all started with the car companies.
They're not moving one vehicle of production back to the U.S. in one month unless they had the supply base, all the tools, all the jigs, everything sitting here, which I think would be pretty unlikely unless maybe they had just moved it to somewhere else. You know, I'm not sure what's going to happen, but we'll be as positioned as we can be, but we can't bring unlimited inventory back into the U.S.
That hundred days at the dealers, you're saying that that's pretty much you're not necessarily able to add to that in your own warehouse?
No, we have inventory in our warehouses in the United States. There's more than a hundred days in the country at any given time. It's a hundred days at the dealers.
We can't make enough in a month and find places to put it to, you know, we can't buy ourselves six months. You'd have to close the factory in Mexico because you can't build, you can't just keep building inventory. There's no place to put it there either. You know, somehow this is all going to have to work out. You know, like I said, it's going to impact the car companies a lot more that they make 4 million cars in Mexico and 1.5 million in Canada. They're going to be pushing really hard on this one.
The other thing I'd tell you is when the first deadline hit, we were actually at the Miami Boat Show and there were some investors who were like, boy, this must be a windfall for you guys because dealers must be running in to try and get as much inventory on their lot that's pre-tariff. It was actually the opposite because I think dealers are looking at this going, this is not going to be good for my business. Forget whether the unit has tariff or no tariff on it. I'm just worried about the consumer. The last thing I want to do is pull that much more inventory in, especially after just having gone through reducing inventory pretty dramatically.
I think to me that's just, you know, they've got the pulse of the customer and they're hearing it firsthand in terms of all the things that Bob and I outlined around concerns about, am I going to have a job, cost going up. The last thing they want to do is go buy an expensive side by side. The last thing the dealer wants to do is overposition themselves. If anything, it's kind of just kept things tight from that standpoint.
Hey guys, I just want to follow up on the market share conversation. I get that that's sort of a medium-term goal or priority.
Mike, how do we sort of think about the triangulation between trying to grow share, trying to keep dealer lots relatively Lean, right, to lower their interest burden and all this uncertainty, but then also some of the competitive dynamics from dealers, right? Like, you know, what is largely a multi-line dealership model?
Yeah, it's an evolving and complex triangle, I guess I would say. We've seen it play out in Marine. We're seeing it play out in Off-Road. We've had this discussion with dealers because the immediate concern is, hey, when we're being a lot more efficient with inventory and player B, C, and D are not, they are creating more focus from a dealer on their products, which is true from a short-term perspective. In a lot of instances, as we've certainly seen both in Marine and Off-Road, the products are typically lower-end.
They are not as desirable as our products. The consumer that they're attracting, they're putting huge discounts on them. They're aged inventory. They're pulling a consumer in that, in most of the conversations with our dealers, they're like, I'm not sure those people would ever buy your product. They're coming in because it's $10,000 off. They're not necessarily going to be a repeat customer because they're not going to be able to buy things at that price. The second piece, the dealers start to make decisions about whose product they're going to carry. I can tell you, we know it for a fact with Marine where, you know, during COVID, they brought in all these other businesses, smaller manufacturers because they actually could produce a boat. They were like, okay, we're going to bring these things in.
Those same people continue to shove inventory in when things slowed down. Yes, the dealer pivoted, put a lot of emphasis on them. As they clear that inventory out, they're thinking, you know what, I'm not bringing them back in here. They're getting rid of short lines. We've had the same discussion with our Off-Road dealers. In fact, when we had one of our largest dealers in two weeks ago, they told us how many lines, now they're not all Off-Road because they carry other products, but they were trimming significant numbers of manufacturers that they carry the product of. To me, that's the payoff is we remain the disproportionately large portion of their business. It sets a tone because, yeah, they're still paying a lot of inventory interest because they carry more Polaris than anybody else.
When they have to go over and focus on a unit that's three years old and has 10,000 off and it dissuades them from being able to pull in and spend the time on a higher-end customer, they don't like that. From my standpoint, we could have chased it. It's a short-term game and it's a chase to the bottom as opposed to, look, we'll chase when it's appropriate if it's a segment that we want to protect. We're going to do what's in the best interest of the dealer. We're going to make sure we keep that front and center with them and have those discussions. Ultimately, the payoff is they're going to get rid of some of those bad actors as time goes on. Or the bad actors are going to take themselves out of the equation as we've seen.
Yeah. Just one more. I feel like we've gotten some differing views on the February consumer confidence reading from some leisure vehicle players. Do you guys think that that's like a big deal, medium deal, not a big deal, something to monitor? I mean, it was a pretty precipitous drop.
I would say it's, I think it's reflective. I think it's reflective of what everybody's feeling. I think different segments of the population feel it differently. You know, I'm not sure that the low to middle end of our customer set cares much about the movement in the stock market, but that's definitely impacting the psyche of our higher-end customers. Higher-end still remains relatively good, but, you know, when you have the stock market drop 2,000 points within a short period of time, that's going to impact them.
