All right. Well, good morning, everybody, and just wanna welcome everyone to our Polaris's investor analyst meeting. This is the first time we've kinda been together in person since the pandemic hit. I just wanna thank you all for coming out and participating in the event. As many of you know, this will be my last investor meeting, so I just wanna thank the ones that are here. I've known many of you for many years, so I just wanna thank you for all the conversations and discussions and the analyst modeling, and all that kind of thing. I've enjoyed it, even though sometimes you probably thought that you know, some of those conversations went a little bit long.
Even I thought they went a little long, but that's okay. We got through it. I just wanna appreciate all the conversations and the getting to know you guys over the last probably 15, 20 years. Thanks. With that, J.C. Weigelt is here. He's taking over for me, so all of you are in very good hands. With that, I'll turn it over to J.C., and he'll go through some of the agenda and some other stuff that we need to cover. Thanks.
All right. Thanks, Richard. J.C. Weigelt. Pleasure to be here. Thank you all, and good morning to everybody here in Las Vegas. Those joining us virtually, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you're clicking in from, I guess. I'm J.C. Weigelt, the new guy in Investor Relations. Excited to be here. Had a good opportunity so far to work under Richard, and excited to take over the IR program at Polaris. They did luckily give me the safe harbor as the new guy, so I gotta go through this. There will be some forward-looking statements as of today. The company undertakes no obligation to update those at any specific time. Actual results could differ from things we talk about today. Risk factors are all in our most recently filed 10-K with the SEC.
The agenda today is a strategy overview by Mike, and then he's gonna pass it over to Pam, who's our Chief Customer Growth Officer, talk about best customer experience. Then we're gonna give it back to Mike to talk about rider-driven innovation. We're gonna have a quick break, and then Steve, who runs our ORV business, is gonna do a deep dive into that business unit. Then Bob's gonna come up and finish up with financials. We do have a lot of time for Q&A at the end, so we do kindly ask that you reserve all your questions for the end. The team's gonna come up here and take your questions. We'll have some mics that go around as well.
With that, let's kick this off. We got a fun video to get everybody energized here in the morning. Here we go. Thanks for coming.
I'm a savage, I'm a fighter. Making noise in the street. Haters like a fire. Throwing rocks to a beat. Got my finger on my pulse, it's steady. All those vehicles full of speed. Automatic shift, gears are ready. Headstrong, I believe. When I close my eyes and count to ten. All I feel's the adrenaline. When the pain begins to set. All I hear is, "Long live the champion." Long live the champion. Long live the champion. When I close my eyes and count to ten. All I feel's the adrenaline. When the pain begins to set. All I hear is, all I hear is, all I hear is. "Long live the champion." Long live the champion. Long live the champion. Long live the champion.
Okay, well, if that didn't get your blood boiling and moving, for those in the room, the ride this afternoon certainly will. Thanks for joining us. I know, making a trip out here isn't easy, and I appreciate you taking the time. We've got a jam-packed day, so we're gonna really try and keep everybody on schedule. We're gonna do Q&A at the very end. I'd ask you just, you know, hold your questions, note them, and we'll have the whole, executive leadership team available. For those that are gonna join us at dinner, it'll be a great opportunity to honor Mr. Edwards for the work he's done. I obviously had some words to talk about at the earnings release. He's just done a fantastic job.
We're sad to see him go, but J.C.'s doing great work, and we're glad to have him on the team. I'm gonna do a couple of things this morning. One is I wanna cover some foundational elements of the company. You know, there's a chance we have some folks in the audience or on the line that don't really know the background of the company. I'm gonna spend a little bit of time there. I really wanna spend the bulk of the time talking about our strategy. We're gonna go deep in a couple of areas, specifically around best customer experience and rider-driven innovation. Not because they're more important, but I think they're really paramount in terms of the investment thesis behind the company. Steve will obviously spend time talking about ORV.
We obviously have had challenges over the past with our Off-Road Vehicle business. Steve and the team have done a spectacular job of not only improving that business but really put it back out in front, relative to the competition. Bob's gonna bring it all home with the investment thesis behind the company, and we're excited about some of the dynamics that we'll be able to share with you then. For those of you who might be new to the story, you know, the company was founded in 1954 by two brothers and a best friend, and it was really founded on innovation. These guys were trying to figure out how to get across the frozen tundra of Northern Minnesota, and they built the snowmobile. Now, it didn't look like the snowmobiles today.
It was two car fenders, a makeshift frame, and an engine. It did what it needed to do, and that was the start. It was the lifeblood of this company, and we're really proud of that. We have 20 manufacturing locations. We have 4,000 dealers. We work through a two-step distribution network. About half of that is North America, about half of that is outside of North America. Our dealers are not exclusive. About 70% of our dealers support other OEMs. They may have other businesses in lawn and garden, but in most of the cases, we make up a disproportionate amount of their business. This business is incredibly global. We're in 120 countries. We talked about on our earnings call the fact that we've eclipsed $1 billion.
When I joined the company, we were around $500 million . We've seen substantial growth. I talked about on our call, we really leaned into international when many of our competitors maybe didn't lean in quite as much. When you couple that with the excellent international team we have and the products and the focus, it meant we won. We've now talked more about global market share because we're seeing gains not only in North America, but also globally. We think that's really important. You can see the financial profile of the company. Obviously, ORV is our biggest business, but we have some really good growth platforms around Marine, Aftermarket, and On-Road. I'm gonna spend some time talking about those today since we're not gonna have those leaders up to talk. I talk about the best team in powersports.
This is that team. We have over 130 years of experience on this team, and we have a number of individuals on this team that have been with Polaris for two decades or more. That brings a lot of the institutional knowledge and helps us carry forward the incredible culture that we have. Then we've brought new folks in who've helped bolster us as we think about the emerging, capabilities that we need as a team. That's been really critical. I would put this team up just, against anybody. Now, you're not gonna hear from everybody today, but they're all here. I would encourage you during a break, during the ride session, tonight at dinner, you'll have the opportunity to hear from them, talk to them. Feel free to go up and ask them the questions.
Obviously, don't ask them about Q1 or any of that kind of nice stuff. They're here to really provide information. They're an impressive group, and I'm humbled to have the opportunity to lead them. Before we get into the new strategy, I think it's important to close out our old strategic framework. I'm not gonna go through this in detail. That old strategy framework provided a lot of great things. First and foremost, it really refocused us as a company to become a lot more customer-centric. I would argue that we kinda lost our way in the past and started looking at innovation for innovation's sake and not necessarily paying attention to what the customer was looking for. That framework helped us refocus. We delivered some category-defining vehicles.
The Pro XP, the Turbo R, the Turbo, the Pro R, and the Ranger XP Kinetic are just a few examples of the products that we've delivered. We knew coming out of 2015 and 2016 that we had some issues. Not just the quality issues that we were contending with, but competitive issues. We refocused our R&D efforts, and we started listening to consumers more, and we're now innovating, and I would argue we're out ahead of the competition. We launched new business models. We had the courage to go after things like Polaris Adventures, Polaris Adventures Select. We recognize not all consumers are comfortable committing the capital or have the space or the comfort level with buying a vehicle. Polaris Adventures has been incredibly successful. Just last year, we delivered over 400,000 rides.
Well over 1 million rides since its inception. It's become a tool for us to continue to cultivate and bring new riders in as owners of Polaris. We're converting at a pretty low single-digit rate, but that's because we're not putting a lot of emphasis on it right now. You know, obviously, we don't have a lot of excess inventory around, but it is gonna become an incredible marketing tool for us, and it's really opened up the aperture in terms of how to think differently in terms of bringing new customers in. Lastly, we executed in some pretty tough times, and we exceeded the financial commitments that we put out there. I thought it was important to close that out as we move on to the new framework.
Now, when the leadership team and I got together, we really boiled it down to three simple things as we thought through how do we move forward as a company. It's really, hey, what can we be best in the world at? What are we deeply passionate about? What drives the economics of the company? It really got us to the simple answer. We need to refocus ourselves around powersports. You're gonna hear us talk a lot about what does that mean. That means putting investment back into those core elements of the company. I'll tell you that the divestiture of GEM and Taylor-Dunn was a prime example. It's not that they weren't good businesses. They were. We wish them all the best.
They were never gonna get the investment under this framework that they deserved because we weren't gonna take it away from the other elements of the business that are core to the strategy. I think that really shows you the mindset and the insight that we've got as we look at our company. You're gonna hear more about that from Bob in terms of how we're pivoting from a capital deployment strategy, perspective. We're gonna go through the six strategic pillars. You know, our mandate is to continue to be, and as we move forward, the global leader in powersports. We work from a position of strength, but we're not gonna take that for granted.
It's why the theme is lead from the front because we know we have a responsibility to continue to set the standard, and we're gonna do that, and I believe we've been doing that this past year. I'm gonna walk through that in more detail. There's obviously financials. I didn't put them on the bottom on purpose. I'll get to them here in a minute. I'll tee those up, and then Bob will be able to drive those home. I'll tell you that, you know, as we had this conversation with our board, the big question was, how big is the opportunity for growth? You know, they had gotten a distinct feeling that, you know, maybe powersports really wasn't gonna grow that much, that there was a need to diversify the business.
What we told them is, "You couldn't be more wrong." We shared with them some data. We talked to them about core markets, addressable markets, and other aspects of the company. What we've shown over time is we've been able to grow. What we talked to them about is just in the past three years, we've been able to grow the company 7%. There's some emerging trends that have really helped fuel that and will continue to fuel that as we move forward. Millennial spending patterns have changed. If you think back to the 2008, 2009 financial crisis and what happened after that, there was a very distinct change in this younger generation's ability to spend. That has changed. They're now buying homes. They're buying cars. A return to the outdoors.
These are not temporary things that happened during the pandemic. Our business and the dynamics around it are much different than someone signing up for a streaming service or buying exercise equipment. These are large investments. These become new ways for them to conduct their life. In a lot of instances, folks added a second home in a, you know, an area in the mountains or on a lake. Just because they bought a vehicle doesn't mean that it precludes them from taking a vacation to Europe or going to Disneyland. In fact, it provides them yet another way to continue to get benefit from it. They can go out on that pontoon with their friends and family. They can take their four-seat RZR out and rip through the trails.
There's just a lot of benefits that they can continue to reap from that change and that fundamental shift, and I think that's gonna be here to stay. This focus around sustainability, and a lot of folks look at us and say, "Why is a powersports company talking about sustainability? It feels like it's the opposite." I'll tell you, it couldn't be further from the truth. Our products are used in the environment, land and water, and if those elements are not maintained, then our products have nowhere to be used. We take that very serious. We feel that we've got a stewardship responsibility, and I'll talk a little bit more about that opportunity. There's a priority around experiences. We've shown that with Polaris Adventures.
It has really opened up the aperture around the opportunity to continue to pull more and more customers in, to the category and offer those compelling experiences and opportunities for them. Then last, this whole urban to rural shift, where people are moving out of densely populated areas. They're getting themselves a house with some land, garage space. That certainly helps in terms of people thinking about buying one of our vehicles, making that type of commitment, and being in a location where they can actually support it. What we shared with our board was the size of the market. When you look at the core market of $55 billion, think of it this way, and I'll use our boats business. This is where we play. It's in pontoons and deck boats.
When you get into that lighter blue area, that's the rest of the marine industry. You start getting into tow boats and, pleasure boats, fishing boats, and you also get into other marine areas like accessories. The point being that our core market is huge. You think about us being $8 billion-$9 billion in a $55 billion market, there's still a lot of opportunity there. You start looking at addressable and for us to start to work, well, whether it's organic or inorganic, to continue to grow. We put a couple of related lifestyle categories. The reason I put those up there isn't because we're gonna go out and try and grab, you know, half a billion dollars worth of revenue from that. It's more that there are significant customers.
There's a lot of money spent in those categories. I will tell you that adventure travel category is where we pull the bulk of our Polaris Adventures customers from. These are people that are looking for outdoor adventure. They're looking for something different. They may wanna tack it on to an existing vacation that they take to Las Vegas or Arizona. We now have over 200 locations that can offer that. It's just an example of how we're thinking broader. Now Pam's gonna talk to you about not only about how we do that, but how do we bring those customers in? How do we make it easy for them to interact with Polaris? It's more than just our business models. It's all the work we do behind the scenes in terms of how do we cultivate customers?
How do we build that relationship and bring them in? We believe we've got an incredibly compelling growth opportunity, and you can see focusing on the core, going out to that addressable market, and then even thinking more broadly, about how customers can come in, to this segment. We're really excited about that, and we think that offers a pretty compelling, underpinning of the overall business. Let me talk a little bit about strategy. Pam's gonna come up and talk about best customer experience. But the way I want you to think about this is it's three elements. It's product experience. Not only is it us developing the best products, but it's customers having the best experience with that product, meaning it's got the quality and the reliability, the product excellence that we expect around it.
The second element is around the channel. It's both the physical dealership, the experience they have when they walk in, the experience they have with service, and it's also the omni-channel experience. One of the things we saw during the pandemic is consumers had a higher degree of desire to interact with us remotely, whether that was to try and book service, whether that was to actually buy a vehicle through the click, deliver, ride. Continuing to foster and develop that, making it easier for them to buy components, buy accessories from us without having to go to a dealership. Then the last is entryway experiences. Again, getting back to things like Polaris Adventures or Polaris Select, making it easier and easier for customers to interact with us.
I will tell you that in years past, we didn't think about these folks as our customers. They weren't buying from us. They were renting. Well, that's the wrong way to think about it, and we've demonstrated there's a benefit from bringing them in and thinking of them as a customer. It starts to create that brand and customer loyalty, which is incredibly important. Those are the elements Pam's gonna talk more about. When we talk about inspirational brands, when we talk to our board, we had a summary slide that we didn't even talk to. We literally flashed three pages that were densely populated similar to this. Inspirational brands is all about having brands that people are excited about, that they wanna share with people, that they wanna post on Instagram, that they wanna talk to their friends about, that they wanna bring their friends in.
It fits and resonates with the Think Outside brand moniker that we have. These pictures, and we literally have millions of these pictures, show that. Whether it's taking an individual to a place that they could never go without the vehicle, giving them the opportunity to go out with their family or their friends and enjoy, you know, just a fun day out, whether it's on land or water, just an incredible opportunity, and you can see the enthusiasm. It resonates when we have venues like Camp RZR in California, which we're looking forward to hopefully getting back to here this year, where you can see how enthusiastic customers are, how much they love the brand. Continuing to have those inspirational brands is really important. I'm gonna come back up in a bit and talk to you about rider-driven innovation.
The simple way to think about this, and this is how this company has evolved, is it's about how do we leverage our core capabilities and continue to look at the emerging capabilities in the marketplace through the lens of our customer, and how does that continue to make us a better company? I'm gonna come back up and spend a little bit more time talking to you about in terms of what exactly that means, give you some of the examples, that we have. The fourth area is agile and efficient operations. This is more than just lean principles. You know, certainly there's an opportunity for productivity in our company, and I'm gonna talk here in a minute about some of the things that we've been doing in this regard.
This is more than just productivity in our supply chain or operations, it's productivity throughout the entire business. There is no part of our company that doesn't have an opportunity to continue to leverage into the growth that we have. This isn't about cost-cutting, period. I've sent that message loud and clear to our organization. We've done a lot of that in the past. We've got to make sure we're investing for growth, but we have to do it wisely. This affords us the opportunity, as we're growing the company, the investment levels can be leveraged. You see us today sitting at about 15% or sub-15% operating expense level. That's through deliberate effort we've made to try and make sure we're investing in the right areas and holding other areas to leverage the growth.
You're gonna see us continue to have that focus. It's really about, you know, how efficient are we at product development? What are we doing in our factories? How are we running our supply chains? It's also about delivery. You know, one of the things that's come out of the pandemic, we were already ahead relative to being able to deliver a unit to a dealer through the RFM process. We've always been a pioneer in the category. You know, before RFM was MVP. What we learned during the pandemic, despite the supply chain challenges, is we've got the opportunity to deliver even faster. You know, these challenges have really taught us how to be more agile and flexible.
One of the things that the team and I have talked about is, as we emerge from this, once the supply chain starts to stabilize, we are not gonna carry the same level of inventory that we did before this pandemic started. It's better for us, it's a lot better for our dealers in terms of profitability, and it can be better for the customer because the customer is gonna have the ability to pick exactly what they want, customize that vehicle, and have it show up in a relatively short period of time. We think that's a really compelling opportunity. We announced an investment in our distribution network for our parts, garments, and accessories, and that's all about making sure we've got inventory positioned close to the customer. I will tell you, in years past, those were looked as taboo investments.
That wasn't an area we were gonna put money. There were more exciting things to do. To be honest with you, these things are exciting because they are the things that are gonna propel and support growth. That's really part of the leverage point that we've got. You can see we've got over 400,000 units, 4,000 dealers, 80,000 PG&A SKUs. There's a lot to leverage here as the global leader in powersports. Now, a couple of the areas I'd go into. You know, we hear a lot about manufacturing footprint. Steve's gonna talk a little bit more about this today. You know, we've got 20 different locations, and we are constantly looking at ways to optimize.
