All right. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us. I'm Joseph Altobello, Leisure Equity Research analyst here at Raymond James. I'm very pleased to introduce our next presentation, our first presentation of the morning, Polaris. With us today we have CEO Mike Speetzen and CFO Bob Mack. Welcome, gentlemen. Polaris is a leader in the Powersports and marine industries with a presence in off-road vehicles and snowmobiles as well as pontoon and deck boats, though it recently divested its Indian Motorcycle business. The past few years have been challenging for both the company and the industry as it's had to navigate softening post-COVID demand, heightened dealer inventories, and very meaningful tariff headwinds. Before we dive into a fireside chat, I believe Mike has some slides he'd like to go over, and after that we'll go into Q&A.
With that, I'll hand things over to Mike.
Okay. Well, thanks, Joe. Wanted to do a few things this morning. Wanted to talk to you a little bit about leadership in power sports, the things that we're doing to improve the company. We're also introducing new segments now with the divestiture of Indian Motorcycle, we're gonna be revising our guidance up slightly given a closing of Indian ahead of what our original schedule was. For those of you who are new to the Polaris story, just a little bit of who we are. We're number one in power sports, number one in off-road, number one in pontoon and deck boats, number two in snowmobiles, although I'd argue we're gonna be doing our best to get back to number one in that category.
We talk a lot about being the leader in Powersports , and that's not just market share. As the leader, it's incumbent upon us to set the tone and the example, and we've done that from an innovation standpoint. You can see since 2023, we've introduced 40 new vehicles, and we've also registered 800+ patents. I think that really demonstrates our commitment to the category, and doing so in a pretty difficult time period with destocking and a slowing in the industry. We operate through 3,300 dealers in North America, and a similar set internationally, and we have 16 manufacturing facilities. Our primary manufacturing facilities are Monterrey, Mexico, Huntsville, Alabama, and Roseau, Minnesota, as well as Poland for off-road vehicles. We're introducing new segments.
Will not come as a surprise with the divestiture of Indian Motorcycle. We've essentially dissolved the on-road segment. Three segments are gonna be Polaris Powersports, Marine, and Aixam and Goupil. Polaris Powersports, it may be just a little context. The reason we set this structure up is we started with who our customer is, what they buy, and where they buy it. Essentially, our channel really informed how we wanted to structure the company. You look at Polaris Powersports, you now have off-road vehicles, you have seasonal, which is snow and Slingshot. You've got our commercial business where we sell RANGERs to the largest provider to our rental companies like United and Sunbelt, our government defense business, as well as our parts, garments, and accessories. In our marine portfolio, we obviously have Bennington, Godfrey, and Hurricane.
Aixam and Goupil, which are probably new to some of you, are small vehicle business that was acquired some time ago over in Europe. Aixam is small transportation vehicles. They look like tiny cars. Goupil is small light-duty trucks used by grocery companies like Picnic, for example, for delivery in really small confined areas. You can see the revenue breakdown. O bviously, Powersports makes up the bulk of the company. It's really the way we've organized ourselves. When you think about Polaris Inc and the corporate, it's very small now. We have pushed our resources down into each one of the segments. That's not to say that there aren't things that reach across the segments. Clearly, you know, Bob holds things like treasury and tax.
We're not gonna replicate that in each of our segments. Our standards for employee safety, for quality, for our operating systems, lean, those types of disciplines do span all three segments. The majority of the resources are down in each one of these segments to make sure that we can effectively operate, service the dealer networks that we have in each one, and make sure that we're executing for the customer. When you look at the way the segments break down, you can see the different vehicle classes that we have in each. This really is the way we thought about how we wanted to organize the company, is that we needed to make sure that any of the internal complexity we have is just that.
It stays internal to Polaris, and it doesn't show up as you, as you walk into a dealership. The example I would give you is because we had the on-road segment and the off-road segment, Slingshot sat in on-road. It was a completely different sales channel going into the same dealers that the off-road and snow folks were going into. There wasn't as much coordination as you'd like to see. We've eliminated all that. Everything goes through one sales channel. Our ultimate goal would be to have our NorthStar program, which we've talked to you about in the past that covers our off-road business, will ultimately include snow and then ultimately include Slingshot so that the dealers are working through a comprehensive set of products that's all aimed at one dealer-managed program.
I think it's a really good setup that we've got, and we can certainly get into more details during the Q&A. As I mentioned, we are introducing new guidance. We had effectively during our initial guidance call back in January, we had said that we had Indian in for the entire first quarter. We obviously executed the divestiture, the separation on the second of February. We're introducing new guidance. You'll see that we've updated revenue, obviously pulling out two months' worth of what we had anticipated would be Indian sales.