I think in that low to mid range, they're paying attention to the uncertainty that tariffs are creating. I think the interest rate pause that is likely to happen if inflation's not coming down. Then just all the uncertainty around tariffs and what that could do from an employment standpoint, it's just too much. It's an overwhelming amount of noise that creates a negative sentiment. I think that's what you see playing out. Certainly our dealers are playing that back to us in terms of what they're seeing in door swings coming through at the dealerships. I think what we're going to see is we're going to see a choppy layout. You know, I think we're going to see a January okay, February's awful, March we'll see.
I think that's, I mean, it's, you know, Bob was joking about it, but it's a little bit of the news cycle we're in. I mean, every couple of hours brings something new. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad or, you know, and I think that impacts people.
Yeah, I mean, that's what we're hearing. I mean, we talked to a lot of economists. We talked to the dealers and, you know, it is this moving day by day, you know, what's happening. Like Daytona, we just finished Bike Week. Daytona was okay. Attendance was good. We did a lot of demos. There was a lot of interest in the product. Retail was okay. Not mind-blowing, but okay. You say, okay, well that's a good sign.
You will have a few days where retail is really choppy and it is just very hard to get a read right now as to what the consumer is feeling. I do think it is, as Mike said, just because there is this day-to-day cycle. People are, you know, sort of hanging out trying to figure out what is going on in the air in the U.S.
Will Staudinger, your BMO Capital Markets, you mentioned a 10% reduction in your workforce, 20% at the VP level. Is the expectation when the industry, your business, faces a rebound that these costs will come back or is the goal to really remain at that Lean level?
No, it is not going to come back. That is why we went through the process we went through.
It was very surgical. I've worked at enough companies that when tough times come, they do a 10% reduction in force and they just go through and they take 10% of the people out. Most people cop out and take out newer, lower-level employees. We went business by business with a mandate around we're going to run the company in a different way than we ever have. The cost, I mean, first of all, when you take 20% of your VPs out, that's a lot of money. The rest of what we did followed suit as a result of that, meaning we were collapsing org structures, we were pulling things together. We can scale the business.
Just because I'm pumping more Rangers out of Huntsville or more RZRs out of Monterey or more snowmobiles out of Roseau, I may need some more hourly people to be able to do that. I mean, we did take 22% or 24% of our hourly workforce out, which was directly related to volume, but also the activities that Marc did around indirect. Some portion of that's going to have to come back, but there's no reason I have to go add a bunch of salaried people. What we found was nothing really dropped. In fact, we're, you know, Tony and I were talking about this on the flight out. Our decision-making process is so much faster now. It's refreshing and that is how we're going to run the company going forward.
Hey, Noah from KeyBanc.
I guess in terms of like mid-cycle dynamics, what do you think needs to go right to get back to mid-cycle? Is it rates moving lower? Is it consumer confidence improving? I guess my question is like, do you think there's an affordability issue in terms of like the pricing that's been taken since pre-pandemic to now? I know you commented that maybe later this year you'd be trying to hit some of the entry-level price points on ORV. So like basically how do you think about like what needs to go right externally and then what's in your control to get to move back towards mid-cycle?
I mean, I think external, I mean, if I could put my wish list together, all this tariff stuff goes away.
The, you know, the fact that inflation is starting to move down, I mean, I was listening, eggs are $2 cheaper a carton, which is really good. Let the inflation stuff drift down. That means interest rates come down. You start to get the consumer more confident. I do think big geopolitical things, like if I think that this Ukraine-Russia war can get drawn down and the geopolitical noise comes down, I think if the economic uncertainty in the U.S. comes down, things that are kind of being self-induced for all the right reasons, but we get those things under control. I do think you're going to come into, whether it's the second half of this year or into next year, consumer confidence is going to build because everybody hates, the stock market's the big measure of it obviously, but everybody hates uncertainty. It's just playing out.
I think to the extent we can take that uncertainty out of the equation for the consumer. I think as inflation comes down, the interest rates are going to adjust. They're never going to go back to where they were, but they're going to come down to more meaningful levels. For people who qualify for our financing, the payment differential once they start to come down is negligible. I don't think it's going to, and a lot of our people finance their vehicles. I don't think the price point of the vehicle is as much of the problem. For us, it's going to be about making sure we got the inventory positioned and we can see that coming before it's already upon us. You know, I think we're putting a lot of the tools in place.