You know, Bob and I have tried to make a couple of points in the last earnings calls just around the investment we've made in Monterrey. You know, we've added twice as much capacity to an existing footprint as some of our competitors have added in Mexico. That speaks to the fact that not only are we continuing to grow, but we're looking for opportunities to continue to be efficient. We're looking at other expansion opportunities right now. We know based on the current trajectory of the market and the capacity we have as a company, that we're gonna need substantial new capacity investment. Again, these weren't necessarily looked at as good things in the past. They are now. These are really good opportunities to support the growth we have as a company.
We do a lot of great work here, and I'll tell you, this is a never-ending quest. You know, the opportunity to in-source core capabilities to not only save money but give us a competitive advantage are absolutely crucial. The other area is around strategic sourcing. We've talked a lot about this. You've heard us refer to Project Sunburst, the global supply chain transformation. This was really about, hey, how do we get some of the core capabilities we need? You know, we really had trouble with quality from our suppliers, for example. How do we bring those? Plus, how do we take our supply chain and optimize it? Those are really the tenets we had. Cost, while important, wasn't the number one objective. In fact, there were many other items on the left-hand side that actually lead to lower costs.
They're just tougher to quantify when you look at the cost of a component. We've already seen that. During the pandemic, the suppliers who had gone through this transformation performed better on average than the rest of our supply chain. That's pretty encouraging because it says we've done the right thing in terms of building that partnership. How do we put ourselves in a better strategic category to make sure that we can continue to leverage that going forward? Now, I will tell you we're learning a lot. There's gonna be a way to look back after we get through this. There are areas where we created strategic partnerships, and our partners aren't acting very partner-y. We're gonna go back and take a really hard look at that.
You know, I think the thing that I love about our culture is we don't just make a decision and then just stick with it and ignore all the data. We make a decision with conviction, but we listen, and we course-correct as we go. We're gonna learn a lot as we've gone through this supply chain disruption. I'll tell you know, I talk about it on the calls. It is incredibly sincere. Our supply chain organization is outperforming, and they're tired, but these guys continue to step up and do the right things. I couldn't be more proud of the achievements that we've seen here. This supply chain transformation is continuing on in earnest, and hopefully in the next couple of years, we'll have it largely wrapped up and ready to go. Best team, best culture.
This is the number one reason why this company is what it is. I just had a call with our top leaders this morning. We're working on a return to office, and I conveyed the message to them because we're working through a lot of ambiguity. I'm sure many of you are dealing with that with your companies in terms of do you bring people back? How do you bring them back? I will tell you that our team has a tenacity, that they're gonna work through the obstacles. As we deployed some of our thoughts this morning to those top leaders, I really reiterated this is an important moment. These are the most important assets we have. If we don't have these folks working to the mission, we're never gonna get there.
We can have all the best strategies in the world, but if the people aren't there, then we're not gonna be able to achieve them. I have a lot of confidence. I mean, we've spent a lot of money making sure we're recruiting the best, developing them, retaining them. You know, Jim Williams, our CHRO, and I spend a lot of time looking at our retention data. You know, while turnover rates have started to move up, they're nowhere near what we're seeing in a lot of the benchmarks. We're on it. We're making sure that we're making those folks understand the compelling proposition they have with Polaris. The last thing I'll say on this slide is this point around understand the riding experience, live the riding experience, work to make it better. This isn't a new mantra.
For those of you who have followed us for a long time, I'm sure you probably saw this years and years ago. In fact, it hangs outside almost every single one of our facilities on a plaque. We kinda got away from it. We got distracted. Well, we brought it back because this is absolutely critical. When you go around our facilities, you see helmets everywhere. When you talk to people about their personal experience, they talk to you about how they went out to snowmobile riding. You know, Ken was telling me last night at dinner that Chris Wolf rode his snowmobile into work because we got a bunch of snow in Minnesota. That's how we live.
There's a lot that we can learn because we are essentially customers, and we need to be our biggest critics, and we can continue to make ourselves better. Obviously, on the right, you can see we've gotten validation externally about the strength of the team and the culture that we have. We don't let that get us too comfortable. We're continuing to look at and strive to be even better, because not only do we not wanna lose those, more importantly, we don't wanna lose the team. Last but not least is Geared for Good. This is really around the whole ESG framework.
I'll tell you that the reason we call it Geared For Good is when we had the discussion with our board many years ago, John Wiehoff, who's our chairman, actually looked at us and said, "Please, please, don't call this ESG. Don't do it just to check a box. You gotta make it yours." He was right. You know, we're not good at faking it. We're a very genuine, authentic company, and I think that's many of the ways we've become who we are today. When you step back and you look at ESG and you really get down to the core, which is what we've done over there on the right, hey, let's think about our product. Let's think about our facilities. Let's think about the places that our products are used, and let's think about the people we have. It's incredibly important.
You know, I made the comment at the beginning, our products are used in the environment, so why wouldn't we care? Why wouldn't we care about how much energy we consume at a factory, how much water we use, how much waste comes out of it? Not only is it good for the environment, which is important to our company, it's also good for us. It helps us run a more efficient business. When you look at some of the key measures that we have, you know, we're improving our disclosures, we've improved our scores, and we made a $5 million commitment to the National Forest Foundation. These are important milestones. You know, we've upped our game as it relates to not only employee safety, which we're world-class in, but also rider safety.
You know, if you go out and look at a lot of the videos and content that we put out there, it really shows you we're trying to make sure that we give our riders everything they can to stay safe. Obviously, from a recognition standpoint, as a powersports company, I take a lot of pride in making it two years in a row on Newsweek's Most Responsible Companies. It says we've got the right focus, and we're doing it for the right reasons, and that's why employees embrace this, and there's a lot more that we can continue to do with this. Those are the six pillars. Like I said, we're gonna go a little deeper here in a few minutes. Here are the financials. Now clearly, being number one in global powersports is job one.
Mid-single digits revenue growth, and again, these are CAGRs through the period. Talking about EBITDA in the mid- to high teens, we recognize that we've seen a lot of degradation here since the 2013-2014 timeframe. We know we have a responsibility to get that back up. Bob's gonna talk a little bit more about that. ROICs in the mid-20%. We've done a lot to rebound from where we were, and we know that we've got to maintain that. We've got an incredible spread versus our cost of capital, and we've got a very good spread relative to many of our competitors as well as the S&P 500. The last one is double-digit earnings per share growth.
Bob's gonna spend some time walking you through this, so I'm not gonna get into these in a whole lot of detail. Last thing I wanted to hit is just talk about the business. You're gonna hear more about off-road vehicles, so I'm not gonna spend any time there, but I thought it was important to kinda go through each of our segments because I don't want you to leave here thinking they're not important, that we're not up here talking about them. We just didn't have the time, and given the fact that you're gonna be out riding our off-road vehicles today, we thought that was probably an important area to focus. Our on-road business. I don't think you can argue. We have delivered some phenomenal products and innovation is alive and well.
The Net Promoter Scores are incredibly high in this business. I don't know that you'll find anybody that'll tell you that Indian isn't the best bike out there. The Slingshot business, you know, for those of you who've followed us for a while, we obviously had a lot of troubles from a quality standpoint. We had trouble with consumer demand 'cause all we had was a stick option. The team has done a spectacular job, not only knocking those quality issues down, but we've actually turned them into a competitive advantage. We've added more innovation, and we add the automated transition or transmission, which brought in an enormous new population of consumers. In fact, it's the largest part of the business now. Global growth is important. I talked about international getting up over $1 billion. Indian has been a huge driver behind that.
In markets like Europe, Japan, Asia, Australia, the affinity to the brand is incredibly high, and there's a compelling opportunity to continue to leverage that growth. We started up motorcycle manufacturing in Opole, Poland several years ago, and as you heard on my earnings call, we announced that we've started up motorcycle assembly in Vietnam to serve the Asian markets. That just gives you a sense of the growth opportunity we have for that business. The last thing I would say is, we know we have a responsibility to deliver profitability. At 15% gross margin, that's not good enough. I will tell you that, you know, we bought Indian in 2011. We didn't buy a business. We bought a brand. We didn't take anything with us. We had to start over. We had to tool up a factory.
We had to redesign the bikes. We had to invest the engineering. We basically built a business. But we also know now that we've got the portfolio filled out, we have a responsibility to now turn our eyes to profitability without compromising all the things that have made that business great. Mike Dougherty and his team are doing an excellent job. They're on the path that we've set with our board. They were on the path last year, even though we had unprecedented commodity pricing and logistics challenges. I think that just speaks to the ingenuity that the team has, and they launched a bunch of new bikes, and they've continued the investment in new bikes. The team's really focused on that. I would leave you with, you know, we understand the commitment around profitability. We're building off an incredible franchise.
We've got the best products, best distribution, and best brand in the market. We have a lot of confidence around what we can do there. Our marine business. We were actually just at the Miami Boat Show. We saw a couple of folks out there while we were touring the floor. We have an incredible boat franchise, or, you know, it's our marine segment, but an incredible boat segment. What I will tell you is that we probably haven't done this a lot of justice. We didn't spend a lot of time talking about how phenomenal this business is.
One of the reasons we bought it was not only the fact that it's got the number one and number three position for pontoons and the number one for deck boats, and the brands are the best in the marketplace, but it was also the financial characteristics of the company. While the gross margins may only be at 22%, the operating expenses to run this business are very low. I would tell you that the EBITDA for this business is more like what we used to be as a total company. The return on invested capital is incredibly compelling. Over 100% when we bought the business. We've already returned a weighted average cost of capital in terms of returns. Bob will talk a little bit more about this. It is a phenomenal business. We have a great management team.
There's a lot of opportunity for us to accelerate innovation. We've been doing that, and I'll talk later today about some of the examples behind that. There's still opportunities to improve profitability. You know, the Godfrey and Hurricane businesses really were nowhere near the profitability of Bennington, and so Jake Vogel and the team continue to be incredibly focused around how do we continue to move that needle. There's opportunities there, and it's a compelling investment area. Great business, and we will make sure that we're sharing more of that as we go forward. Last but not least is our aftermarket. You know, we have two pieces to the aftermarket. We have our powersports aftermarket, so these are things like KLIM, Kolpin, and 509, Pro Armor, phenomenal businesses.
What we've done is we've bolted those on. We found ways to incorporate them with our vehicles coming out of the factory, LE editions, things like that, and we've improved the profitability. That's an area that we view is ripe for inorganic growth, as we move forward, and there's a lot of opportunities in the space. The other area is really around our Transamerican business. What I'll tell you is the focus here has been about profitability improvement. Obviously, we had a goodwill write-down back during the early days of the pandemic. The business was heavily hit by tariffs, but Craig and the team have had a huge focus on rightsizing the cost base, as well as we've fired unprofitable customers in the distribution wholesale side of the business.
We're continuing on that journey. We understand we have a commitment. Bob will talk a little bit more about that as we assess our effectiveness around capital deployment, and the priority there is really around how do we continue to improve that profitability. With that, I'm gonna turn it over to Pam, and she'll talk to you about the best customer experience.
There you go.
Great to be with everyone today to talk about customer growth. Mike talked a lot about our very aggressive plans to grow and continue to be the global leader in powersports. I'm gonna talk a little bit about how we're gonna do that from a customer perspective. A few things I'm gonna be talking about is, one, we have seen incredible growth coming from both places, both existing customers repurchasing as well as new customers coming in. That is exactly what we wanna keep seeing and what we wanna keep fueling. On top of that, when we look at our new customer mix. It is coming from a couple of different places. We're seeing more customers who look like our current customers, and we're seeing growth there.
We're also seeing a wider variety of demographics, new customers that historically had not been a part of powersports coming in, and we've made a massive effort to fuel that, and we'll continue to do that. On top of it, new customers, though, have always been an important part of our business. Something we hear a lot of is, "Oh, are the new customers just coming in because we were in lockdown and there's nothing else for them to do?" That's not the case. New customers have always been a core part of our business. It has accelerated, but we're gonna continue to grow that.
At the end of the day, as we think about our customer focus, we know that understanding customers better than anyone else is what is gonna drive this business and what is gonna get us to the best product innovation, the best connections with customers, the best engagement. At the end of the day, we need to find new ways to keep bringing more new people in, and that's what we're committed to doing. When you take a step back and look at where we were in 2016 and where we were in 2021 and what those projections look like, the dark blue bar is looking at our existing customer base and the diverse customers that are a part of our current base and what that looks like modeled out if it continued to grow at the rates we've been seeing.
The light bar is looking at if we accelerate growth with new demographics of customers, what that looks like. You can see it's a meaningful difference. We intend to grow our customer base by over 50% in the next 10 years, and I'll tell you how we've been doing. Essentially, you can see on the right where that growth is coming from. Certainly a lot of growth with people who look like our current base, but also a lot of new people coming in. We're gonna continue to do that. On the top left, you can see, going back to 2016, 2/3 of our customers always have been new people. Going back 2016, 2017, all the way through 2019, about 2/3 of our retail was coming from people new to Polaris.
About a third of that coming from existing customers repurchasing. We've seen that increase as the volume has grown. We've got more total retail happening. At the same time, we are growing with existing customers, and that scale that we have is certainly fueling that, in addition to having more new customers. When you look at the demographics, you see certainly a growth with millennials, and we define that as people 25 to 42 right now. You look at the growth with our Hispanic customers certainly growing quite a bit, and female customers. These are off very big bases, and it's great that you can actually see customer growth, but the mix is also evolving as well.
When you look at people who look like our current people, understanding who our current customers are, we know a lot of them are this is the type of activities that they do. We have hunters. We have ag customers. We've looked at, have we seen growth within those segments over the past five years? We've seen significant growth. The great part here is we know we've got a lot of hunters, for example, a lot of farmers within our base of customers. When you look at our penetration of hunters, the category penetration, it's still very low. There is a ton of opportunity to grow within these segments, and we intend to fuel that growth. One of the questions I get a lot is, well, is this just pandemic tailwinds? Everyone's doing well. That's great.
This is taking a look at brand awareness amongst category intenders, those who intend to buy the category, and looking at Polaris across a variety of different demographics and then competitor A and competitor B. You can see this is not just a pandemic tailwind. This is because of the investments we've made and the intentional effort we've made to go after these segments, and that's why you're seeing greater brand awareness amongst category intenders for Polaris. This is not happenstance. This is caused by efforts we've made, and we intend to continue to fuel that. When you think about customer growth, we have four key strategies, and I'm gonna walk through each one of them. The important thing to know here is our customer focus is what's gotten us here, and that's what's telling us where we need to play, how we need to go after this.
Most importantly, we're not starting today. You're gonna see in each of these examples how this was started before the pandemic, and we've been committed to it. You know, when supply chain gets tight and budgets get tight, the commitment to these are not wavering. That's a really important piece to ensure that we're gonna have the growth as supply chain comes in and more product is available for customers, that we've been fueling that demand and driving interest from people all the way through the funnel, including people trying to even become aware and interested in our category, so they might be interested in buying in 12, 15, 24 months. Let's start with understanding our customers. It all starts with understanding our customers.
What I will tell you is having a commitment to consumer insights, not things we think would be cool because we like to ride, so this is what we think would be good. Actually talking to customers, and that means talking to core customers that we have had and new customers, these growth customers. The way this comes to life is all companies do market research, and Polaris historically has done market research. There's a difference in doing research to validate what you wanna do, and so you have a great data point on a slide, and doing research to truly understand what those needs are behind it, so you can deliver products that people maybe haven't even asked for or thought about. You can deliver, meet those needs, and even delight them.
Even just using the Kinetic as an example, we didn't go out there and say, "What do you want in electric? Because we're gonna make electric, so what should we do in electric?" We talked to a variety of customers to understand how do they use the product, and where might electric actually help enable a better product experience for each one of them, and what's different. In some cases, we said, "We really gotta hone in here because this could be a huge opportunity. Let's lean in." Others, we said the technology is not ready, so we're not gonna lean into that as much right now. We're gonna keep working on it until we can actually deliver on what their needs are. We've been really working at that for several years and it's changing in the culture.
The second bucket is our marketing analytics capabilities. This is, to me, one of the most exciting things when you think about reaching customers. First, you have to understand who your current customers are. Second of all, the data and analytics being used to understand those customers do look-alike modeling, trying to understand how you can best reach the right person with the right message at the right time. Then when you do something with marketing automation, you actually can read the behavior and adjust and do it again. The old world was, here we are as a brand. Here's what we're gonna tell you about our product. We hope you like it, and we watch a lot of people fall out of the funnel and not buy.
Now we look at segments of people, what they need, how we reach them, and we are agile and adjust and continue to create personalized experiences to become the most effective and most efficient we can at reaching and bringing people through the funnel. Finally, going back several years, we made a commitment to growing with diverse customers. As a category leader, this is not only our opportunity, it's our responsibility to help grow this market, and we have been committed to it, and we've had some great results, but this is just the beginning. I thought it would be helpful as I can sit here and talk at you, telling you how important it is to have customer insights. It's more important to say, "Well, give me an example. How did that actually work?" I have a few here, and Mike's got several others.