We now have guidance of flat to up 2%. You can see that our EBITDA margins improved as a result of extracting Indian out earlier. We've raised the earnings per share on the low and the high end by $0.10. The one thing I wanted to point out here, I'm not going to go back through all the details that we provided when we gave guidance because nothing's changed. I wanted to emphasize when we talked about build equals ship equals retail, there's a lot of noise in these numbers. We had Indian in all of last year. We had Indian in for 1 month this year. You strip all that noise out, our revenue is growing 8%, and that's with a flat retail environment, flat industry.
We have undershipped the channel for a couple of years to get our dealer inventory down. We've talked about that being a priority. We have our dealer inventory at less than 100 days of supply. That's the lowest it's ever been since I've been with the company, and I'm pretty sure it's the lowest it's been outside of the COVID time period in the history of the company. The reason that's important is we're now playing more offense in terms of being able to see some growth inside the business, and that's showing up in the margins. It's tough to see. We got a lot of noise in here. tariffs are essentially doubling year-over-year. When you strip tariffs out and you look at the organic performance of the business, our incrementals are up almost 40%. I've worked in industrial a long time.
Rarely have I ever seen 40% incremental margins. I think that's just a testament to the amount of work we're doing inside the business to improve our operations, improve quality, and really get the business on a better trajectory. I'm going to talk a little bit about that here in a second. One of the things that we talk about is the consistency of our strategy. Aside from removing a motorcycle picture off of this picture on the left, nothing has changed. This is the same strategy. We're playing the same playbook. This is what's really going to put this company in a better spot. It's already put it into a better position. I think as we see the industry start to stabilize in 2026 and hopefully improve into 2027, I think you're going to see this business in a much better spot.
One of the things that we talk about is we're going to focus on what we can control. I can't control whether or not President Trump puts tariffs in place. I can't control economic policy. I can control the things within our own company. That's exactly what we've done. We've done it from an operational efficiency standpoint. We're seeing significant progress. You know, 3 years ago, we spent a lot of time talking about our plants and their inability to execute against our build plan. We don't even talk about that anymore. We get updates. The updates are usually around very high percentages of execution against the production plan. The other is innovation. We made a commitment. You saw it on that first slide. Since 2023, 40 new products, over 800 patents. We are committed. As the leader, we can't back off of that.
We're not going to back off of that. Working capital. We already have world-class working capital performance, but we know we can be better. That's a big focus area that Bob is driving inside the business. Dealer health. If we don't keep our dealers healthy, we're not going to be successful. We recognized that about a year and a half ago. We made that commitment that we were going to get dealer inventory down. We were going to make it easier to do business with Polaris. We were going to stay on the gas with innovation. We were going to improve quality. I feel really good about the fact that we've executed on all those. Our vision is clear on how we're going to win. We're going to stay focused on the customer.
We're going to advance our number one position. That's not just market share. It's all the things I talked about earlier in terms of setting the tone and the cadence with innovation and quality. We're going to position this company to excel long term. I've used this slide internally with our employees. I've used it with our board of directors. We've talked with investors about this. For me, it's really the compelling investment opportunity with Polaris. On the left-hand side, I could have probably put 2014 or 2015 instead of 2019. There's been a series of things happening. You know, the industry was slowing. We can pull COVID out because it essentially was a near-term bump. Then we've essentially given back as an industry all those gains that were made during that time period. For us specifically, our warranty performance was not great.
That showed up in warranty costs and product liability exposure. We talked a lot about being great at manufacturing. The truth is we were not great at lean. Obviously, the onset of tariffs that started back in 2018. Accelerated in 2024. We had a number of money-losing businesses. Transamerican, GEM, Taylor-Dunn, Indian Motorcycle, and a number of other businesses that we don't even talk about publicly, smaller businesses that we've restructured out of the business. Obviously, you know the focus. We've talked about it for four years now in terms of improving operations, improving quality, staying on the gas with innovation, and making sure that we go after the portfolio. You know, essentially as we look forward, we think 2026 is kind of the bottom. We've seen a lot of indicators. I mean, the recreational markets still are tough to predict.
