Peloton Interactive, Inc. (PTON)
NASDAQ: PTON · Real-Time Price · USD
5.47
+0.21 (3.99%)
Apr 29, 2026, 11:12 AM EDT - Market open
← View all transcripts

Earnings Call: Q4 2022

Aug 25, 2022

Moderator

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Peloton Interactive fourth quarter 2022 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. We will take one minute to assemble the queue after the safe harbor. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Peter Stabler, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Peter Stabler
Head of Investor Relations, Peloton

Good morning and welcome to Peloton's fiscal fourth quarter conference call. Joining today's call are CEO Barry McCarthy and CFO Liz Coddington. Our comments and responses to your questions reflect management's views as of today only and will include statements related to our business that are forward-looking statements under federal securities law. Actual results may differ materially from those contained in or implied by these forward-looking statements due to risks and uncertainties associated with our business. For a discussion of the material risks and other important factors that could impact our actual results, please refer to our SEC filings and today's shareholder letter, both of which can be found on our investor relations website. During this call, we will discuss both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP financial measures is provided in today's shareholder letter.

I'll now turn the call over to our operator to take our first question. Operator?

Moderator

As a reminder, that's star one one to ask a question. We'll go ahead and take a minute for the queue to assemble. All right, our first question will come from the line of Justin Post from Bank of America. Your line is open.

Justin Post
Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst, Bank of America

Great. Thanks. A couple. First, when you said churn about 141%, I think it would be lower if you adjust for Canada. Is that what you're looking for in the first quarter, or is it the adjusted with Canada? Secondly, just thinking about the shape of the year, looking for flattish subs in the first quarter, how are you thinking about holiday seasonality going forward, and what needs to happen to get to break-even cash flow? Thank you.

Barry McCarthy
CEO, Peloton

Take the first two parts and I'll do the cash flow.

Liz Coddington
CFO, Peloton

Sure. The first question, I believe if I understand correctly, was related to churn and what our expectations are for the first quarter. As we mentioned in our shareholder letter, we saw a modest increase in our monthly churn, and for Q4, and that was related to our All-Access subscription price increase that we had in June. Happy to say, though, that for July, we saw churn levels decline from June and decline from the Q4 average. We expect our retention levels to remain attractive. Our engagement trends suggest that churn will continue to remain low in the first quarter and for the rest of the year. With regard to the flat subs, you know, seasonally, Q1 is a low growth quarter for Connected Fitness product sales.

We did increase prices on Bike+ and Tread, and that took effect on 8/12/2022. While we do expect our Q1 churn to remain low, as I said before, our volume of Connected Fitness growth additions in Q1 is expected to be offset by churn due to the size of the sub base. Now, how does that play for seasonality going forward for the rest of the year? You know, we're not providing any full year guidance on revenue or subscribers, but we do expect revenue for the year to most closely resemble the seasonality for fiscal 2022 in terms of revenue per quarter. Hopefully, that's helpful.

Barry McCarthy
CEO, Peloton

I think the third part of the question, Justin, was the free cash flow. We have to get to breakeven cash flow. The short answer is, and not to be glib, we need to right size the spending of the business. The run rate of the business, whatever the run rate of the business turns out to be. I made this point when I first joined the company, both to employees and to investors. It's not enough to just cut expenses. We have to grow revenue. We've taken a number of steps in order to accomplish that objective. We have substantially picked up the pace of innovation and testing and risk-taking in order to accomplish that objective.

Among the new initiatives are Fitness- as- a- Service, the sale of previously owned bikes, evolution of our digital app strategy, which we'll have more to say over the next several months, among other initiatives, like the introduction of the rower and the new pricing strategy. We happen to sit right smack in the middle of the pivot, where we have made substantial progress addressing all of the infrastructure related headwinds of the business. Now it's time to get back to the business of expanding the franchise. We do that principally by expanding the TAM, and we do that principally with a good, better, best strategy, that targets not only the premium segment of the market, but the value segment of the market, and the use case for Connected Fitness with competitive platforms.

Justin Post
Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst, Bank of America

That's great. I'll let someone else ask more questions. Thanks.

Moderator

Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Doug Anmuth from J.P. Morgan. Your line is open.

Doug Anmuth
Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst, JPMorgan

Thanks for taking the questions. You've had multiple product price changes over the past several months. Just trying to understand how comfortable you are now with the most recently revised pricing that creates this greater gap between entry level and premium products, and then how you're going to communicate those options in your marketing. Barry, if you could perhaps also update us on Fitness- as- a- Service, how we should be thinking about kind of full rollout and how you'll increase awareness around the product going forward. Thanks.

Barry McCarthy
CEO, Peloton

Doug, I have difficulty hearing, but I think the first part of the question is about pricing generally-

Doug Anmuth
Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst, JPMorgan

Yes. Yes.

Barry McCarthy
CEO, Peloton

...loans in the market, and the second piece of the question is about FaaS how do we think about it and what are our plans for it?

Doug Anmuth
Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst, JPMorgan

Yeah.

Barry McCarthy
CEO, Peloton

Okay. Let me begin with FaaS, and then if I miss anything, I'm gonna ask Liz to jump in on top. We've sort of gradually expanded the footprint for FaaS and our marketing initiatives around FaaS. We're renting at a pace of, in round numbers, 30,000-40,000 units on an annual basis. It's, you know, a relatively small footprint, and we haven't really leaned into it yet. It begs the question why, because we've been at it for a while.