In some cases, customers will tell you, "Here's what I want." Slingshot's a great example. We knew more people were interested in Slingshot. Many of them said, "I can't drive a stick shift. So when you make it automatic, I'd be interested." And that's been a great example where they could tell us exactly what they wanted. That's great, and we'll take those. In many cases, though, customers can't articulate what would be great. Nobody said, "I would like something like RIDE COMMAND, some kind of infotainment that tells me where all my friends are." If you've ever rode or watched a group of riders, you know that if you're riding in a group, in order to not lose your friends and get lost, you need to ride pretty much on top of each other. That means an experience of eating dust.
It means you may wanna go faster than the person in front of you, and you're kind of stuck having to stay as close as you can, not eating dust, not riding at your pace. With RIDE COMMAND Group Ride, essentially on your screen, you can see where all your buddies are so that you can space out, ride the way you wanna ride, not eat dust, have a much better riding experience and actually say, "Okay, I know where my friend is. We'll hook up. They actually took a left at that spot instead of going to the right, so we don't lose each other." Delivering on customer needs that they didn't articulate 'cause we really understood the riders. Youth safety. You talk to any parent, any grandparent, you know youth safety is important, but really getting into what is it that they're concerned about.
That's what drove our Helmet Aware technology. That's what drove geofencing. That's what drove speed limiting. To make sure that, you know, as a parent, the idea of having an empowered kid who can go out there on their own and do their own thing makes you feel great as a parent. But having the safety in mind to know that I can let them do that and I can still feel confident is a great thing. The last one I'm gonna talk about is the Bennington Bowrider. For any of you who've driven a boat, it's really fun to have friends out there.
When you're driving and you're the captain, and you've got a bunch of passengers in front of you, it's not ideal in terms of seeing where you're going and making sure you're able to interact, but also doing what you gotta do and drive this boat. In this case, the seating area was actually dropped. So the person driving this boat has a great visibility that they historically have not had. In addition, think about the riding experience for these passengers that are now lower to the water and really having a completely differentiated riding experience. That really starts with really deeply understanding our customers. Mike mentioned Polaris Adventures and Polaris Adventures Select. From a customer growth perspective, I think this is one of the most incredible points of differentiation for Polaris.
It's not enough that we tell people you should get out and ride, you might like this, show you inspiring images. We're actually gonna help you do it. The fact that anyone can be in one of many places and go rent one for a couple of hours and go experience it with their friends and family, you don't need to have a ton of experience. They help you get into it. They go take you through a safety briefing. They give you all the right equipment. You get to go experience places in a ton of different ways. That is incredible, and we know some of those people have bought vehicles. There are others that just as a vacation, they like to do it in different places, and they put it in their Instagram feed and other people say, "What? Where are you?
What are you doing?" It's not even just the riders, it's their friends and family that they're bringing along and introducing them to powersports. I think Adventures Select is an incredible offering as well. We know there are those that like to go once a year. There are those that wanna go more often, but because of the barriers of entry to the category, because of their lifestyle, because of a lot of different reasons, a membership experience might be the right thing for them. They show up, they go, they get to try a variety of vehicles. Maybe today I wanna ride a Slingshot on road, and next week I've got family coming in town, and I wanna get a couple of RZRs and ride out. That'll be great. Or I'm traveling, and I wanna try it in another city.
This is really opening up an accessibility that we've never had before in this category. You just look at that access. The number of people that are within a reasonable driving distance to have one of these experiences is big and growing. One of the most important things to me is let's look at the demographic makeup of the people who are experiencing significantly more diverse than where our base has historically been. This is a feeder pool of people to be introduced, to join the category, to participate, and we know one thing we've always known about this category is. People bring along their friends and family. That's the number one way you get involved. That's pretty exciting. When we think about accessibility, adventures is an awesome way. You even think about how do we develop this market?
We're really thinking ahead about how do you truly develop a market with people who did not grow up with this? May not even have an idea of why they want it. Here's an example of a partnership. EA Sports is a massive gaming manufacturer. Many of you may know Madden Football. Battlefield is actually one of their games that's bigger than Madden Football. That's a big deal. They came out with a new game this year, and our Polaris Sportsman ATV is integrated into the game. When you play the game, you can choose what vehicle you wanna ride to play, and Sportsman is the number one selected vehicle. People actually ride the vehicle to play the game. It is massive.
We have found out just the hundreds of millions of people that have experienced our brand riding virtually that just had never had any experience. Now, does that mean they're gonna play a video game today and go buy one tomorrow? No. They're aware of it. They actually have familiarity with it. Might they go try a Polaris adventure sometime? Possibly. Part of our work is to continue to cultivate that and mine that. I'm just gonna share with you a fun video to bring to life when we reached out to new people. You'll see it fits in line with who Polaris is, but when you reach a different audience, you gotta reach to them, you know, and resonate with them. I'm gonna share that with you.
The ride. It's beyond the one you know. Riders, think outside. Dare to look around. Hear the roar of the throttle. See the rise of the hill. A new community awaits on the Battlefield and on the trail. You'll forge your own path. Create your own adventures. Discover places you've only imagined. Challenge yourself in ways you never thought possible. Leave your mark on the world. Let the world leave its marks on you. Outside or online. The ride is one. The ride is now. Polaris. Think Outside.
That's fun. But let's talk about it. It's great to have things where we have opportunities, but we also have to make sure that we're reaching people. Having an authentic commitment to these audiences is very important. People are looking for that today, and we know that. The first thing is inclusion is very important and focused learning efforts. It's not enough to reach people. You actually have to understand these customers. As we're doing research to make sure that we are including more of our diverse customers in our learning and doing dedicated learning with them as well. This is just an example of the types of things that have come out.
Now, as you read through these different examples that have come out from our learning, I don't think anyone in here would look at the women's research and say, "Well, men don't care a lot about other riders with them." Of course, that's not the case. It really does come down to prioritization and what things bubble up as the most important for each customer. When we're gonna talk about products, you're gonna highlight the things that matter most to them. Whereas when we've talked to Hispanic customers, we know that style plays a large role. When we talk to our Hispanic or our African American customers where we know style is very important, perhaps storage isn't gonna be the first thing we talk about, where our general market customer, that may be more important. We also need to build connection.
If you go back to 2016, we've been building relationships with Black Girls Ride, Women Riders Now. We last year launched an Empowersports Women's Riding Council, and it's important because this is about us learning and having the voices of these customers have direct access to people developing products, people who are reaching out to new audiences, and us learning so that we can authentically reflect back and be the brand that resonates with them. Finally, inclusive and empowered. I'm very proud. I'm hoping that you've seen it as you've seen the videos and the photos today. Our brands have embraced this, and you look across the assets they create, the advertising they create. It is inclusive, and it is very different than the powersports of the past, and we are leading in this space. It's not enough to be inclusive.
It's also important to make sure that we are doing dedicated outreach. You can't expect that because we are inclusive, that the new people are seeing us. They've never been to a dealership. They are not at our dealerships yet. We need to go where they are. That means we need to lead and share a voice in the category, and that is something we've been doing for several years, and I think you've seen it in the market share results. We need to be out there leading the category and bringing in new people. It's also making sure that we're supporting our dealers and their readiness, and I'll talk a little bit about that.
As new people come in that don't know all the specs and they don't know why they want might want more travel and clearance, they have to talk to them a little bit differently and make sure that they're understanding where that rider's at in terms of experience and knowledge and figuring out their needs and making sure we deliver for them. Reaching the right people. I said I love the data and analytics. Yes, I'm a bit of a nerd, but what it does is it really fuels great business because we don't have to buy TV on ESPN now and worry about how much waste we're gonna have. We can actually say, who are the people, who are the segments of people that we wanna reach? We can reach them all separately. We can reach them with the right message for them.
At the end of the day, we have to think about, on the right-hand side of the slide, how we're gonna talk to them. If I'm talking to someone who is a 100-acre farmer, it's very different than if I'm talking to a 2-acre property owner. That property owner might care about, you can do this task with 12 wheelbarrows, or you can use an electric dump box and a RANGER. That's very different than how you talk to a farmer. You think about Turf Mode, property owners, homeowners care about not tearing up their grass. It's very different than if I'm talking to a different segment of customers. Understanding how to talk to them in addition to being able to reach them individually is really what's gonna fuel this. When you think about that focus, it's really about understanding our customers again.
We did a purchase journey and looked at what happens when people go to shop for products, what happens when they become owners, and the pain points. What we learned was, when you go back and look back to 2016 and before, historically, 2/3 to now almost three-quarters of our customers are new. Let's think about how their needs are different, so doing research with new customers to understand the differences. Here are just some really, I think, interesting examples that may not be rocket science, but it's different than how we approached it in the past. New customers, they don't have the friends and family who have all this experience. They're more likely to listen to a manufacturer because it's credible.
They also will do research online, but at the end of the day, they are terrified of making a very expensive mistake. How do they? I mean, you know how many vehicles are in this category and how many accessory options are there. It can be really overwhelming and paralyzing to figure out what is the right one for me. How do we help make that easier for them? Honestly, a lot of times what happens is, if they can't figure it out and it's too hard, they don't even get to the dealer where the dealer can help them. They opt out. That's our opportunity. We don't wanna lose people in the funnel. We wanna bring them in. Great. We bring them in, then what happens?
We saw, you know, as we did this research, a lot of people who came in new to the category. There are things that people who've been in the category for 20 years know, they didn't know. How do I load a trailer? Where can I ride? What do I need to be wearing? We talked. Mike talked about safety. They don't do unsafe things because they wanna be unsafe. They don't know better. We have been doing a lot of work to try to understand and try to make that a better experience for them. If you think about it, Mike talked about we did innovation for innovation's sake. We had great products, but it was very much product-driven. What is the next Sportsman that we're gonna make?
Versus thinking about what do the customers need and how can Sportsman deliver on that in the best possible way? How do the accessories deliver in the best possible way? We've always been retail-focused, right? That's very important to us, but instead of saying, "We gotta move units," how many new customers do we need to bring in? What's our plan to get those new customers? What is our plan to grow our repurchase and get customers back in? Moving from a, "Here's how you buy our product. We hope you all can navigate the website and that your dealer is helpful to you," to, "How do we actually help create a personalized shopping process and ownership process to make that better for you?" Historically, once you bought, the dealer was your relationship, and that's not gonna change.
We want your dealer to be your relationship, but it shouldn't be your only relationship. It really needs to be how do we continue to engage you and help make it a great experience? When you buy, we help build your knowledge, get you riding, and that we know is gonna help drive business in the future. Here are just some examples of some of the things we're doing. Website digital transformation is very important. You've seen some things we've done, and there's more coming. When you think about it, you can go to the site, and you can do something called Help Me Choose. Answer some questions. We help narrow which vehicle might be the right vehicle for you to help make it less overwhelming. In some cases, that's not enough.
We know some people don't get all the way to the dealer, and so we gotta help them. We have something called the Polaris Product Pros. You can call and talk to an actual Polaris expert, talk to them about where you plan to ride, how you plan to use it, how much experience you have. They'll talk to you about which product you should be looking at and what types of accessories might be good for you. Also thinking about, in this case, when people are waiting for inventory, giving them visibility to where their unit is so they can see it, giving them the ability to pre-order because this way you can get in line and make sure that you're gonna get one of the units. I think in-store experience is really interesting.
The image on the bottom left is a heat map of a dealership. Historically, when inventory was plentiful, dealers would pack those dealerships because they thought people wanna be able to see all the options. The problem is the red dots there are people. They literally can't get into vehicles because they're packed so close together, so they end up window shopping. In this category, you do your research online. You go to a dealership to actually experience the vehicle. If you can't get in and you can't experience the vehicle and you're window shopping, it's not fulfilling that need. We're working on that. Then finally, dealer readiness. New customer growth training. We've implemented that. Polaris service app to help get diagnostics and the Digital Wrench tool to help you diagnose your vehicle, get help from Polaris.
We know that dealerships are having trouble getting employees like every other business in the country, in the world. We know that anything we can do to make it easier for them to get the answers they need to get back to customers is good for the customer, it's good for the dealer, it's good for Polaris. Finally, when you think about it, we get all these new customers, they buy. We could just say, "We're good. Hopefully, it'll all go great for them." That is not our strategy. We need to play a bigger role in that. We need to actually help acclimate them to the category, make it a great experience, because ultimately, this is what's gonna deliver for the future. We have a great YouTube series called Trail Talk. It starts with, I just bought a side-by-side, I just bought an ATV.
Now what? Where can I ride? How do I find that? How do I use RIDE COMMAND? How do I load a trailer? All kinds of fantastic content to help make it easier for them. We've got My Garage online. You can have your vehicle there. You can get a ton of information on your vehicle, self-help. You can store things in there, so when you need it, you know where to find it. Our Website Help Center, the growth here has been phenomenal. When you look at the number of people using this tool in 2021, massive, because they want the information. We're making it easily accessible and available when they want it, not just when we're open for customer service. We actually implemented Spanish language in 2021 as well. Finally, one-to-one with owners. Yes, the dealer relationship with that customer is very important.
When you buy, making sure that we're helping you understand what are all the things that you need to know. How are you gonna ride safe? Where can you ride so that you don't ride somewhere you're not supposed to ride? That's very important. How do we help you make this a great experience and build that knowledge base? They're thirsty for knowledge. Once they are knowledgeable, we know that there's a ton more we can do to encourage them to ride, give them new ideas of where they can ride. What ends up happening is it fuels their commitment to the category. It brings them back to repurchase, but it also brings along their friends and family. That's the virtuous cycle that we're creating and with this dedication to customer growth.
With that, I'm gonna turn it back to Mike to talk about rider-driven innovation.
Thanks, Pam. You know, hopefully, what you've seen is huge opportunity for growth in terms of the markets that we have and the work that Pam and the rest of the organization have been doing in terms of really how to focus on the customer and how to make it easier for the customer. How do we attract more people? That gives us a really compelling growth opportunity. The next element is, how are we gonna innovate? I talked about rider-driven innovation. What I'm gonna tell you is that, you know, this is driven by customer insights, and it's about how do we take our established capabilities plus emerging capabilities. What we have on the chart is we're talking about emerging capabilities around connected and electrification. This isn't a static chart.
If you would've looked at this chart five years ago, infotainment would've been over on the right-hand side because it was emerging. It wasn't something that was core to what we do. The other thing I would tell you is just because something is on the left doesn't mean we feel like we've got it mastered. We are constantly looking for better ways to do it, and there's innovation within those areas. You know, we introduced DYNAMIX several years ago in terms of having more electronically controlled suspensions. That's a prime example of how we innovate within that specific area. But it's really important to keep our eye open to emerging capabilities. What I wanna do is spend a little bit of time talking about connected vehicle and electrification because it's important for you to understand.
before I do that, I thought it was important to go back and show you how this framework has really helped us evolve as a company. Here you can see two things, and there's a couple points I wanna make here. First is there are areas where we created the category, snowmobiles, for example, or the deck boat. This company has largely grown not from creating new categories. You know, we used to get asked all the time, "Hey, what's the next new thing coming out?" It's more about how do we define that category? How do we set new standards? When you think about the customer insights we get, the way we are active in the market, riding the vehicles as employees, that provides us with an incredible foundation.
You can see we weren't the first producers of ATVs, but we are number one in market share. We weren't the first with side-by-sides, but we are number one in market share. When people think about rec side-by-sides, they think RZR. That's because we listened to what customers were saying. We used our core capabilities. We looked at those emerging trends, and we adapted. This is evidence that we've been doing this for a very long time. It's not something new that we're trying to put out there. It's really how we've thought as a company. What I would tell you is we're refining it. We're thinking more specifically about each of those categories, and we're using those customer insights to help guide us in terms of where we want to go next.
Now, how we do this is through our research and development team. We have 1,800 people. This is one of our biggest and best assets. We're in eight different locations. We are global. We've got the ability to essentially kind of run around the clock, and we've got some of the best core capabilities and processes. Our product development process is yet another example of how we learn, we iterate, and we improve. I've watched us go through this in the seven years I've been with the company, and it's phenomenal in terms of how we listen, we see what's happening in the marketplace, and we adapt. We've got over 1,100 patents, so it shows you the strength of that. We invest a lot of money here, almost 3.5%-4% of our revenue. Big commitment here.
Great way for us to leverage and make sure that we're getting the innovation and the development, and we're continuing to expand that. Just recently, we added 5,000 acres down in Texas. We purchased a proving ground. It's important. You know, we do a lot of testing in Wyoming. We do a lot of testing in Arizona. Texas is our number one market. And having the ability to have the acreage to go do the testing, but also to develop even more test atmosphere and the freedom to be able to do that is incredible. Again, another sign of us investing in the core of the business to make sure we can innovate and make sure we've got the capability to grow. Here are some examples of the innovation here in the more recent past.