You know, I think consumer uncertainty, certainly the Iran developments are going to inject new challenges. Consumers are just a little bit nervous relative to a product that they may like to have but don't necessarily need. For us, that makes up about 40% of our company. The utility side remains strong, and we feel good about that. As we look into 2027, we know that there's got to be a replenishment cycle likely coming at that point on the rec side. These vehicles are getting long in the tooth. People, you know, they're still using them. We talk a lot during our earnings calls about the fact that we're tracking things like repair order activity, spare parts, tire sales, oil sales, you name it. It is all indicative of the fact that people are out using their products.
There's going to be a replenishment cycle at some point in time. When that happens and we start to get a little bit of growth back, you're going to see some pretty good things happening in the business. We're going to leverage off of all the operational efficiencies we've made, the improved quality we've made in the business. You know, our quality for two years now has improved. We've saved, you know, well over $20 million in warranty. Our Net Promoter Scores are at the highest level they've ever been in the company. That's really a marker that not just the quality is improving financially, but it's showing up with the customer and the dealer. As we move into 2027, we have taken our own efforts to reduce our tariff burden.
You know, we talked on the call about pulling our cost of goods sold for materials that we buy from China down from a high of 18%. By 2027, it'll be sub 5%. We're really going to be focused on highly profitable segments. You know, by divesting TAP, Taylor-Dunn, GEM, and Indian Motorcycle, we've pulled out about $1.5 billion worth of revenue and probably close to $100 million worth of negative earnings. That allows us to really focus in on profitable segments. Now, not everything's perfect. I'm sure I'll get questions about Slingshot or Snow.
That's, that's the business we're in, and it allows us to be focused on those segments and then go in and make sure that they're operating at the level that they should be, generating the profit that they should be, rather than spending time on businesses that are losing money and are non-core. I think we've really positioned this company well. It actually shows up. You know, you think about that 8% incremental margins, and you think about the earnings per share growth that we've got that's over 100%, and that's with tariffs effectively doubling.
We're working hard to generate the returns in the business. I think as we get past some of the noise that we've got here in the near term, we're going to have positioned the company really well for the long term. As we look at 2026, a lot of what we talked about on the call, you know, we think that the retail environment's going to be flattish. You know, we've seen retail now for 2 months. I'd tell you it's just largely consistent with what we anticipated. We're going to stay focused on innovation. You're going to see that again this year. That product count of 40 is going to continue to go up.
We remain committed to making sure our dealers are in a good spot, this whole build equals ship equals retail is going to continue to be our mantra. We think price is going to be positive given a slightly lower promotional environment. With our competitors largely getting inventory in a better spot than it has been, I won't say that everybody's perfect, but it's better than it has been. That's going to take some pressure off as the industry starts to stabilize. Our operations are in a good spot to be able to meet demand fluctuations as we move forward. Talked about it on the call. We've got a significant number of transition service agreements between us and the new Indian Motorcycle business.
Those largely expire between 6 and 12 months. The team's really moved from executing the separation to now executing on these various agreements and working with their team. There's nothing there that would tell me that we're going to have any issues with that. We're going to continue to stay focused on lean and operational improvements and then obviously working to execute our tariff mitigation approach. Let me just wrap up by saying, you know, look, we're advancing our leadership position. you know, you've seen it in terms of the market share gains that we made in every one of our segments last year.
Our new segments, I believe, align us to be able to execute against the brands and the channel that's most important, and we've removed all the distractions out of the business so that we've got ourselves really focused. We're going to stay focused on the things that we know we can do great, which is margin expansion, generating cash, and being disciplined about where we deploy our capital. As we look forward, as I mentioned on the prior chart, I think we're really setting the foundation up. You know, the operational improvements, the quality improvements, staying focused from an innovation standpoint. We're putting ourselves in a really good spot to be able to get the incremental margins as we see the industry.
We don't even need the industry to return to significant growth, just low single digits, and I think you'll see some pretty incredible performance. We're committed to making sure that we reduce our tariff burden. I mean, we're not giving up on our efforts in Washington, but we're not going to count on that. We think we've got a compelling proposal to the Administration, but we're not going to wait. It's been a year almost, and we really haven't seen much movement. We're just going to continue working the things that we can to mitigate our exposure. Appreciate you guys listening to me, and obviously we're going to open it up for some Q&A at this point.
Great. Thank you, Mike. We are very excited to be rebuilding our models very soon. With that, and the three new segments, maybe explain to the audience, you know, why you chose the segments or segregated them the way you did.