You know, I think I do not worry. I do think having lower-priced vehicles is helpful. It is not that somebody who buys a $25,000 Ranger is going to go, "Oh, I am going to go buy that $9,900." That is not the case. You may have someone who waits and maybe is buying a used vehicle or now says, "Wait a minute, I can buy a Polaris and get in at an attractive entry point." We know we are moving them up the scale. That is why we are doing that. I do not think it is going to mean that there is some huge mix shift in the business. I just think we are actually going to continue to grow the pie as it relates to bringing more customers in. I think there is just too much noise externally for people to be comfortable.
That is why you see all of our rec categories weak. You see utility holding firm because the utility segment is where the vehicles are used for more than just recreational purposes. It is an important part of what they do on a farm or a ranch or big property.
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, we talked about how, you know, the segment grew and the shift from cities to rural. You get a lot of people that, you know, they are on two acres, five acres. You know, they do not need a Ranger Northstar. We just have not had a great sort of entry-level product that meets the need of that customer. That customer segment has actually grown.
You know, they're using it to haul some firewood and tow their garbage cans up to the road and, you know, move some things around their property. They might ride it down to the pool or the, you know, club if they're in a kind of mountain community. You know, we're looking at how do we make some products that provide, you know, great Polaris quality, our ride and handling, the things we're good at, that dealership support. Because a lot of the other stuff that's out there is, you know, there's no dealer support. There's no, you know, they're not good products. We think there's an opportunity kind of in that middle ground. That's what we're focused on. To Mike's point, I don't think it's going to drive some huge mix shift.
Mike, you mentioned like the 9.9 price point. Like would it be that much lower than your kind of existing product?
Just using that as an example.
Got it.
You'll see later this year.
Okay. Thank you.
Just on the mid-cycle margin target, it seems like most of that's going to be driven by volume normalization. Given what you said about ORV flattish to pre-COVID, whereas the other segments down more significantly, do you expect most of that margin improvement to come from those other segments? Any color you can provide on what those mid-level margins look like on the segment level would be helpfu l too.
Sorry. Yeah, I mean, obviously we don't, we only give EBITDA total company, but you know, I think the challenge in motorcycles and snow, the margin degradation has been fairly steep because of the big falloff in volume.
If those normalize, you know, they will trend back to their historic margins, probably somewhat better. You know, certainly in snow, Jenny's doing a lot of work on, you know, Leaning out the product line, the stuff she's got coming in the next few years. Highly platformed will be better, which will help a lot. Some volume will really make a difference because we're just so far down that you're getting, you're running the plants at a really inefficient level. Indian's no different. You know, new products are great, but you're just in this very inefficient environment. Off-road is down less, but it's also far and away our most profitable segment. Any recovery in Off-Road dwarfs any benefit we can get from, you know, motorcycles or snow. That's just how the math of the company sets up.
You know, the driver of those mid-cycle margins is going to be primarily recovery in ORV, the work Marc's doing in the plants, the fact that we aren't going to, as Mike said, grow the OpEx base. We should get tremendous leverage on any new volume we can get. We will get certainly tailwind from snow and motorcycles trending back towards their normal levels. Really the driver is Off-Road.
Martin Mitela here from Raymond James for Joe Altibello. One of your largest competitors is selling their marine business. As you pointed out last week, they're burning cash, whereas you guys are making a profit off of it. Does this disturbance in any way shift your strategy when you approach marine? What kind of long-term benefits are you getting from being in that segment?
No, I think if anything, it reaffirms the approach we took.
Our competitor tried to Powersports eyes the marine business, and that's part of the problem. We had looked at one of those businesses, and it was a well-run business. You know, we had expressed interest in it back in the original acquisition timeframe. The marine business, the thing we recognized, and, you know, Bob obviously had responsibility for the marine business shortly after we bought it, it is a different model. Now, there are common points. I mean, it goes through a two-step distribution, all those things. The season, the way you sell in, the way you do model your rollover, how you interact with the dealers is very different.
What we have not done is gone in and tried to take what works in our Polaris model and said, "Okay, this is what you're going to do in marine." They have benefited from some of the things that we have done, like Tony's product development process. We ported that over, but we modified it for a marine business. There were certain pieces of that that did not apply. Marine buys all of its powertrain, whereas we make ours. There are differences in how the product is developed. What we tried to do is say, "Look, if there are common points that we can leverage without destroying the essence of the business, that's what we're going to do." You know, when our business is in a normal cycle, we are making mid-high teens EBITDA.
We're in a very low point right now, and we're still making a lot of money in that business. We've paid the, not paid the complete amount that we paid for the business. We've paid a lot of it back now. You know, at the end of the day, we focused on investing in the Hurricane and Godfrey business, which had been under-invested in. We're now to a point where we're making money in those businesses. You know, I think we've tried to listen to the people who know how to run a business like that and really allow them to do it the right way. We also made decisions on things that weren't working. You know, the Rinker business, the Larson business just didn't have the brand strength. They didn't have the distribution.