You know, the Wide Beam Pontoon. Pam talked about the Bowrider. Again, this gets back to listening to what consumers are looking for. You know, we heard from consumers that they love the Pontoon, but boy, they'd like it to be a little bit wider 'cause they got a lot of people on there. Jake and the team listened, responded, and created the Wide Beam Pontoon category. Indian Motorcycle. You know, we have the large display, the RIDE COMMAND unit on our larger bikes. The issue is when you get onto a Bobber or a Scout, it becomes a more challenging environment to put a gauge. The team listened to what consumers were looking for. They still wanted a lot of that same information, but we adapted.
We put a round gauge in that gets accolades from everyone, in terms of being best in the industry. Yet another example. Parts shopping reinvented doesn't sound all that glitzy, but if you own a vehicle and you're trying to repair it, in the past, if you were lucky enough to find it, the next confusing point was, what are all the other things I need to be able to do it? If I have to replace an A-arm, and I order the A-arm, but I realize there's 12 other pieces that I've gotta have to complete that fix, that can be pretty frustrating. We knew that was a pain point because we were listening to customers. We dedicated a team, we went out, and we fixed that.
Now you can get on, you can very easily find the part. It tells you all the things you need, depending on the extent of the replacement you wanna do. It's not glitzy innovation, but boy, I'll tell you what, it removed a pain point, and that opens up the funnel for more people to buy parts from us. RIDE COMMAND. RIDE COMMAND itself was incredibly innovative, but we didn't stop there. We continued listening. One of the things we heard from customers is, you know, boy, plowing can be a pain. You gotta remember to raise and lower the winch. Sounds simple, but when you're dealing with snow and you're moving around your driveway or whatever area you're plowing, you can forget, and that can be a bad thing to forget.
We programmed RIDE COMMAND to be able to handle and have those features, so it knew to raise and lower the plow based on the gear you were putting the vehicle in. These aren't earth-shattering things, but it's just things that we continue to do to make the riding experience, the use of our vehicles that much better. Just some examples on top of what Pam showed you of how we continue to innovate. Doesn't have to always be a new product. It can be about how do you redefine that product category. Let me cover a couple of new areas, and really this gets back to the growth opportunity. When you look at the core, the addressable and those adjacent areas, that starts to open your lens up and you gotta start thinking differently.
Then you look at what are some of the emerging industry opportunities, and for us, it really comes down to connected and electrification. It gives us an opportunity to get a competitive advantage. You know, we've got a very large business, we can leverage that, and we can continue to provide more use cases for our vehicles and open up the aperture to attract more and more consumers in. I'm gonna spend a little bit of time going through this. I think what's important is for you to know how we think about these particular emerging technologies. We don't think about them from the standpoint of, "Hey, can we do it? Let's go demonstrate we can." We start with the customer. What is the problem we're trying to solve? What kind of improvement are we gonna give the customer? Pam talked about this.
She talked about it with the XP Kinetic. We didn't go out and just say, "Hey, we gotta make an electric vehicle. Let's just make it." We started with, "Well, what are we trying to solve for the customer?" That, you know, those customer insights become incredibly important, and how you interact with the customer to get them is incredibly important. We look at technology as an enabler, which is important because just because we can doesn't mean we should. We look at it as purely an enabler to solve a problem for the customer. This point's incredibly important. You're gonna see a bunch of electric vehicles today when you go out to the ride site, prototypes that we've got, test vehicles that we have.
We're gonna test broadly, but it doesn't mean we're gonna commercialize everything because we're gonna let the customer lead us to where we need to go. We test broadly so we can demonstrate the capability to ourselves. We learn a lot as we go through that process. When you pair that up with the customer insights, it provides a compelling opportunity for us to create vehicles, and that's what guided us to the XP Kinetic. Then lastly, it gets back to we're gonna leverage the established capabilities and we're gonna partner where it makes sense. The extent of that partnership can be as great as it is with Zero, where they're actually providing the powertrain, or it can be smaller, where we're partnering with electronics companies to help us with connected vehicle.
The key is we don't feel like we have to do it ourselves. We wanna be able to move fast. We wanna bring all the things that we're really good at to bear, and we wanna learn as we go. That the Zero relationship has been incredible. We've learned an enormous amount about electric powertrains so that we can move into the position of starting to source materials. We can start to get more competent internally. It allows us to move with speed and meet what those consumer needs are. We think that's a winning equation and puts us into that position to continue to be the leader in global powersports. Let me talk about connected first, and then that'll lead us into a discussion around electrification. We refer to connected vehicle as RIDE COMMAND+ .
Now, the benefit we have is we've got a fairly large install base of RIDE COMMAND out there, so we've been learning as we've gone. As we looked at connected, we looked at it really through two lenses. What does it mean for the customer, and what does it mean for us? Because that's important. We did a lot of work talking to automotive companies. You know, everybody's got a connected vehicle from an automotive standpoint, or the majority of them are. What we found was it wasn't just about providing the consumer with benefits. That was important, but it was largely driven by what could they get from it. You know, as we look at it from consumer standpoint, we know that there's things consumers want. I mean, I've got three RZRs sitting, you know, thousands of miles away.
It'd be nice to know, are they charged? What's the fuel level? Do I have any flat tires? Has somebody gotten into my garage and taken them? Those are just a few use cases. As we continue to put connected out there, we're gonna learn more and more and more, and we're gonna be able to adapt. As a company, it'd be great for us to learn more about how people are using the product real-time. Think about the improvements we could make in the design of the product. Think about what we'll learn relative to warranty, how to harden certain components. We see a lot of that after the fact, but it goes through our service network, and we may or may not really find out about it. We may watch warranty rates at a high level.
This will provide us a lot more real-time data that we'll be able to synthesize and understand. It's a pretty compelling opportunity. Right now, we have a small number of connected vehicles. The plan is by 2026 that the majority of our models will have the capability to be connected. Now, not everything's gonna be connected. We're not gonna run out and put connectivity on a value ATV. There's not a lot of sophistication on it. The consumer's not willing to pay for it. They don't need it. So we're not gonna do that, but we are gonna focus on the areas. You think about somebody who buys a NorthStar or they buy a Pro R. There's a lot of tech on the vehicle. You know, we've got these sophisticated suspension systems. We've got Ride Command, you know, over-the-air updates.
There's all sorts of things that they're gonna benefit from, not to mention protecting the investment they have in that very expensive vehicle. We think this is a great opportunity. It's not easy to do. On the left-hand side is all the things that are required. Now, the good thing is we made the investment in RIDE COMMAND, so we have the head unit, and we've got the adoption. We have over 250,000 RIDE COMMAND units out there. It's now about 30% of the product we're selling and increasing every year. We have over 1 million subscribers to our RIDE COMMAND app, which you can load on your iPhone or Android device. We have 500,000 active users every month. We have 1 million miles worth of trail data. There's a lot for us to build off of.
It's not just that. You've gotta have that connectivity solution, and I will tell you, this has been incredibly challenging. You would think it would be easy. Automotive has it, so you could just go grab a module and plug it into a RANGER or RZR. The way our vehicles are used is nowhere near like a car. Different heat, different cold dynamics, water, dust intrusion, vibration, you name it. We've learned a lot, and we have a solution. The investment we made in testing and retesting and understanding has paid off. Then you have a lot of other elements, which we've already started to build the capability of, which is you gotta be able to do the analytics. You gotta get the data in, and then you gotta be able to learn from that and adjust the use cases.
Our flywheel is moving. It's not moving as fast as it will, but we've got this underway, and we're building the underlying capabilities. The last thing I'd leave you with is we have to have connected if we're going down the electrification path. I'll talk why we're gonna do electrification here in a second. If you think about an electrified vehicle, there's over-the-air updates. There's an incredible amount of electronics involved. You need to understand the battery charge on the vehicle. You've gotta have connectivity. The RANGER XP Kinetic that we're launching here shortly or delivering here shortly into the market is a connected vehicle. You've gotta have this to be able to get into that electrification space. Let's talk electrification. Why would we electrify in powersports? Just because automotive is?
No, I mean, there are really some compelling use cases. You know, the torque, the power of the vehicle are incredibly important. Yeah, the vehicle can go, you know, 0 to 40 miles an hour in under four seconds. That sounds really cool, but that really just translates into being able to pull and haul some heavy stuff. You know, they're pulling horse trailers. They're dragging tree stumps out on their ranches. There's all kinds of applications around that. Control is incredibly important. I've been on several of our electric vehicles. The precision, if you've driven an electric car, you know this. The precision around being able to accelerate and slow down is nowhere near like what you get in a regular car or vehicle. It is precise, and it allows you to start to do more things.
Think about Turf Mode, all these other elements that allow for a better riding experience for those who are gonna need that precision. A lot of these guys are working in environments where they're backing up and trying to hook up a trailer. Being able to have that level of precision is incredibly important. Lower cost of ownership. You don't have as many driveline components to handle. Your powertrain is much simpler. It puts you in a different spot. You're not doing oil changes. All these different things really are important. Quiet operation, this was one of the most compelling aspects. Making sure that we had a vehicle that they could drive around a ranch. Hunt application was really big.
Being able to take the vehicle and not have this super loud, noisy vehicle that might either spook a horse in a ranch or spook a target animal out in the field from a hunt perspective were really compelling. When I talk about our XP Kinetic, they actually were even bigger than we thought. Obviously, zero emissions. That starts to even open the aperture up to new consumers, people who may not have bought our product because it has a nice engine. It starts to provide a opportunity for new folks to come into the second segment, and I'll talk about that here in a second. It sounds great. The answer is, well, why don't we just electrify everything? There are challenges, and we have to be pragmatic.
You know, just because we can doesn't mean we should. We've gotta step back and really look at these. You know, range and charging infrastructure are huge. You know, the automotive charging network is being built out incredibly well. The powersports charging network is pretty much nonexistent. And so you've gotta have the vehicle used in an area where people are gonna be comfortable. They're not gonna have range anxiety. As we looked at the XP Kinetic, that was one of the biggest things, is we know that people who are working on a ranch or a farm or going hunting, they've got a fairly limited range that they're likely to use that vehicle. If they're gonna be at a range that's greater than 80 miles, they probably aren't gonna buy it.
If they've got a smaller ranch or they're going out for a short distance to hunt, it meets that need, so they're not gonna have that anxiety. Battery technology. To get the density and the time that you need, you gotta have a lot of batteries. When you start thinking about an off-road vehicle and the trade-off is taking an engine out of a RZR, but adding a ton of batteries to still only have 20 or 30 minutes of runtime, that's pretty tough. Then when you add to it, there isn't a charging network, it makes it a tough environment. Do-it-yourself modifications. Cars don't go through this near as much as our vehicles.
I mean, if you go out to Glamis or you go riding anywhere down in Arizona or California, you're gonna see the majority of the vehicles are completely modified. How do you think through modifications when you have an electric powertrain? Then there are emotions just tied to the category. It may sound weird, the smells, the sound, but it is strong. As we listen to our customers, that is a connection, something that they just love. You think about someone firing up a motorcycle or a sports car, there's a connection to that. That's gotta become a reality. First of all, internal combustion engine's still gonna play a prominent role, so we're not sitting here saying it's gonna shift overnight, but we're also not ignoring electrification.
There's a segment where it's gonna play, and we've gotta continue to keep our eye on it and we've gotta evolve, and that's really what we'll do. Now you're gonna see it today. I'm gonna talk here in a minute about the electric vehicles we've got on display. We're gonna continue to test. We're gonna find those solutions, and then as things like battery technology improve, charging infrastructure changes, we're gonna be poised to really react well to that. I talked about the XP Kinetic. You're gonna have the opportunity to ride that for those who are gonna be here in person this afternoon. It is a phenomenal vehicle. It is a riding experience like you've never had. It's quiet.
You can talk to the person next to you, and it is just a cool-looking vehicle both inside and out, so you'll really enjoy that. I talked about it on the earnings call. When we launched this vehicle, we sold out within two hours. One of the categories that we targeted, because we came out with a camo unit, was hunt. That sold out before anything else. They had customers behind every order. This wasn't just dealers coming in and grabbing them. They had to have a customer. We still have more customers who want them. We've got building customer lists.
We're not opening up orders on it right now because, you know, with all the supply chain issues, we don't wanna get customers in line and get them disappointed, so we're not gonna open up until we get comfortable with the environment we're dealing with. It really has proved out the thesis, and from my standpoint, it proves out taking this perspective that's gonna start with what are consumers looking for? What kind of problems are we trying to solve? What capabilities do we have? What's emerging in the marketplace? How do we wrap that around and start to create a vehicle? Recognizing we didn't have to do it all ourselves. You know, we brought in partners to help us. Now, will we still have partners five, 10 years from now? I don't know. We're continuing to think through that whole process.
It was really important for us to get to the right spot with an incredibly good vehicle, best Ranger we've ever produced, and you'll have the opportunity to be on it today. Last thing I wanna hit is you're gonna see these vehicles up front and live, and we're gonna have a couple of our electrification experts on site to be able to answer any questions you have. These are test vehicles, and it gives you a sign of our capabilities. Now, these are just off-road vehicles 'cause you're gonna be with off-road vehicles today. We've got other areas within the company, other segments that we are obviously looking at pretty aggressively. I wanna come back to the point I made earlier. We're gonna test broadly, and we're gonna be very purposeful around how we commercialize.
Just because it's on here doesn't mean we're gonna necessarily all of a sudden launch it out. We're trying to understand the categories. We're looking at it through the lens of our customer, which essentially brings me back to the closing chart, which is what I started with. We're gonna look at our capabilities, we're gonna look at the emerging capabilities, and we're gonna work really hard to understand what consumers are looking for, because just because we can does not mean we should. I can't say that enough. What we want you to understand is we take it serious, we're building those capabilities. It is a priority for us to make sure that between connected and electrification, we are putting ourselves in a position to build a competitive advantage and really leverage that into the future.
With that, we're gonna take a quick 15-minute break, I believe, and then we'll come back. Steve will talk to you about our off-road vehicle business. He's done incredible work building that business back to being the clear category leader. Then Bob will wrap it up with a discussion around the financials and the compelling investment opportunity, and then we'll have the team up here to do Q&A. With that, I'm gonna let you go to break, and we'll see you back in 15 minutes, Richard?
Yeah. Take 15.
All right. We'll kick us off for the second half here. I'm Steve Menneto. I run an off-road vehicle. It's kinda cool to see some of the old pictures. I was a dealer actually in 1994 when the Sportsman came out, and I joined the company with that first RANGER in 1997. It brings back some cool memories. We'll take you through a deeper dive into ORV. What I really wanna walk away with here today is making sure you understand how the business has changed over the last couple of years, where we're trying to take it, and what we understand we need to do to make it just an exceptional business. We're a strong, healthy global business. We're doing really well. We'll talk through some of the results here in 2021. We're more customer-centric than ever.
We are really focused on driving the voice of the customer through everything we do within ORV, and it's making a difference in how we think about the business, how we execute our products, how we execute our go-to-market plans, and so forth. We'll talk about the strategic pillars that we're really focused on and how to drive improvement in the ORV business, and we understand what we need to do around margins. We are not where we wanna be with margins. We have a maniacal focus on improving margins over the next five years, and we'll tell you how that is gonna happen. Lastly, we are positioned very well for growth. We are investing in growth, and we'll talk about that as we go through the pitch. We'll get at it.
In 2021, we had a really nice year, grew 16% around the globe. You know, with all the challenges in the supply chain, we still launched 30 different products. It was a really big year for us. PG&A has been growing phenomenally well. One of the things with the pandemic is we're seeing more owners attaching accessories to their vehicles than ever before. The dealers are focused on it with a little bit of constrained, you know, supply chain, of course. They're trying to make sure that they're getting their accessories onto the vehicles, customers want them. We support 2,600 global dealers around the world. We have five manufacturing locations. Kinda to the right, you see we are number one in market share in the utility rec and number two in snow businesses, right? Really great North American performance, been strong.
You know, when you look at our business, we are the global leader in off-road. In North America, our retail volume is equal to or a little bit better than the next three competitors. That's the size of off-road vehicles. You gotta make sure you understand that. That's huge in what we do and how we can move the market. When you look outside of North America, you look at the global landscape, we work with our international teams hand in glove, and we're doing a fantastic job in growing our sales as well as our market share. We have plans to be number one in every market we play in. Globally, it adds up that we're the number one player, but there's still opportunities all over the business. Really excited about where we can take off-road vehicles in the future.
Over the last two years since I've been leading off-road, we've made a change in the business of how we think about it, and it was really moving from a product-driven company or division to a customer-driven division. Here's how that works, okay? When I came to it, we really focused on Sportsman, RANGER, RZR, GENERAL. That's kinda how we thought about the business. It's a really core powersports business, about $11 billion. We're about half of it at $5.5 billion, right? We were thinking, how do you incrementally grow those businesses? What's the next innovation that takes us to the next level? That's just not a good way of thinking about it. It's a limited way of thinking about it. What we've done is broken the business in our division into five businesses: utility, rec, snow, commercial, and gov defense.