Yeah, I mean, it was, it was pretty simple. I mean, you know, sometimes businesses can get wrapped around how they want to do things, and the reality is you have to meet the customer where they are, and you need to make sure that how you meet that customer is as friction-free as it can be. We started with customer, then we went back through the channel, and that really informed how we wanted to organize the business. Now, I'll tell you, the marine segment, that's how they've been operated. You look inside of Ben Duke's business, he's got a Bennington leader, and he has a Godfrey Hurricane leader, and that is because that's how that business goes to the channel. There are shared resources in certain areas.
I will tell you there are distinct differences between Bennington and Godfrey, so they don't necessarily share their engineering resources because they want to remain distinctive from a brand standpoint, but allows them to share other things, but stay focused on going into their channel and meeting their dealers and their customers where they are. We're just really getting Polaris back to its roots. Over time, because we brought all these other businesses in, we started losing that focus, and really pulling us back to being heavily concentrated on Powersports has allowed us to really say, "Okay, we've got to make it as seamless as we can for the dealer, and we need to make sure that when the dealer's thinking about Powersports , they're thinking about Blue.
You talked about several divestitures you've done over the past few years, including Indian. Is the portfolio where you want it now, or do you anticipate any more changes?
I would say it's largely where we want it now. There are some things within the portfolio that aren't necessarily performing like we'd like. We're now putting focus and attention around those areas. That isn't anything out of the normal. you know, I think the difference is that they're very small relative to the company, as opposed to the things that we've dealt with over the past four years have been very large. I think that's just allowing us to get ourselves refocused and make sure that, you know, we don't give up on something that really should get the time and attention.
The other thing I would tell you is, you know, we have talked about this over the last year or so, it allows you to focus on things that you didn't pay attention to that are actually really important. On that chart, I had commercial. We have an incredible commercial business where we've taken our RANGER, we have a derivative that's hardened to be in environments, construction environments through United Rentals, Sunbelt Rentals. The vehicle, that business has grown exponentially. That's because we've got a really seasoned and talented leader in that business. It did so without any focus from us.
Now we're looking at that business and saying, "Hey, there are some different things we can do." It never saw the focus because we were spending so much time working on things like Indian's return to profitability. I think it's just a very good case study in the importance of focus around what you do best and being able to allocate your resources to that.
On the subject of tariffs, I think you mentioned that they're doubling this year. Give us a sense for how much or how big that number is for 2026.
At the beginning of the year when we gave guidance, we talked about $215 million in tariffs, about $90 million of it is incremental, given, you know, we really didn't see much tariff impact until the second half of 2025. Fast-forward, excuse me, fast-forward to today, I think the question everybody's sort of wondering is, you know, what happens with, you know, what happened with the Supreme Court last week. We've paid about $125 million in IEPA tariffs. Right now, none of the accounting firms are agreeing or signing off on booking receivables because there's no process really to go collect that money yet. There is a fairly standard process with Customs and Border Patrol to do it. That's what people are starting to do.
I think in the long term, we're gonna get that money back. The timing of that, I think is anybody's guess right now. It needs to play out a little bit further, we're doing everything we can to make sure we're in the best position to get that cash back. It hasn't all gone through the P&L. Obviously, some of it's hung up in inventory. You look at the IEPA tariffs came out, the 10% tariff went in. Let me be really clear, it is a 10% tariff, not a 15% tariff. There's sort of what the president says on Truth Social, there's what actually ends up in federal law. In this case, what's in federal law today is 10%.
15%, he has threatened a lot, but it's not what we're paying. We're paying 10% today. The difference for the full year or the difference for the remainder of the year for us for that is about $30 million. $30 million benefit. We are not updating guidance for that benefit because these tariffs are only in place for 150 days. He could go to 15% tomorrow. He has the authority to do that. That doesn't extend the 150 days. It would just be what it is for the remaining of the 150 days. He has said he's gonna bring in other tariffs at the end of that 150 days or sooner. We have no idea what those are gonna be. We're not gonna run out.
You know, we don't wanna be in a position of trying to update guidance, every time he changes his mind on tariffs. If we get to something where it's stable, we'll look at that. Right now, just giving you the benefit, it would be $125 million in cash if we could get it all back, what we've already paid, and, our tariff burden would be about $30 million less this year if the tariffs hold exactly where they are today, which I don't think is gonna be the case.
What's the process of getting that money back?
You, you know, what's interesting, most of it's been paid in the last 300 days. Under the rules of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, you can amend your filings within 300 days. That's what most people are doing. That's certainly what we're doing, is going back and saying, "Well, these tariffs, we shouldn't have paid these. They're not legal. We want our money back." CBP has not announced a process by which they're gonna refund that money. They may have to take it, you know, it may have to go to court, we're gonna wait and see. You know, we're certainly doing everything we can. Some of it's indirect, you know, where a supplier imported it.