When COVID hit, we made the hard decision to prune those off, which I think in the end was the right thing to do because it allowed us to funnel investment back into those three core brands. That is paying off for us right now. As it relates to, I think what is in your question, would we ever do more M&A in that segment? I do not know, potentially. We like the marine segment, but not anytime soon. You know, Bob, I think pretty well articulated our capital deployment strategy. Quite frankly, we are employing a lot of the same approach that we have in Powersports, which is, you know, our best payoff is when we do something organically. You know, we are now moving down that path with the 24-foot center console and the 32-foot day boat that we have got in Hurricane.
I think those are going to be really important test cases for us to say, "Okay, now we're going to extend the brand outside of its normal, you know, the area that it would typically play in with a fund deck or some of the smaller fiberglass boats." As that strategy works, I think we're going to feel more confident about how do we move into these new segments. That gives us the opportunity to organically grow and really leverage the investment we have. You know, if we do look at M&A down the road, I mean, it's got some pretty high hurdles that it's got to get over because our, you know, the financial characteristics of our marine portfolio are very strong. We feel good about it. We like the business and we're sticking with it.
Hey guys, just had a question on how you, really if there's anything we should be keeping an eye on with regard to used inventory over the next few years, just from the fact that, you know, we sold a lot of new vehicles in 2020, 2021. Do those maybe entering the used base like help liquidity on trade-up? Is there anything that you're worried about with those vehicles maybe coming into the used market? Just anything you're keeping an eye on with how used impacts things?
We actually see the, there's a couple of things. We can watch the used market through really kind of two barometers. One is there are some reports that come out on the used market pricing. And then we are the largest aggregator of used Powersports as it relates to side-by-sides with Polaris Exchange.
Part of that's because we are probably the largest source of used vehicles because of Polaris Adventures, where we maintain ownership of the bulk of those vehicles. Once we're done with the term, we bring those back in and we put them into exchange, as well as the used units that come out of whether it's our management units, our sales units, those types of things. We had historically just taken these things and pushed them off into MPA, into the auction houses, and realized, you know what, we're creating a competitive environment that we're not benefiting from and we're not controlling the inventory. If you haven't had a chance, I'd encourage you to go look at Polaris Exchange because it's pretty cool in terms of the health diagnostics and things that you can do on a vehicle.
The way that works is it allows our dealer network to get in and have the opportunity to bid on these vehicles. We're not paying a third party anything. It's between us and them. They know what they're going to get. It encourages them to have that as an important profit pool. Some of our dealers have seen the value in that. We've had a significant number of our dealers sign up for Polaris Exchange, which says a lot in tough economic conditions. I think they see the value of that. We have not seen anything coming through Exchange that would tell us that there's some kind of an impending glut of vehicles. I think you would have probably started to have seen that the minute the ridership data started to slow down.
We kept a close eye on that because what we did not want to have happen is people saying, "Hey, look, I'm not riding and, you know, I'm going to put this unit on Craig's list or whatever." It is encouraging now that we see the ridership data coming back and actually stronger. We watch the used prices that are coming through. They have stabilized back where they were historically. We have not really seen anything that has got any concern written on it, but it is an area that we do keep a close eye on. Quite frankly, we play in pretty heavily.
I think one of the things we are going to see is, you know, what we typically see with Ranger on the utility side is those do not come back.
I mean, they might come back if they're like, if we sell them, you know, that they were a demo unit and they're a year old, sure, those will sell instantly. And smart dealers have made a lot of money buying those and reselling them. But, you know, typically if you're a, if the vehicle's owned by a farmer, rancher, whatever, they kind of use it for seven to ten years and they park it and they let the kids use it or the ranch hands or it's there as a spare. They don't really trade them in. You don't see a lot of five-year-old Rangers coming back. On the rec side, you used to see and you would see, you know, three-year-old RZRs. Now this stuff is nearly five years old. And if somebody's been riding a lot, a five-year-old RZR's pretty beat up.
If you're a hard rider, I know if I had a RZR for five years old, it would be pretty beat up. Mike's would be really beat up. Not because he's a bad driver, but because he rides. Mine would be beat up because of what I've hit. I think by the time those buyers come back, I think those units aren't going to be a big trade thing. They might, you know, they'll sell them for a little bit of money if they want to sell them, but I don't think they're going to have a huge impact on the new market.
All right, are there any more questions today? Else we'll wrap it up. Okay, thank you. Do you want to?
All right, with that, we're going to wrap up Capital Markets Day.
We appreciate everybody who made the trip out. I also appreciate those who have dialed in or are listening to this once it's been posted. I just want to reiterate, we are working hard to navigate through choppy waters and position this company for the long term. I think we've got this business set up to be an incredible value creator once we get out to the other side of this current volatile market. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to JC and we'll make sure we get back to you. Thanks for the attendance today.