Those are the five businesses of off-road, okay? When we think about it, our teams now are focused on those customers, and the addressable market gets huge. As Pam talked about, we are hand in glove with Pam on how do we grow this business. I'll give you some stats on just how to think about in just one area. Let's take utility. Let's take farming as an example. There are over 570 million farms in the world. On average, they're about 7 acres and above. Drill down. In the U.S., there's 2 million registered farms. The average acreage, 440, okay? Go to Texas, the number one registered state with farms. There's 260,000 registered farms in Texas, okay? The opportunity is immense to be able to go in just that little area of utility with our products.
What you have to start thinking about is how do those customers think? What's their lifestyle? How they use our products? Driving those insights back in not only to your products, but also on how do you go to market, how do you engage them, all the things that Pam spoke about. How do we talk to our customers really starts to change inside the business. We've been doing this over the last two years. What it, you know, really gets down to in a tactical way is we have an ag program in Texas that invites farmers to buy our Ranger product, right? We wanna make that connection, so we have a lot of opportunity around the globe in just farming alone.
You get into recreation, snow, and everything else that we have in our off-road business, just phenomenal growth opportunities that we're gonna go after. We know we have to really focus on the priorities of the business and what is it gonna take to make a very good business an exceptional business. These are the five areas that we're focused on, is focusing on our customer experience, going after the channel improvements. We have to work with our dealers to make sure we're giving a great experience and our dealers are profitable. We have to make sure that they're the best dealers that we have representing our brands and our products. Rider-driven innovation, Mike talked about it, but it's this idea of moving from just making products to providing product solutions. Just a great opportunity with our innovation. Process excellence.
If one thing COVID has taught us is we have to be agile, we have to be able to move, we have to adjust our business to satisfy our customers' needs. We did that in spades. We understand margin expansion. We have to get back to the pre-2015 margins that we enjoyed, and we have a team focused on that and going after it. Those are the five priorities we're gonna talk through right now. First, customer experience. Pam talked a little bit about this. We're working hand in glove with her team as well on the digital shopping experience. Consumers want that digital and physical world to be integrated, seamless. They don't wanna see two different, you know, approach on how they shop, buy, ride, and own. We work together as teams to create personalized e-experiences.
How does our in-store dealer work with the consumer desires and wants and how they wanna buy and shop, so forth. Getting our dealers ready to be able to do that with our service support and how they make sure that our consumers are enjoying their vehicles and putting accessories on the vehicles. We talk about onboarding consumers as well. She showed you a little bit about that. Having the ability of all these new people coming to our category, how do they use the vehicles properly, safely, right? Get the most out of those products. We wanna make sure that we have every contact that really makes a connection with our customer and that it counts for them, okay?
How do we do that? We make sure that when we go to market, it's pretty simple about the customer experience. On the left side of the circle, it's about data analytics. It's about all the analysis that we do, where we gap to goal, where we gap to their expectations. On the right side, it's all the people side. It's really the social listening, proactive outreaches, surveys, Product Pros, as Pam talked about. What we focus on is planning, listening, correcting, and keep that cycle going, right? Just getting better every day. Every day we talk to our customers, and we get a lot of positive feedback, and we get a lot of negative feedback, right?
Because they want something that we haven't, you know, given them yet, or we let them down in some, you know, point of the purchase, the customer journey, and we have to make sure we're active fixing it. We are. We have teams that are designed to go after this, right? You can see the takeaway. The smallest things make the biggest difference, and we're really focused on that as a team, and we make sure that we have that customer thinking, that what that customer wants, really embedded in the team. It doesn't stop there. We also take that experience with our dealers, right? We have a two-step distribution process here that we rely on dealers to sell our products.
We make sure that we're working with our dealers to provide a better experience, helping them train their staff, understanding our accessories business, also getting down to how do they financially manage their business. We have a process called the five profit centers. New vehicle sales, used vehicle sales, PG&A, F&I, and service, right? Those are the five profit centers. We work to train them on them, take best practices, teach them how to be a better dealership, how to operate more efficiently and be able to be more profitable. We also create an incentive called the North Star Rewards Program. As dealers perform better, educate their staff, improve their business, there's incentives for them to earn where their dealer margins increase as they achieve one star, two star or three stars.
It's a rating system that we invest in our dealer base for, okay? About over a third of our dealers are at a three-star. They're making anywhere from three-five extra margin points every product sold because they're investing in their business. We're putting our money, investing in our channel to make it a better channel versus the competition. The next area that we talk about is product excellence and innovation. Mike took you through the emerging innovations, electrification, connected vehicles, and so forth. I don't really wanna lose sight of the fact of the real core innovation that drives off-road vehicles, okay? When you look at vehicles and you experience Pro R and Turbo R today, thinking about the suspensions, how it rides, you know, the enjoyment that you get, the experiences that you get, all the fun, and you can do it safely.
That's what's really cool, right? We look at cool products, bring it into some crazy terrains safely, and that's what we really focus on, high-quality, safe products. We look at our powertrain, drivelines. We introduced a new 2-liter engine, 225 horse on the Pro R, right? So you'll get to experience that today. Cab systems with our NorthStar. We have a team that just focus solely on in-cab rider experience. That's all they do every day. How do we make it better? Fit and finish, the textures of our vehicles, right? Our seats, steering, all that kinda ergonomics, just focused on making a better vehicle. A lot of that innovation, like Mike said earlier, not sexy, maybe not, you know, so compelling as EVs, but really turns the, you know, the market share needle for us and really satisfies the customers.
It doesn't stop there, though, right? We do the same thing in snow with the Patriot Boost engine. We brought RIDE COMMAND to snow, all the group riding, tracking, buddy tracking. Our accessory business with Lock & Ride Flex, just tremendous opportunities in snow and off-road vehicles on how we continue to add accessories to our vehicles as we go. Even in the commercial, you wouldn't even think, hey, you know, people use these vehicles to work. You know, what kind of innovation you have there? Just take Kevlar back seats for puncture resistance. How many people are jumping into out of vehicles, right, with tools on them, and they don't want their seats all torn up. Those small things, speed limitation for safety when people are using our vehicles on the job site. Those small innovations continue to drive our leadership position.
Now, like I said, it's transitioning from just making products to making product solutions. When you see people enjoying the NorthStar editions, it's that climate control, right? Be it in the heat, we have HVAC systems in the vehicles. Be it in the snow, they wanna be warm when they're out plowing and so forth. Paying attention to that, making a better vehicle that applies to their lifestyle or how they use our products. You go to RIDE COMMAND on ATVs, a lot of people use ATVs for work, and they have real-time messaging on them, right? They can track where their employees are working out on the ranch. When it's time to go have fun, you still have buddy tracking on those ATVs, so you can go out and have fun with them.
Always striving after a better product solution for our customers. You'll get to experience these two today. This is just category-redefining product, right? Our focus on power, strength, and control to really bring the thrill of riding safely to the marketplace. Just great products. You'll get to spin on those things today. We'll help you if you need help, strap you in there, make sure your helmets are on right. You'll get out there, enjoy great products that really is changing the RZR market, right? We're real excited about what these can do. You think about snowmobiles, right? We've been here 1954. Think about the first snowmobile Mike described onto these snowmobiles here. Think about the different terrains that they have to go through, elevations, right?
When you look at Matryx on this side, when you think about effortless control and the technology that people want when they go out riding to make sure it's a safe ride, a fun ride, but also taking advantage of all of our machines. You look in the mountains. Think about that elevation. Being out there snowmobiling, it's all about weight and power. Right? We have lightweight vehicles. Our mountain sleds weight to horsepower ratio is actually more, it's actually better than a NASCAR when you think about that, okay? That's the kind of technologies that are in our mountain sleds. Our teams have been doing a phenomenal job making sure that they're getting weight out, horsepower up, so the fun factor's there. When you think about our accessories business, sometimes, you know, we always go, oh, the flashy products.
When you go onto our website and you can configure your own vehicle, you have almost up to 4 million different configurations because of our accessory business, right? You can take our base vehicle and take all the accessories we offer, and you can configure it and customize it the way you want. That's an amazing opportunity to satisfy customers, add margin to our business, and just continue to have profitability in the dealerships. We really enjoy our accessory business. It just does wonders for everyone, the customer, the dealer, and for us. Supply chain. Yeah, we've been struggling this year. Even so, we were able to grow our business and grow market share in 2021, right? Inventories are at the lowest levels we've seen ever, right? In our dealer base as well as our factory.
We're still challenged by a lot of disruption. You guys read it every day in all the different categories that we have to go through. Inflationary pricing causing us a lot of challenges, not only in our products, but with logistics, supply chain, everything that we experience there. We're looking for some modest recovery. Tell you what, every day, right, we fix a few suppliers, and then we have a couple disruptions that come up, surprises that we have to deal with. We have teams all over this, working with suppliers around the globe to be able to keep us producing and satisfying customers. We'll talk about this. We have a lot of presolds that we have to work through, reservations and so forth. We're continuing to do that. Our teams are on it.
We are challenged by it every day, but we're working to make sure that we can try to see some improvement in some of the areas of our supply chain by the end of the year. Some of the bigger issues like semiconductors, right? You guys all know that will persist for a while, right? Into 2023. We're dealing with that. We're offering, you know, sometimes we're taking some chips out of the vehicles, getting vehicles out to market, maybe taking RIDE COMMAND off some, allowing the consumer to make a decision there and saying, "If you want the vehicle and wait, you can.
If you don't wanna wait, you want your vehicle now, we can ship it without RIDE COMMAND and then ship RIDE COMMAND later." We're working, we're agile, we're moving as fast as we can to satisfy customers and that are waiting on our products. What we did learn is you have to be agile, like I spoke about. We started with our base program, right? ORV RFM, fantastic industry-leading program in how we move product to market. Then from there, we saw this amazing demand creation, right? Just all this demand came pouring in, and we were like, "Okay, how are we gonna handle this? How are we gonna put a process in place to get the right product at the right time to the right marketplace, right, satisfying customers who want it?" That was Polaris presolds.
Quickly, we started to run into the supply chain disruption, so now you had people waiting. Now we introduce Polaris Reservation, trying to match wait times with lead times. That's what we're doing there, okay? Making sure, yeah, you can still order the vehicle, but we have to let you know it's probably gonna be three months, maybe it'll be four months before that particular vehicle you want is gonna arrive. We started to reserve slots, and we've been working at that. You can see in the upper right, we were, you know, approaching some pretty high presold levels in December. Teams were, you know, really focused. We were able to get some good shipments that month and get that presold number down. We're already seeing in January, February here, presolds are creeping back up by another 20%.
We actually had a meeting with our dealer council about two days ago. Demand is still hot. Demand has not cooled off whatsoever for side-by-sides, for ATVs, for off-road vehicles, snowmobiles, and so forth. It is still hot, and we are doing the best we can every day to meet that demand. It's a challenge. Mike said earlier, we've learned a lot through this process, and we wanna make sure that we take those learnings and really make our business better. Our target is not to bring back that inventory that we had prior to COVID, right? We're shooting 25%-35% less working inventory as we come out of, you know, once the supply chain starts to normalize. We're gonna rely on our reservation system more.
Less inventory to dealers, the ability for consumers to reserve product, and as supply chains normalize, we'll be able to spin the product faster. We really focus now on velocity of product versus days supply, right? Velocity is really what we pay attention to as a metric. We've learned a lot on how to do this. We're a better company for it, and we are functioning, and we have a lot more to learn. I imagine there's more curve balls coming our way. We're ready for them. We have teams on them. We'll make the best of them as we go forward. Let's talk about margin expansion. Margin expansion's been a little bit elusive. More pressure on it, of course, with the inflationary challenges that we've seen over the last couple years. Really it starts with design to value process.
How do we get the right design of our vehicles? How do we think about our vehicles to be more efficient in terms of asking for more inventory, how we build them, how we design them, design for manufacturing, design for service? All that goes into design to value. How do we make a better vehicle? You see modular design, okay? Think about platforming. Couple examples right now. We stood up a team here in Q4 of 2021. Their sole focus is on margin expansion around DTV and modular design. A couple examples of this right now. We have 10 different brake master cylinders that we use across our business for no reason other than we have 10. Our team has already, you know, been able to get it down to four as we go forward, right?
Just think about we're taking six SKUs right out of the business. We don't have to order those. It's easier on the line. We're more efficient in the, you know, manufacturing facilities. You don't have to stock that inventory. Margins go up, right? That's just one example. We have 16 different suspension interfaces across RANGER, RZR, and GENERAL that all use multiple parts, and that engineering team just commonized all those to one, right? When you think about the work in front of us. This doesn't show up, this margin expansion won't show up tomorrow, right?
Because you have to go through the redesign of the products, and you have to make sure that once you get those tested and validated, and then you get them into the products, you have to get it flowing through all the products to realize all the benefit, right? That's the process we're going through, taking every vehicle step by step. Things that customers don't care about, like what your suspension interfaces are or what your master cylinder is, right? We always paying attention to, again, the valuable things that they are willing to pay for and that they want in their vehicles. Those we have to make sure we do really well and right. How we make our vehicles don't have to be so elaborate and so difficult and and extraordinary here.
We can simplify the whole line across our business, and that's what we're focused on in the next three to five years, is going after all these opportunities that lie in our business. We have huge volumes. You make those types of changes, margins are gonna jump very fast. We have dedicated teams to go after it, and so we're excited about where we can take the business in terms of improving our margins. Our focus is to get back to margins like they were pre-2015. Capacity. When you look at investing in growth, probably not really a visible thing in off-road, but we've invested in over 1 million sq ft in the last two years during a pandemic, okay. This has added about 20%-30% more volume opportunity. Capacity is not our biggest challenge right now.
We have capacity to satisfy consumer volume. We need parts, right? We have teams, like I said, with the supply chain. We're chasing parts. Capacity, we're in good shape with capacity for today. As Mike said earlier, we're already in front of the board over the next few months talking about what's the next investment to drive capacity up in off-road. Our commitment to growth, what we're doing to invest in growth is already there, already in the works. We are already ahead of our competitors by a long shot in terms of capacity to be able to drive the market growth. We are the industry leader in the marketplace. We know we have to drive growth, and we're gonna continue to invest in driving that growth. Short, sweet, but really, really focused, right?
We have a strong, healthy business with huge opportunities for growth, and we're going after them hard. We'll make sure the voice of the customer continues to resonate through the business in all aspects of it. You saw our strategic priorities. We're going after those with vigor, and margin expansion is one of the things that I'm most dedicated to over the next three-five years, okay? When you look at off-road vehicles to leave with today, we are well positioned for future growth, and we're investing in it. Okay. I'm gonna turn it over to Bob. He'll take us through the financials.
Does me a lot of good to hear Steve talking about margin expansion that much. I feel really good. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Bob Mack. I was named CFO in 2021. I've been with Polaris for about six years. I was previously the head of corporate development and strategy, and I was also the president of the adjacent markets business and the boats business. I know the company pretty well, and I was excited to move into this role in 2021. Okay. Let's talk about a little bit about the past. Okay. Can you go to the next slide? All right, there we go. Just to ground everybody in where we are. In 2021, we had revenue of $8.2 billion.
We're forecasting 12%-15% growth on that in 2022, and that's gonna be a mix of both price and unit growth. From an adjusted net income standpoint, $573 million in 2021 and EPS of $9.13. We're looking at 11%-14% growth on that, so you know, range of $10.10-$10.40. You look at the history of the company, right? We've had really good growth. We've had good net income growth. It's a really good platform. You know, we put this guidance out in 2018, our strategic framework. We were targeting 5% sales growth and 15% net income growth. We achieved those. To me, that's really important because it's a foundation.
We've proven that if we say we're gonna do it, we're gonna go out and do it. I think that bodes well for what we wanna talk about today. Next slide. Moving forward, I'm gonna talk about the strategic framework Mike introduced, and he left the financials for me. If you can bring up the next slide. Okay. Mike talked about everything on the top. I'm gonna talk about on the bottom. I'll go into these in more detail. I think we're gonna live with this every time I change slides. Okay. From a sales growth standpoint, we're targeting a 5% CAGR. Obviously, you know, mid single digits CAGR.
You know, sales growth obviously is impacted by a lot of things, price, what happens in the market, retail, what happens in the economy, all of those things. The thing I'm more excited about is our adjusted EBITDA growth. Historically, this business, say 2014, 2015, from an EBITDA perspective, was in the 16%-18% range. Last few years, we've been around 12%. I'll talk more later about sort of how we got here. We're targeting to get back to those mid- to high-teens levels. I think that's really important because what we get by targeting those higher rates is great leverage on the growth. You know, I'm very focused as CFO on the profitability side of the improvement.
I'll let Steve and the rest of the team go drive the growth, and Pam, because we've got to get the profitability on that growth or it's kinda hollow growth. From an ROIC standpoint, we're already pretty high, 27%, better than the S&P, better than our peers. We think that'll stay in the mid 20s. That, you know, obviously, if we go do acquisitions, once they're at run rate, we'll be at the mid 20s. If they're small, it won't be a big deal. If we don't have any inorganic growth, obviously, this will raise above that level. Adjusted EPS growth, it'll be double digits. Obviously, we love that metric.