We were really good about tracking all that and making sure we have invoices specifically for the tariffs, we can go back and get that. If a supplier paid it and we paid them, we can go back and get it when they get their refunds. I feel good about where we are and our ability to go get the money. It's just a matter of when the federal government puts a process in to let us go do it.
Mm-hmm. You mentioned the focus on dealer health. With that, where do inventory stand at this point in the season?
Our inventory, as I mentioned earlier, is sub 100 days. I would tell you that we and the next largest competitor are pretty much right in the same realm. The balance of the industry has improved over the last couple of years. They're still not at the levels we are. The thing I think that's most important, and it's true of us and our next largest competitor, the health of the inventory is important. Having current versus non-current in a much better position, so the blend of that inventory. We've worked hard over the last year and a half.
Largely with our dealer council to get honed in on how to make sure that we're delivering the right vehicles so that we don't just have a focus on, "Hey, we want 100 days of inventory," but you have a bunch of RZR Pro R SxS sitting up in Minnesota in December. That's probably not a good use of those vehicles. We have worked hard to refine our RFM profiles, which essentially are the delivery profiles for each of our dealers, and remove vehicles that are slow-moving, make sure that they're getting more of the vehicles that move at a higher rate.
The feedback we're getting is that i t's gonna take time for the broader network, but the feedback we're getting through our sales team is that we've made huge improvements in about a year and a half. Dealers are never gonna be 100% happy, but they are much happier than they were.
How is snowmobiles?
L ook, the snow in the mountains has been somewhat challenging. The snow in the Midwest, the upper Midwest, the East Coast has been good. Trail sleds make up the bulk of the portfolio. It's been good because it's helped us clear a lot of the non-current inventory that dealers had given two years of really bad snow conditions. On top of that, Jenny Nack, who runs that business, has spent the last three years really going after the quality. You know, you don't have to look back too far and see some pretty big recalls and warranty costs in that business. We have flipped that around 180 degrees and gone from a negative to a positive.
Snowmobiles is our highest Net Promoter Score business at over 80, which is almost unheard of. I think it's just a testament of what she's done. We're excited. I was just in Roseau last week with a few members of my management team and Jenny's team. We were riding some of the new sleds that we'll be introducing in the next year or two, I'm really excited about where we're taking that business.
You launched a couple new RANGERs this year, the 1,000 XP. Talk about why they're important to the portfolio.
Look, it's the continuation of what we recognized a couple of years ago that as the industry grew, and given the industry grew rapidly, from call it 2007, 2008, and changed a lot during that time period. I think we and some others chased ourselves up to the high end. I'm really proud of what we have. T he NorthStar, RANGERs that we have, both the 1,000 and the 1,500. T hese are some of the best vehicles on the market. You look at our XPEDITION, you look at our RZR's.
The problem is when you step back and you look at the market, given the vehicles that we had, we were only servicing the higher end 50% of the market, and we really left ourselves exposed on the lower end of the market. The RANGER 500 was a prime example of that, a sub-$10,000 price point. It's proven to be very successful. You know, 80% of the customers that are coming in are new to Polaris. We think that's really important. Not all of them, but a good portion of those customers are gonna either remain with Polaris and/or continue to trade up through the vehicle class. The moves we made here recently with the 1,000 heated cab was primarily around a segment that we saw emerging that we didn't have.
Dealers could probably configure that vehicle on their own, but it takes labor, and labor at dealerships is incredibly constrained right now, given a shortage in technicians. We worked quickly through our upfit capability, which is where our commercial business comes to play, to essentially create a new product offering. On the NorthStar that we brought down, so essentially, we brought a cabbed HVAC vehicle down at a much lower price point. We just knew that there were people who wanted to get into a premium vehicle but just couldn't afford it. We went through. We think we've got compelling features on that relative to our competitors.
Quite frankly, this ends up shutting down some of our Chinese competitors who have come in on the low end and are trying to encroach on the higher end of the business because now we're competing with them at the low end and at the mid-range of the segment. The team moved fast. I'm proud of what they did, and it doesn't mean that all of a sudden the mix of the company's gonna go to value. I've seen that published a few times. That isn't the case. It's just allowing us to open up the aperture and bring customers in that we know will eventually move up into higher-priced vehicles.
Well, great. I think we're just about out of time. Mike, Bob, thank you. Thank you everybody for joining us, and enjoy the rest of the conference.
Thank you.
Thanks, Joe.