It's influenced by a lot of things, the profitability we're talking about in EBITDA, but also what we do from a capital allocation standpoint, what happens with share count and things like that. We'll get into all of these in more detail.
Just don't.
Okay. As I sat down to prepare this presentation, I thought about, well, why would somebody invest in Polaris? A couple of these things are kind of whited out here because Mike and Pam and Steve have already talked about growth, and they've talked about our winning track record of innovation. What are the other things I'm gonna talk about? We have a significant competitive moat. We are the largest player in powersports, and that's really important. We have a self-help story in terms of our EBITDA margins, and that'll help drive expanding EBITDA dollars. We have a really strong balance sheet, great cash flow, an attractive ROIC, and we have a new focus on capital allocation and capital deployment. Next slide. I'll talk about our competitive moat.
Let's be clear, we are twice the size of our nearest competitor. In the off-road space, we're 80% bigger than the number two player. In the on-road space, we are the number two player, but we're significantly larger than the number three, and we're growing fast. In marine, we're the number one player in both pontoons and deck boats. We're 70% bigger than the next largest player. That's huge. I mean, it's a massive scale difference, and it gives us a lot of benefits. We talk about innovation. You know, we talked about dynamic shocks. Great example. The size we have makes us the most attractive to suppliers. So with dynamics, we were able to launch that technology under an exclusive arrangement with a supplier three years before anybody else in the industry has it.
When suppliers have new technology they wanna bring to the market, they come to us first because we are the largest. That size also gives us the dollars to invest in innovation. It's just math, right? The more scale you have, the more dollars you have. Brand presence, everyone knows who Polaris is. Sourcing and scale. Manufacturing. Steve talked about the size of our manufacturing investments. Our supply chain efforts, we'll talk more about later, but we are important to suppliers and we're important to customers. This same scale gives us the chance to do things like Polaris Adventures and Polaris Adventures Select. You know, one of the great things about Adventures is we can meet the customers where they wanna be. They wanna be off-road, they wanna be on-road, they wanna be on the water. We have the product breadth to do all that.
That also helps us bring new customers into our business. Next slide. EBITDA growth, this is probably the part of the presentation many of you were waiting for. I'll go into these. I'm not gonna give you exact basis points or anything here, but you know, we're at 12% right now, and we think there's an opportunity to improve that by 4-6 points. Greg's taking a picture. Doing that will grow the dollars at 2x. I'll talk about each of the components. Price cost balance. There has been a massive amount of cost impact on the business the last two years. We talk about it in all of our calls, and it comes from a lot of different things. It's commodities are at some of the highest levels they've ever been.
We're expediting products by air over the top of stuff that's stuck at ports. It's freight rates. It's freight rates in two ways. It's base rates that you have in your contracts. Those are up, not so bad. Then, all manufacturers are being forced to buy on the spot market because they're limiting the amount you can actually ship on your contracts. The spot market rates are really high. Then there's labor. If you think about how that's gonna play out over the next few years, labor is not going away, right? People got raises. They're not all of a sudden gonna, that's not gonna change. The freight rates, the base freight rates, I think, will normalize at a level that's probably a little higher than they were before.
I don't know that a $3,000 container from Asia is gonna come back, but it's not gonna stay at 30%. The percentage on the spot market will start to come down as things normalize. The expedites are a massive cost. The number of ships stuck in the ports in California has gone up, not down. That's not getting a whole lot better. To meet demand, we are flying parts on top of all of those ships that are stuck in the ports. When you couple that with the fact that the freight rates are really high and the truck transportation rates are high, it's a really expensive proposition to keep the wheels of commerce moving right now. That will start to normalize. Do we know exactly when?
No, I think that, you know, we hope to start to see that at least start to level off and improve in the second half of the year. Commodities are a big impact for us. It's steel, it's aluminum, it's resins, are kind of the biggest, a little bit of petroleum. You know, steel, we've already started to see steel come back. That's a positive. It lags. You won't see it right away. You won't see it in Q1, Q2, partly 'cause we're lapping lower costs from 2021 in the first half of the year, and also because you're buying in advance, right? We've got inventory in stock that was bought at higher rates. We've also got locks on steel that, you know, come up every couple of months. You don't see the immediate impact, but you will see it.
We've raised price to cover all that, and we've talked to all of you about the fact that we've raised price enough to cover the costs. The timing isn't always perfect. But we're not getting any margin on the price increase because we'd have to raise another 30% to get our margin on the incremental cost. As those costs start to come down, we've gotta manage that balance, and that will help, for the parts that don't go away, we feel like we've raised price, we've been very rational about it. We feel like there's a good opportunity to hang on to that price. As Steve talked about, you know, dealer inventory is really low. This industry has always been kind of a shove product in the channel and promo it out.
This gives us a really good opportunity as an industry to reset and to change that dynamic. We believe we can manage dealer inventory really well as it comes back, manage it to our lower level. We're gonna change our models. We're gonna be better on delivery to deliver the vehicles consumers want at the time they want them. We think that will help balance that price promo environment. We see this as a big opportunity. The next piece is modular designs and Sunburst. Those really go together. Steve talked about modular designs. He's the expert. I'm not. You can ask him those questions later on, him and Ken. It fits really well with what we're doing with Sunburst. Sunburst is our supplier effort. That's been going really well.
We're in wave four, and so we started in 2018. It's been a big effort, but we're seeing the results now. We're consolidating suppliers. We're going with bigger suppliers, and we're going to contracts that give us real benefits, quality, delivery, and price indexing and price transparency. Those are really critical as we move forward. Steve talked about, you know, going to a modular design, going to four brake cylinders from 10. Well, when you make changes, you wanna make sure you're still getting the benefit from the Sunburst pricing that you negotiated. Those contracts all have really good transparency of price, and they're indexed to commodities. While we've seen the costs go up now, we won't have to go negotiate the costs out as commodities come down. They'll come down because they're contractually obligated to come down.
We feel like we have a much better handle on the supply base, and that we're really. This modular design is gonna help us even get more leverage out of the Sunburst process. We think that will be a big driver going forward. Portfolio optimization. Mike talked about GEM Taylor-Dunn done. Doesn't sound like a lot. I will tell you, tough deal to get done. GEM was really integrated with Polaris, been part of the company a long time. But it was part of what we wanted to do when we moved into these jobs. We spent a lot of time with our board, with the management team, with outside advisors, really looking at the portfolio, both where the current financials, what's the strategic fit, and what's the long-term market opportunity and financial opportunity. That one fell out fairly quickly.
It didn't fit strategically with a focus on powersports, and it wasn't making money. While it's a good business and we wish the new owners well, it wasn't gonna be something that we were gonna invest in. That's sort of how we look at the whole portfolio. We'll continue to focus on that as we move forward. Portfolio optimization also includes additions. You will see us continue to look at really good accretive acquisition opportunities that fit inside the spaces that we're interested in. I'll talk more about that as we get into capital allocation. Motorcycle and TAP profitability. We all know. Mike talked about it a little bit. When we bought Indian, we didn't buy a business, we bought a brand. So we had to make all those investments, and those have been great investments.
Steve before him, Mike Dougherty now within the team have done a great job building Indian, and that's a real kinda from the ground up business. A lot of investment. We're getting to the better end of the investment cycle now, and we're focused a lot on profit improvement. We have a path to profitability. We review it monthly. Mike actually has a person whose whole full-time job is tracking the path to profitability. It's a pretty serious thing, and it's something we also review with our board. We know where we're going with Indian, and they're on track. TAP is a bit of a different story, not from a focus standpoint, but from how we got here, right? We bought Transamerican in 2016. The market's changed a lot. There's been a lot of consolidation in wholesale.
Tariffs have had a big impact. A lot of the aftermarket stuff comes from China. Right now with the slowdown in OEM deliveries, that has an impact on an aftermarket business because a lot of people accessorize their new Jeeps and trucks, and those things aren't flowing the way they used to. A challenging environment, but the same thing. They have a very clear path to profitability or path to better profitability, and Craig and the team are focused on that every day. As those things start to improve, they're not massive contributors given the size of ORV, but there's incremental year-over-year improvements every year, and it starts to make a difference to total company profitability. Then I'll talk a little bit about tariffs. We don't know what's gonna happen with tariffs. I wish we did.
It's basically a $100 million impact today. We're not counting on any big relief from that. We don't know what the administration will do. But some of it is in our control. We have done a lot of focus on resourcing and other things we can do to mitigate tariffs. We'll continue to do that, and we expect to get some incremental benefit from that over the years. Next slide. EPS growth. EPS growth I won't spend a lot of time on because it's really an outcome of all of the other things, right? We're gonna leverage our sales growth. We've got the EBITDA margin rate expansion. We will focus on share count, and I'll talk about that in the capital allocation section.
We don't really anticipate any big tax rate changes structurally for us, unless the federal government decides to go structurally change the tax rates. From a business standpoint, there's nothing that's gonna change what Polaris is doing significantly on the tax side. Interest and FX will likely be headwinds over the next couple of years. Interest, certainly. FX, I don't know, the euro's all over the place today, so God knows. You know, we expect those to be headwinds, and that's why capital allocation is gonna be so important because one of the things we can do to offset those headwinds from an EPS standpoint is reduce share count. We'll talk about that. We have a strong balance sheet. If you look at the lower right side of this slide, we generate a lot of cash.
These are two-year numbers, but they've been getting better every year. They do bounce around a little bit. You know, in 2021 it was because of inventory growth. If we have new products, you know, you have to invest in inventory in advance. You look at it on a two-year basis, they're really nice cash flow numbers. You can see, you know, we did the TAP acquisition in 2016 and we did the Boats acquisition in 2018. You can see in our leverage ratios, we've been able to quickly pay that debt back because of our strong cash flow and get down to this kinda 1.5 level. As I look out over the next five years, you know, a debt to EBITDA ratio of 1.5 is about where I would like to be.
I think we'll be between 1% and 2%. It won't always be perfect, but that's where we wanna stay. Obviously, if we do a big acquisition, we have the ability to float up and a lot of dry powder to go do something if we find the right opportunity. From a return on invested capital standpoint, we're better than the S&P 500. We're better than our peers. I think we'll stay in that general range, just depending on what happens from an acquisition timing standpoint. Next slide. We have a new focus on capital deployment. When Mike and I got in these roles, we spent a lot of time talking about capital deployment.
I think if you think about what we've done in 2021 or what we did in 2021, I think that shows our commitment to this strategy. From a capital expenditure standpoint, in 2021, we spent about $300 million on CapEx, and that's organic investments to do things like it's tooling for new vehicles, it's capabilities in engineering, testing equipment, things like that. It's capacity expansion, but it's also new capability in manufacturing, paint systems, robots, welders, laser tables, all those kind of things which help grow our capacity and improve our margins. We spent $300 million in 2021. Our guidance for 2022 is $350 million. In the five years prior to that, we'd spent an average of about $220 million.
You can see we're really ramping up the investment in our organic part of our business. Second is the dividend. We've had a dividend-paying company increasing our dividend for 27 straight years. We're gonna continue that. The dividend is important, but the increases will be small, just like we did in 2022. Next is share repurchase. In 2021, we did about $460 million of gross share repurchase, about $300 million of net. Obviously a big year. Stock traded up really well in the front part of the year. We had a lot of option exercises, so it's a difficult thing to manage. We're targeting to take out 10% of the base shares. In 2021, that was 600,000 shares.
We have about 60 million outstanding, so you can do the math. We're targeting to take 10% of those base shares out over the next five years. We think that's the right thing to do. We have the cash flow to do it, and it gives us a nice lever to offset some of these other potential headwinds with interest and FX and things like that. Acquisitions. We will do acquisitions. We will continue to buy companies in markets where we think it's attractive. The segments we're focused on are marine aftermarket, powersports aftermarket, and then kinda technology-enabling acquisitions. Things like Trail Tech, which I'll talk about, things that bring new technology or new capability to the whole enterprise. Those are our core focus areas.
Obviously, ORV, huge focus area for the company, but those of you that are really familiar with the ORV space, there's not a lot of acquisition targets out there given our scale in the market. Next slide. I wanna talk a little bit about acquisition performance and maybe dispel some what I would consider to be myths, as the person who was involved in a lot of this, of M&A at Polaris. I'll start with probably the most challenging one, which is Transamerican. We bought Transamerican in 2016. As I said, the market has changed pretty significantly since we bought it. We really felt like there was a lot of overlap with our customers, and there is, but it's a different market. It's Jeep truck aftermarket, and it's retail. The financial characteristics in that market are different.
You know, one of the reasons we're looking at EBITDA as a metric is when we talk about EBITDA, you look at across our portfolio, we always focused on gross margin. When you look at Transamerican, they have really good gross margin. They have a lot of OpEx because they run retail. That's one of the reasons that's driving the change to EBITDA is to get the focus on what's really the net that's being returned to the company. That's our most challenging from an M&A standpoint, is getting TAP back on track. Boats, on the other hand, has gone really well. Business has grown significantly. We've had nearly 3 points of improvement in EBITDA margins since we acquired it. Mike talked about the Godfrey and Hurricane part of the business. Really nice growth. We have a whole new management team.
We have a lot of new products. They're taking share. The quality's a lot better. So really, really nice performance. The business is returning above its weighted average cost of capital or just at weighted average cost of capital right now, which when you think about it, is three years post a large acquisition, that's pretty good. It's returned over $270 million in cash to us already. We feel like that's been a great acquisition, and we're proud of it. We have these tuck-in acquisitions, so I'll kind of lump some of them together. We have the aftermarket stuff that's in Steve Eastman's group, and these are really good little businesses. The thing that we've done and the thing that Steve's team has done is built a back office that's leverageable.
These used to all be kind of individually run, their own logistics, their own shipping, their own engineering. We've kept the things that make them individually unique, but we've centralized a lot of the back office to get scale and leverage. This gives us a really nice platform to go out and do more, and we feel really confident with the team that runs that. Aixam and Goupil. When we talked about GEM, Taylor-Dunn, and why they exited the portfolio, there was a strategy, you know, to build a small electric vehicle business. That strategy was always dependent on buying one of the scale players. The scale player that was for sale sold last year for a multiple that I think people would have been pretty upset if we paid.
We didn't see that as the right thing for our business. We didn't see it as fitting core powersports, and so that's a strategy we're no longer pursuing. That said, Aixam and Goupil are great businesses. They have exceptional financial returns. They're very standalone. They have great leadership teams. They are very capital efficient. They don't require a lot of CapEx. So they're good businesses to keep in the portfolio. And we'll be moving those into the on-road segment in 2022. We have our capability acquisitions. These are things that help make the company better. Trail Tech I talked about. You know, one of the great things about Trail Tech, they make our gauges. As we got into the pandemic, you know, for us, our tier ones are really everybody else's tier twos 'cause we make our own gauges.
We're not going to a gauge supplier who's then going to a chip supplier. We're going right to the chip supplier. As this got challenged with chips and other electronic components, we had the ability to quickly re-engineer products, change chips. We had better visibility into what was happening in the chip segment because we were sourcing that stuff directly. That's a big competitive advantage. We will continue to look for opportunities like that as we continue to grow the business. Next slide. Why invest in Polaris? We talked a lot about growth. I think you see how many exciting opportunities we have to continue to grow this company. We're the biggest scale player in the industry, the most big, wide, and deep. We have a track record of winning in everything we do, but primarily winning with innovation.
We make really cool products that are really innovative that customers wanna buy. We have a self-help EBITDA story, and it's gonna help in two ways. The improving rate is gonna improve the dollars and leverage the growth. We're excited about that, and a lot of it, if not all of it, is in our control. We have a super strong balance sheet. We're a great cash flow generator, and we're gonna have a very focused and friendly capital allocation and capital deployment policy. I'm excited about the next five years. I hope all of you are too. With that, I think we're gonna move to Q&A.
Okay. Thanks, Bob. We'll get the presenters to come up on the stage. Just raise your hand and we'll bring a microphone to you so we can 'cause we gotta get this, the questions on the webcast thing. J.C. and I are bringing it around.
Two questions. First. Right here. Yes. Robin Farley, UBS. I know right now it's an issue of parts, not capacity, but I am just curious what precent of your factory capacity is being utilized right now. Then the second question, and this is maybe a little more controversial, but we've seen you sell some things, in the last year that were not profitable. You talked about, Indian not being profitable. It's on track to be. Is there a timeframe where you say, if it's not profitable by X, it doesn't belong in the portfolio? Thanks.
Well, I'll let Steve handle the capacity question. You know, I think with Indian, we've got a plan that we've reviewed with our board. You know, it started when Steve was running the business. Mike's taken that over, and we have commitments and stage gates, and that's why we're going through the process. Obviously, we have got a lot of rigor internally, but every time we meet with the board, we have the discussion. At this pace, we're on track. If that looks like it's veering off track or something fundamentally is changing in the market, you know, obviously we have to reassess that. That's true of everything in our business. Like we said, we've got a very credible path.
The one thing that the team has done, you know, as Bob mentioned, we've got a dedicated leader for that path to profitability. Before we went into it, we sat down and went through what are all the things we're gonna do, and let's build that plan. That's really what we're not just looking at the end result, we're looking at how are they tracking relative to every element of how to improve and get that self-help around the business. The plan's held up through some pretty difficult times. This past year would have been very easy for them to step back and say, "Hey, logistics are high, commodity costs are high." That isn't what they did.
They went back as a team, and they said, "What do we have to re-engineer?" From my standpoint, that makes me incredibly optimistic because it means when these costs start to subside, like Bob was talking, that gives us even more potential, maybe even a jump ahead, on that path to profitability. At this point, you know, we've got a trajectory. We've got With our board, and thus far we're doing well against it. Steve, you wanna talk about capacity?
Capacity size right now, it's any given day, we're jumping between 2/3 to 75% of capacity right now. We could if we get parts, we can throttle hard and fast and meet consumer demand pretty well.
Good morning. James Hardiman, Citi. So two separate but related questions about the long-term guide. I can certainly appreciate giving a four or five-year outlook in the middle of some unprecedented headwinds. As we think about, I think you guys had given us a number somewhere in the neighborhood of $500 million of supply chain related costs, 500+ basis points, I think, on the margin front. From what I'm hearing today, it doesn't seem like we're gonna get all of that back, but maybe sort of order of magnitude, what does normal look like of that massive headwind that you've just in 2021 versus 2020 sustained? Then secondly, the promotional environment.
I can't remember who mentioned it today, but that has historically been a big part of how margins work in this business is a significant promotional support. Presumably, that's been a tailwind as of late. Any way to sort of quantify that tailwind so we can start to think about, again, when we get back to some semblance of normality, what all of these puts and takes look like?
Yeah. I think you have to think of it all together.
Okay.
Because what I will tell you is in 2021, we were upside down from a price cost. When we talk price, it's not just MSRP, it's promo, right? 'Cause it's all part of that equation. As we get into 2022, that becomes a far more balanced equation, as Bob articulated. The issue is that we don't get margin on that. Our strategy all along has been to, "Hey, look, we wanna price just enough to cover the cost," because the view is a portion of this cost is gonna go away, and we wanna be able to retain as much as we can of that pricing. As we built that long-term guide, the mechanics were pretty complicated because, you know, Bob hit it. Not all of this is gonna go away, right?
We've made labor shifts and labor changes and moved salaries and hourly rates up. Those aren't gonna come back. Now, they may slow, hopefully, into the future, but we're not gonna give those back. You know, the cost of the containers, you know, Bob's right. It's not gonna stay at $30,000, but it's also probably not gonna go back down to all the way where it was. So you've got some of those dynamics. So there's gonna be a portion of that cost that becomes a little bit more permanent, and we're not gonna be able to hold on to all the pricing. You know? Even if Steve is able to reset that inventory balance in the field, there's no doubt gonna be some level of promo that's gonna come back in.
It may take the form of helping offset higher interest rates, for example, for financing. You know, we continue to honor all the programs we do for the folks who defend this country, and things like that. You know, it's a complicated algorithm that we're running, but, you know, the net-net is there's gonna be a positive for us because we believe we can hold on to a decent portion of that price and then work that cost out of the system on top of all the other self-help stuff that Bob walked through. I don't know, Bob, anything you'd add?
No, I would agree. I mean, you're thinking about the magnitude the right way in terms of the cost. You know, we've been able to, as we get into the, you know, kind of better second half of the year, we're gonna have the run rate price promo, you know, starts to catch up with that. The exact math on how much cost comes out and how much promo comes back in is, you know, not exactly a perfect visibility as we sit here today. Our goal, you know, so Ken and I and Steve partner on this along with all the other business unit CFOs. We're really focused on tracking every part of that increased cost so we know and we can look at what's coming, what can we go get, and what's gonna be permanent.
You can count on that we will be maniacal on trying to drive the cost side down.
Yeah. I mean, it was a big part, as we went through our strategic plan. Usually 100% of that focus is really around the new product and then the services and the technology. We actually put a disproportionate amount of time around we need to make sure we get the right mechanisms in place, that when these costs start to come out. It was no different than when we went through supply transformation. The biggest watch-out that Gibson Consulting gave us was, "Look, as soon as you start to take this out, somebody's gonna wanna spend it." We've gotta have that same discipline, which is, "Hey, let's not get excited 'cause commodity costs are coming down and we're getting a margin tailwind. Let's go back three years ago and look at how bad this was." We've gotta get that cost out.
We put a lot of discipline between Ken from a central ops perspective and supply chain standpoint and each one of the business units, so that we know the markers that we've gotta go make sure that we're gonna get out. 'Cause I mean, to your point, I mean, you're talking about $500 million . It's a big number.
Yeah. Just to piggyback on the promo. If you looked at what Pam was talking about, we don't do advertising the same way we did it two-three years ago, where it's just this blanket coverage. As we go forward, we won't be doing promo in the same manner either, 'cause we're just smarter and able to get to that finite customer. It's kinda more demand shaping than there is this blanket kinda demand creation promo strategy to it. That will be shifting in our business if we need to see that come back.
Well, Steve, you also talked about training the dealers and working with dealers and trying to make them better, and part of it is they've enjoyed a lot of profitability in the last couple of years as well. Trying to ensure that as inventory comes back, they stay rational and try to hold margins and whatnot because it's good for the whole business as well.
Billy Seay from Morgan Stanley. Just a question on your sales long-term guide. You've had a good history of compounding the top line at low double- digits. The guide for sort of mid-single digits even off a very high base. With all the sort of positive levers you have around market share gains and even just TAM expansion overall, bringing new customers in. Do you think there's some potential that is, you know, once supply chain headwind sort of mitigate. There is potential to sort of exceed that per your sort of last.
Well, I mean, you guys know us. We're gonna be driving for far more improved performance. There are some dynamics. You know, one of the things we talked about when we put guidance out for 2022 is, you know, look at our off-road vehicle business. The unit delivery this year is about flattish. You know, most of the growth is really coming from what we've done in pricing. As we look out into the future, trying to understand what is that dynamic gonna be, you know, the unit volume picking up versus what is our price level. We have mixed dynamics. You know, one of the things that's happened during the pandemic is people have pivoted to the higher end premium, both in terms of what consumers want, but also what we're producing.
You have a finite number of resources, and, you know, are you gonna put it into a value pontoon or are you gonna put it into a higher end Bennington? People are willing to pay for it. There's a lot of those dynamics. We're also trying to make sure that we're being realistic about, you know, hey, we could go through a little bit of a period where things start to just, I don't wanna say slow down, but just moderate a little bit. You're only talking about five 5 years out. You look at the growth we have in the first year. I mean, it's pretty substantial, right? It's the 2022 guide. It's really about how much of the price can we hold on to, what's gonna happen with the unit recovery and the timing.
There's a fair number of unknowns. I mean, Steve hit on it. The supply chain issues around semiconductors, you know, actually worsened as we came into the first quarter. Thankfully, we've got the engineering capability to go in and re-engineer things like Ride Command and try and work around the chip constraints. But it's hard to believe that's gonna get better because it touches just an enormous part of the economy. Unless there's something that really slows the economy down, that's gonna take, you know, probably a couple of years to work through the system.
Questions? Yeah.
Just a question around the EBITDA dollar and margin guidance. Sorry, Kasey Parker, BTIG. I mean, I guess one of the problems is that side by side is very different margin profile, maybe growth than a lot of the other segments. If some of the segments are gonna end up being sold, as an outsider, it's kinda tough to reconcile. It'd be great if there were segment margin kind of guidance and goals. Maybe not yet, but maybe next year. Just saying. It's not so I can build up.
Did you pay him to come up with this question?
I did not. I'll take that one. I guess a couple of things. If you look at kinda the total ORV business, the boats business, those EBITDA profiles are relatively consistent. Aftermarket, a little bit different. Obviously, Transamerican, we've talked about the challenges. GEM and Goupil or ex-Goupil are kind of a little bit above. The profiles aren't that far apart at the EBITDA level. They're a little bit further apart at the gross profit level. That's part of the switch internally and for the total company externally to EBITDA is to account for those differences. We do see migrating longer term to adding that to our guidance.
The reality is right now, Polaris was run from a manufacturing standpoint, very centrally, for many years. Getting to really good clean EBITDA margins for the legacy businesses, so motorcycles, off-road, and then kinda getting that down into the subsegments is taking some work. We're really focused on that this year. My team's spending a lot of time on that. We'll look to see if we're gonna update that for next year. We got to get to having reliable numbers, by segment just 'cause of the way we've historically done the accounting.
Xian Siew from BNP Paribas Ex ane. Here.
Yeah.
Maybe just dig in a bit more on the long-term revenue guidance. What are you guys embedding in terms of industry growth, market share? You mentioned there are a lot of price and volume dynamics, but like, is it more price-driven volume? Maybe some more help on that. You know, you also mentioned how the first year is pretty strong, 2022. How do you think about the balance of the year? Is it pretty consistent growth between those or, you know, is it kind of linear? How do you think about that? Thanks.
Well, I mean, I think the top-level calculus is we think there's probably gonna be low- to mid-single-digit industry growth, and we're gonna be kinda in that mid-single-digit. We're gonna either be in a position to hold, and our target will be to grow our market share. You know, it's tough to get into. I mean, look, we've run scenario after scenario. You know, quite frankly, our focus is on 2022. I mean, we're, you know, just trying to get the volatility around the supply chain worked out here in the near term. You know, clearly, when, you know, I sit on the board of another company and we had this discussion because everybody was worried about the growth trajectory slowing, and it's not slowing. You're lapping a really strong year.
You know, if we move out of having double-digit growth this year into low single digits, that's not a bad thing. It doesn't mean the business is slowing. It just means you're lapping a pretty strong. The dynamics that we've got make it even more complicated, right? 'Cause we look at two measures. One is retail. What's going on at the end point with the consumer? And then what's going on with the company? You know, and right now retail's doing pretty good. We're trying to get inventory into the channel, and there's gonna be a disconnect. That disconnect started back in 2020.
We thought that it would resolve itself by now, but given the persistence of the supply chain issues, you know, that's why we talked about dealer inventory will get a little bit better by the end of the year, but it's gonna take at least into next year before we start to make progress on that. You know, it's really tough to give you more around that specific timing. You know, I think the key message is back to what we talked about at the beginning. We think the market opportunity is large. We think what we're doing in terms of trying to attract customers, finding customers, and being a business that can make it very easy for them to come in and, you know, the inspirational brands, everything we're doing that'll really drive the resonance and continue to grow that pie.
We think we've got a really good setup to be able to weather any kind of impact that may be in there because the market opportunity is so big for us to continue to draw new folks in.
Yeah, the other thing is, as we look at five-year plans and five-year targets, you know, we're very focused on the profitability because the profitability to the extent that the growth ends up being better, the profitability improvements are just going to have an even larger impact on the EBITDA dollars and what you're gonna generate off that growth. You know, rather than be overly focused on exactly how many points of growth are we gonna get, it's much more on how are we gonna be more profitable on whatever the market and the rest of the performance looks like.
Thanks, guys. Good morning. Joe Altobello, Raymond James. The dealer is obviously where the customer physically interacts with your brand, and I think having a good dealer relationship is sometimes underappreciated in this business. With that said, what's the biggest complaint or complaints that you hear from your dealers other than get us more product?
You stole our thunder.
That's the one. That's one, two, three.
The next one is, give me more product.
Yeah. What we see in off-road is, you know, like you said, is product number one, and complexity is number two. Really, you know, the complexity of our line, our programs, and so forth to make it easier for me to execute my business. Also probably third is how we can support them better. They're facing labor crunches as well, right? How do we get more techs in the business? How do we interact with consumers who want a different shopping experience? As Pam noted earlier, we're working really hard to make sure that we're helping our dealers interact with consumers, supporting the service side of that side of the business.
We go so far as, we're investing in some tech schools in Minnesota just to start to try some initiatives here to see how we can help get more techs coming into the industry, and recruit out of high school for dealers. It's a small little program we're starting to seed right now, part of our Geared For Good. It's a way we can help. They're looking for labor help as well.
You know, I'd say, you know, we do a lot of work every quarter to survey the dealers and, you know, we have to spend time kinda sifting through the noise in there. You know, I'll tell you the thing that became clear, and it started when Bob and Steve and I went out and met with a number of our dealers, was just some of the dynamics around presale. Steve and the team took it back and said, "Okay, how do we have to think through that?" You saw that on Steve's chart, where he migrated to the Reservation program, where we started figuring out how do we allocate and protect the dealers. The other thing was the dealers were catching a ton of heat.
You know, the customers coming in and going, "Where the hell is my vehicle?" The dealers turning around trying to find that data, and it was tough. We created the online tool where the customer can get in and put that information in and very quickly find out where the vehicle is at. It takes some of the heat off of the dealer, and really puts it back on us, to be in a position to be able to give them reliable and credible data around where that vehicle is. You know, it's a constant process of learning, iterating, and then trying to figure out how do we, how do we make it an easier process for the dealer.
Even some of the website stuff that Pam went through, any of that stuff makes it easier because if you walk into a dealer, and they're looking at it going, "What is this? Where did it come from," that creates confusion. Trying to make everything as seamless and easy as we can is gonna take pressure off of them. As well as having good dealers. You know, I mean, one of the things that we've done over time is we've taken bad dealers out of the network because good dealers get really frustrated because those guys aren't running their business the way we should and as sophisticated, and that puts pressure on them. We've got a responsibility there to manage that network.
Good morning, thanks. It's Craig from Baird. A couple questions. One on the marine side. How would you like to fill that portfolio out? How might that change? Steve, to you, just on the military side and on the farm side, what do you need to do differently to go to market, to make that a bigger part of your business?
Well, I think on the marine side, there was a reason why we changed the name from boats to marine. Boats is very narrow, and we think of the market more broadly. You know, we talked about it. There's attractive elements in terms of other categories of boats, but there's also a lot around the aftermarket and the accessories. You know, we look at it. We've got a great platform to build off of. There's inorganic moves that we could make, but there's also a lot of organic. I mean, we've worked with Jake and his team to really help them see some of the tools that we have at Polaris, whether that's our industrial design capability or the electronics, and how do we bring that to bear for them to develop organically.
There is gonna be some opportunity inorganically. The key is it's gotta make sense economically, right? It's gotta be the right moment, the right time, the right fit with the portfolio. We're gonna be really patient about how we think about that space. The bottom line I'd leave you with is we think it's really an attractive category. It has great fit with the brand.
On the farm side of the house, now that COVID's kinda lifted a little bit here, we can get teams out. We're spending more time with our farmers right now and understanding what is it exactly that they want, right? What types of vehicles. You see Kinetic's a huge hit with the farm opportunity and just how they think about getting work done and, you know, looking at that vehicle. Then what kind of fleet deals we can do and all that kind of stuff. We're in a learning mode right now that we can kinda get out and get going. We have the basics.
I mean, we know what a RANGER is, we know what we can sell them and so forth, but we're trying to go, you know, fast and bigger in the farm section. It's a lot more learning. Accessories are gonna play a huge part of that business as how we try to really steer and customize those machines for the farm application that we're serving there. A lot of learning going on now. We'll turn that into, you know, what our action plans will be. On the defense side, Bob can help out. That just transferred over to me.
I mean, a lot of that, we do a lot of innovation with USSOCOM, you know, special forces and so forth on what is it that the war fighter needs on that light tactical vehicle and so on. We'll continue to see how the landscape changes. There's a lot of opportunities to innovate with the military with some of the programs that they put out to help us develop vehicles for specific needs that they have.
One, Bill, just, you know, to give Steve's team a lot of credit is historically we would talk about ag, farm and ranch, and the way they're looking at it, you know, they think about farm versus ranch, what types of farms. If you've got dairy versus beef, cattle versus if you have vineyards, what types of needs, they are very different and distinct. Actually getting to that, those layers deeper to really understand so that there is differentiation that they can bring to bear that is right for individual segments, which is just a very different approach.
I think on the military side, I mean, the thing to keep in mind about military, we're certainly the leader in small tactical vehicles for the military. This is very programmatic buys, right? We're at the start of what we call M-RZR Alpha, which is the new M-RZR. We have the contract with SOCOM and some of the other services to provide that vehicle. We're starting to ship those kind of in more quantity in 2022. But it's not like the U.S. government doesn't just walk out one day and decide to start a whole new program and buy a new vehicle, right? This is multi-year development.
It's not quite, you know, full military contracting, but it's not as simple as, you know, buying off the shelf the way the military might make it sound when they talk about buying commercial products.
Yeah.
You know, events of today will not have a major impact on our business. You know, it's not like the cycle's just not fast enough. You know, we won't see. Don't expect there's gonna be big orders coming out of conflict this morning.
Yeah. David MacGregor at Longbow Research. Good morning. I guess my question is on productivity. Clearly you've talked a lot about productivity here this morning, and it's an important part of your EBITDA margin progression effort. But at the same time, Steve mentioned there's 4 million different ways you can configure a product. I'm just wondering if there's a risk here that the progress you're making on all the manufacturing productivity and the operational productivity, you end up having to give back because the consumer's way of purchasing and what they wanna buy is just becoming much more complex. Or are the unit margins in those sort of incremental configurations so rich that you can get paid for it?
Yeah. When you look at the accessories and the margins in the accessories part of the business, they're that rich. What it is actually with the consumer, it's right, that's more satisfying. They wanna build the vehicle that they want. We say that there's all these opportunities. You know, we have power items that our consumers, they, we kinda know where they play and, you know, winches, you know, windshields, you know, cab systems, roofs and so forth. Those are kinda what we talk about. They have the ability to go further and they do that. But not, that's not the, you know, every single consumer. They kinda stay in the 25, 30 power items and then they can build from there.
It's a great opportunity, like I said, both margin wise and profitability wise for our dealers and for us.
I think the real issue is around the platforming. It's the things the consumer may not see. You know, Steve's example of 10 different brake cylinders. We did that just because the engineers were working on different programs. That's where we have an opportunity to impact the complexity and the cost without it really impacting the consumer. You know, Steve's point is when all these different configurations are coming, you know, the color of the vehicle, it's the accessories, the doors, the roof, the audio, you know, those are the things the consumer, A, is really willing to pay for and, B, make all the difference. Whether or not they have the same brake cylinder as what the vehicle two generations had, not many of them are gonna really care.
That's that platforming idea, and continuing to drive that forward is where we can get a lot of the complexity and the cost out.
One of the things we do different than a lot of manufacturers in the space is, you know, we have what we call Factory Choice. You know, we'll ship a vehicle to a dealer that's fully configured. It's got all its accessories installed, and that's been great because we actually have to install our own stuff. You'd be shocked what you learn when you have to go do that every day. That's really given us a great momentum to take the platforming concept Mike was just talking about and Steve talked about in his presentation and really take that to accessories. Standardizing, you know, interfaces, mounts, wiring harnesses, all that kind of stuff to make it easier for dealers, customers, and even our own factories to put that stuff on. It takes.
While there's a lot of options, we're really trying to focus on how do you make it easy to install the different options so it's not different every time you do it.
Well, for those, many of the accessories that are applied at the dealership, it's a huge profitability opportunity for the dealers, not only in terms of the accessory itself, but the service labor that they are able to charge when they put it on. If you think about it, we have all these new customers coming in. Half the time they don't even know what they possibly could do. That's a different challenge in terms of helping them understand based on their use case, what are some of the things they might wanna do. They can work with their dealer, and they can do it when they first buy the vehicle. They may come back a year later, two years later. Just think of that opportunity to go back to that installed base.
With new use cases now that they've been using it, what's the next best use case that we think they might do? Here are two more accessories that we think you might like. There's a lot of opportunity to keep driving profitability post-purchase when they have ideas of what they can do, and then go back to the dealer and drive dealership profitability as well.
Thanks. Me again. So, two quickies. Well, the first one is a quickie, and I don't think you've addressed this, but just as we think about the conflict, Russia, Ukraine this morning, just brainstorm how that could hurt you guys. You know, what's the risk profile there? Don't think it's much from a consumer perspective, but as I think about your supply chain, is there an issue there that we should be aware of? I guess more broadly, Mike, you talked about being upside down between this, you know, price and cost, over the past year plus. Unlike, I think, some other companies in the powersports space. It occurs to me that that is primarily a function of your global supply chain, right? Relative to maybe some of these other companies.
You talk about tariffs. We don't know what's gonna happen there. Maybe that's permanent. Some of these supply chain issues, similar story. I guess it sort of begs the question, if you don't expect these to be temporary headwinds, do you maybe need to adjust sort of what your supply chain looks like? Presumably the answer is no, but just take us through your thought process there.
Well, let me hit the Ukraine thing. You know, we've done kind of the scan. You know, we have some business in Russia with snowmobiles. It's very, very small. We're largely towards the end of the season, so financial risk seems pretty minimal. You know, we have obviously manufacturing in Poland, so we've got employees with ties to Ukraine, so we're trying to make sure that, you know, we're protecting them and helping them deal with the issues. It's clearly gonna drive inflation, which is incredible to me, 'cause you didn't think it could get much higher. Fuel prices, I mean, our ability to source oil is gonna, I think, be constrained given all the things that are going on from a sanctions standpoint.
You know, it's tough to know from a consumer standpoint what that's gonna mean. You know, we just came from a joint venture discussion that, you know, Bob and Steve sit on our JV with Wells Fargo for Polaris Acceptance floor plan JV. One of the things they talked about is, you know, yeah, consumer savings is starting to slow, but there's still, like, what, $2.4 trillion-
Yep.
Sitting there. You know, when you think about the profile of our consumer, most of them have a lot of job security right now. They did incredibly well in the stock market. They did incredibly well through the pandemic. They're still pretty flush. When you look at the dynamics in the dealership, we know from past conflicts, unfortunately, that demand really doesn't get impacted. We're not as worried about that. I mean, we're obviously gonna keep an eye on it, but the runway for us is so long given how depleted the dealer inventories are that, you know, we should be able to adjust for that and see it coming. I have a feeling this conflict's gonna be relatively short-lived, so we'll see how that works out.
As it relates to the cost profile, I don't wanna leave you with the thought that we think the bulk of this cost is gonna stay. We think the bulk of the cost is going to go. There's gonna be elements of that are gonna be tougher. What we don't wanna do on the tariff side is overreact. We have to continue to look for opportunities to take costs out. You know, we use this example often. You know, there aren't any other half shaft suppliers. The question becomes, is it advantageous for us to either source internally, go make it ourselves? When you look at the economic equation, we've been here talking to you about margin degradation. It just doesn't make any sense. In some ways, we're just gonna have to live with it.
The point is, we've got to think of those as a little bit more permanent. Even though there are, you know, two different bills between the Senate and in the House, we can't bank on that being the resolution. We've got to continue to push our supply chain and the supply chain transformation, Project Sunburst, is a great time to do that. We're constantly looking at those opportunities to go back. You know, I think for us, that is the biggest single opportunity outside of having the rigor as the costs come down from a commodity standpoint to make sure that the contract provisions are being lived up to, so we see those step functions down and getting the team to realize all the logistics savings.
Easy for us to see, and I think it's easy for us to hold the team accountable. Anything to add?
Yeah, no, I would agree with all that. I think on price cost, I don't want anybody to misunderstand what we said. You know, we've been pretty aggressive with price. We've been, you know, measured. We're not trying to be crazy aggressive. You saw in the RV space, some people, you know, really got aggressive with price, and they've had to start backing off on it, reducing price, promoting things out. That's not the scenario we wanted to get into. Obviously, we wanna continue to grow share, so you have to balance all those things. You know, the only reason we got a little bit upside down on price cost is the fact that we were so successful in our presale program, because we've chosen to honor the price on presales.
Now, as we've updated the program, you know, we're only locking in a certain number of units. We're only price protecting a certain number of units, and we've also gone to quarterly pricing. You know, to the extent that we don't see the supply chain costs coming out or they, you know, start to change and go back in a negative direction, you'll have the ability to adjust with price. You'll continue to see us be, you know, really monitor price and take actions when we need to.
Hey, Mike, a question on your electric strategy. You mentioned today you're looking to partner with, best-in-class suppliers , but down the track you might insource that. What are some of the sort of capabilities you'd look to take in-house, and would you potentially be looking at any acquisition? What area of the manufacturing process or technology would you look to build on?
Yeah, I mean, when you look at where we're at in the scheme of, you know, we're at the very, you know, front end of procuring through Zero, basically all the powertrain components, the electric powertrain and the control modules. It's about how do you start to scale further down that maturity curve so you can do more of the configuration yourself. As we're learning, we're bringing more and more experts on board to help us with that because, you know, it fits well for that use case. As we look at the other areas that we're gonna potentially play, that may not be the solution we need.
Then at that point, we're gonna start asking ourselves the question, do we have the capability to do it internally, or is there a different partner that we're gonna go have to look at? I would tell you, it's the same approach within connected vehicle. You know, there's things that we're gonna do internal, and then there's things that we're either procuring or we're getting supported by externally from a software user interface that helps us migrate. You know, I think the key message to take away is we're learning as we go through this, and we're adapting very quickly, and we're committed to putting the capital where we need to.
Any other questions? Yeah.
Just back on the small vehicle strategy.
Yep.
You mentioned that there was a larger company that was sort of the step two of the overall strategy. With that out of the market and then some of the assets now gone, but some remaining, I mean, I guess I had a few questions. One, was there a consideration and an interest in the MBO of taking these assets which were actually profitable to take with them, which were the assets which were not profitable? Like, was that on offer? And then secondly, I mean, should we just now expect that you're still looking for that larger next step to sort of round out your small vehicle strategy?
No, I think so I guess I'll answer the questions. I'll answer the second one first. No, you should not think we are out still looking for a larger acquisition to round out the small vehicle strategy, right? Obviously, you know, Club Car traded to Platinum Equity from my former employer, Ingersoll Rand, so I'm pretty familiar with the whole thing last year. You know, they're off pursuing their strategy. As Mike and I came into these roles, you know, you saw today clear focus on powersports. You know, that would have been a huge investment, I think they paid $1.7 billion, you know, to go into something that's adjacent to powersports. We didn't feel like that fit the strategy, and we still don't.
You know, we have the Aixam and Goupil businesses. They're really kind of different. Goupil is an electric on-road product that you know is primarily sold in Europe. Big partnership with Picnic, who does food delivery and so kind of different than the GEM and Taylor-Dunn products. You know, Aixam is partly some diesel, some electric L6e, you know, unregistered vehicles that are sold to consumers in Europe who drive them on the roads if you're under 16 or you don't have a license or you know whatever. Both great businesses from a standalone standpoint and you know no reason to really be overly focused on them because they generate a lot of cash and you know they're not significantly integrated with the company, so.
With the MBO? No, 'cause the businesses are kinda different, sorry. You know, GEM, Taylor-Dunn, that team really just needs to focus on kind of fixing those businesses. You know, kind of including something like a Goupil with that, I don't think would have maximized the value for us. I mean, you know, part of the challenge was Global Adjacent Markets was a collection of a bunch of different things as opposed to a business per se. I had them put this slide back up because I wanna make sure it's crystal clear. Powersports. Small vehicle business has nothing to do with powersports. It's our guiding principle, and it's important. It's why we did what we did. Those businesses, as Bob said, have incredible financial characteristics, and they're a part of the portfolio.
They're small. They don't require capital from Polaris. They are self-sustaining. They've got incredible leadership, so we're kinda letting them do their thing. When we think about where we wanna invest capital, you know, you think about that $300 million mark that Bob was talking about with CapEx, organic investment, it's here. Could we have taken those businesses and done stuff? Yeah. We'd had to take money away from Steve, and there is no way I could go through and make that kind of decision because the returns I get putting money into him or putting the focus around Mike Dougherty's business in terms of proving motorcycle profitability, the payoff is tenfold.
Yeah, just a couple follow-ups. Can you talk about the Adventures Select? I think that's kind of just coming out of the starting blocks essentially, but it seems like there's a lot of potential there. I think you're in four states right now, so you're planning on opening more this year. How hard are you feeling like you're gonna lean into that? You've got a competitor that has a club model that's off to a much very strong start. I know they're much further ahead than you are on this, but it just seems like there's a ton of potential there.
Who's off to a stronger start?
I'm sorry?
Brunswick with Freedom. Oh.
Yeah, with [APC].
Um-
Just your thoughts around that.
Yeah, I mean, it's a different model. You know, it's really been more focused around off-road vehicles and motorcycles. It's really a derivative of Polaris Adventures. That's why we call it Polaris Adventures Select. You know, really it's what we've seen so far through the folks who have joined is you've got people who are either new to powersports or you have people that used to be in powersports as a kid, and they're coming back, but they're young. They don't have the money to go out and buy a new machine. They maybe have a young family. They're living in an apartment or a small house. This gives them the ability to become a member of Polaris.
You know, I think the way to think about it is it starts to give them currency, and you can start thinking differently about that as you have Polaris Adventures sitting right next to it. I think there's gonna be some neat stuff that'll come about as a result of that. You know, the team is really working through the profitability equation, but we're not letting that lead our thought process. It has to be profitable, right? If I go back to Polaris Adventures, we didn't start with that. We started with, "Hey, we've got to improve the rental experience. We got to make it a good reflection of Polaris.
We got to invest in the systems capabilities so that the experience is the same if you're in Sedona as it is if you're in North Carolina. We've done that. Oh, by the way, now we're making money in that business. It's the same thing with Select. It's a more complicated proposition because you've got to get vehicles to a trailhead for somebody. We think it's a worthwhile investment and we think it's, you know, it's an investment in marketing and advertising in many ways, but it's also a great way to continue to build that funnel of new riders. We're gonna work through that economic model as we go. We're in four states, we got a long way to go, but, you know, early reads are it's very promising.
Yeah, no, I just to add on to that, I think the key, as Mike mentioned, low single digits in terms of conversion to whole goods, to buying a vehicle. But the reality is we've been focused on getting those businesses and getting the customer experience right and ensuring that that's great. We are now doing a lot of the legwork to understand who are all the customers who have done an adventure, who are part of Select. Which of those do we think are likely to tip into buy a vehicle and when?
It may be because of where they're at in their life stage, it's not right now, but we wanna continue the relationship and build it so when they are at a place in life where that makes sense, we wanna be the brand they go to. There may be some that just never makes sense. As long as we're profitable on a Select standpoint, and then you can build in opportunity there. At the end of the day, it's looking at the pipeline of people, not just those who rent or who are members, but also their network. That's where the pie just grows exponentially, and we have to view that as a way to fuel the holistic business.
The other thing I would add, and we don't spend a lot of time talking about it externally yet, mainly 'cause there aren't many used vehicles out there. If you think about it, we will probably be one of the largest sources of used vehicles. You have Polaris Adventures, Polaris Adventures Select. Internally, we have our management unit program vehicles that, you know, our more senior employees use. You know, typically those vehicles would just go to auction. Well, there's a lot of value in those vehicles. We know a lot about them, especially as we start to propagate more of the connected vehicle strategy. You're gonna have a really good read on you know, the life of the vehicle, where it's at, and be able to control the flow of those used vehicles a lot more.
The used space in off-road vehicles is nothing like in marine or motorcycles, where it's much larger than the new space. It is meaningful enough that, you know, having our hands in there to try and help that, it becomes a really good source of profitability for our dealers, if we control that instead of just throwing things into a free-for-all auction. There's a lot of other dynamics that we're learning as we go through that, and I think it's all gonna roll into the calculus behind the economic model.
Thanks.
I'll just add, as you know, Mike for motorcycles, Jake's for boats, and me for off-road, that's one of our customers to supply vehicles to. With the supply chain challenges and so forth, we're constraining that growth right now because we can't get enough vehicles to Adventures and Adventures Select. It does have that impact on it. Once we can break through that, those guys can get out and run hard.
Got it. I just also wanted to ask you about motorcycle assembly in Vietnam, and just kind of thinking about your aspirations there. How should we think about the way in which you leverage that? Can you talk about it over the next, say, three-five years?
Yeah. I mean, you know, look, we know there's opportunity in China. There's been regulatory changes that have allowed the size of the bike to be more easily accommodated. The bikes are phenomenally popular in China. We recently went into Japan. Japan's a huge motorcycle market. Like I said, Australia is a big market for Indian. Supplying those bikes either out of Poland or North America just doesn't make a lot of sense in terms of that added shipping cost. We already had a JV in Vietnam, where we were producing a lot of components that were ultimately either coming back for off-road vehicles or motorcycles. It was a logical next step. The stand-up we had in Poland really helped us get comfortable with that.
We had a lot of the same folks involved in helping us stand up Vietnam. It was a little bit more challenging 'cause most of it was being done virtually and, you know, trying to work around COVID. We think that's gonna give us a really good foothold to continue to grow that business. You know, Asia is gonna continue to be a very attractive growth area for us in that business. I think we have time for maybe one more question.
Yep. One more, anywhere. Going once, twice.
Sold.
They wanna ride.
Yeah. All right. First of all, thank you very much for coming. Hopefully you saw, you know, we're the leader in powersports. We've been at this for a very long time. You know, we view this as leading from the front and really driving not only the economics of our company, but the industry. Huge compelling growth opportunity. It's really about leveraging those six strategic objectives. You know, I think the financial outcome of this is incredibly attractive. I think Bob did a great job of walking through the investment case and why would you invest in Polaris. Tough day to have an investor day when the markets are all over the place and we've got global conflict, but, you know, I think this is a long-term game. We have a lot of confidence in the business.
We have the best team in powersports to go execute this and the best brand and franchise to go make it happen. Really appreciate your time here today. Richard's gonna cover off on all the specifics around what we need to do. For those who are gonna be doing the ride this afternoon, you're gonna have a lot of fun. The management team's gonna be mingling to help you make sure you can get into the harnesses, get your helmets on, all that good stuff. Just ask that you ride safe and have a good time. With that, I'll turn it over to Richard.