The answer is, in order to know whether or not the value proposition works for consumers and works for Peloton, we need to understand what the retention behavior is and the implied churn rate, so we can calculate lifetime value and figure out whether or not we've created a nuclear bomb or we're for the path to the promised land. I would say so far, we're encouraged by the churn data we've seen, recognizing that, you know, it's a growing but limited sample. I'm guardedly optimistic.

I would say that I would think a win for us might be something like 125,000-150,000 bikes a year renters and the ability, which we have just brought online, to utilize our certified pre-owned inventory to fulfill demand under that program. I would say net net that looks pretty encouraging. Now, there will be some substitution behavior, I think, between certified pre-owned and growth in Fitness as a Service because they both target basically the same segment of the marketplace, which is the value-minded shopper. It's pretty clear that we are bringing into the Peloton family a younger, slightly more female demo than we have historically, which is good news. It means those programs are expanding the TAM.

Now, as it relates to CPO, we said we'd seen substantially better performance. We talk of very small numbers, so, you know, take it with a grain of salt. We outperformed our forecast by 3x. We have a lot of bikes in inventory, used bikes, that we can recycle into that program. We've been talking about it for a year. We finally got it live. We're gonna lean into it. Remains to be seen how big that program can become and as it scales, what the substitution behavior will be with the Fitness-as-a-Service. Okay, I probably talked too long about that. Sorry. As it relates to pricing, I want us to pursue a good, better, best strategy.

We believe, and I think the net promoter scores for our various products support the notion that, in the premium segment of the marketplace, the integrated hardware user experience with Peloton is the absolute best. There are people who are willing to pay a premium for that. We wanna serve that marketplace well. We also want, if we're gonna grow our revenues as FaaS as we would like, we're gonna have to increase the TAM. If we're gonna increase the TAM, we're gonna have to reach for new market segments, and that's where the good and better comes in. That's where the FaaS and the digital app strategy comes into play. With respect to the digital app strategy, I had previously told investors that I wanted us to pursue a freemium strategy.

We are gonna implement that. There'll be various price points, and you'll have access to different kinds of content depending on how much you pay for the digital app. Roughly half of our paying customers today use our Connected Fitness-related content on the app. It's quite clear they're using the app on somebody else's hardware, which is something we've always shied away from and going forward is something we're gonna lean into. I would be delighted for you to use our content on somebody else's hardware if you've already purchased it. That's a big installed base, and I think it's a big opportunity for monetization for us, and we're gonna lean into that segment of the market as well in order to grow TAM. We'll figure out the pricing as we go.

I think if we have the luxury like we do now because of our cash position and the changes we've made in the business to price products, in order to earn a reasonable return on hardware, we will. That wasn't the case earlier in the year. We absolutely needed to liquidate hardware to manage for cash, so we did, but we've put that in the rearview mirror at the moment. Did I answer your question?

Doug Anmuth
Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst, JPMorgan

You did. Very helpful. Thank you, Barry.

Barry McCarthy
CEO, Peloton

Yep.

Moderator

Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Ron Josey from Citi. Your line is open.

Ron Josey
Managing Director and Senior Internet Analyst, Citi

Great. Thanks for taking the question. I wanted to ask maybe, bigger picture on gross margins. Barry, I know we talked about the focus being on free cash flow, but help us understand how you view gross margins, maybe on the subscription side, given the pricing increase. Then on the product side, as you exit manufacturing and last mile and FaaS gaining share here, just as, you know, we think bigger picture on the way towards free cash flow. Maybe a second one just on that, any insight or help us understand how you view inventory just continually coming down, going forward. Thank you.

Barry McCarthy
CEO, Peloton

I'm gonna ask Liz to take the gross margin, subscription and bigger picture piece, and I'll just take the inventory liquidation. I think there might be a perception that because we have a large inventory position that we will be liquidating during FY 2023, we will have a large wind at our backs from a free cash flow perspective that will help us achieve our objectives in FY 2023, but we will not have the benefit of in FY 2024. I just wanna burst that balloon and say, actually, on a net basis, the benefit in FY 2023 will be all of $6 million roughly.

The reason for that is we have the benefit, of course, of selling inventory we've already paid for, but we also, in settlement of the supply-related issues that we've dealt with in the past several quarters, we have quite a bit of money flowing out the door. So on a net basis, it's sort of a no harm, no foul. I think for the full year, if we're successful in managing to our current forecast, we'll end the year with about $1 billion in cash, which leaves us, you know, well capitalized for the run rate of the business. Liz, do you wanna address the gross margin piece of the question?

Liz Coddington
CFO, Peloton

Yeah. With regard to gross margin, the way we think about the way I think about gross margin is there's kind of two pieces to it, right? There's the revenue piece, which we increased the prices for Bike+ and Tread, and that's gonna obviously have a positive effect on gross margin overall. You know, from a cost of goods perspective, we decided to fully outsource our last mile delivery to 3PL, as we announced that. That will have a positive impact on our delivery costs. We're also focusing on improving our delivery quality. That should also help reduce our warranty costs over time. Kind of more of a longer-term opportunity on gross margin. This is related to the Connected Fitness side of it, you know, opportunities to reduce the cost of our hardware through how we design our products. That's obviously, like, a longer-term opportunity.

Barry McCarthy
CEO, Peloton

Let me just jump in and mention related to that, is redesigned to enable self-install, which would dramatically change the logistics and the cost associated with last mile.

Liz Coddington
CFO, Peloton

Yep.

Barry McCarthy
CEO, Peloton

Domestically and internationally.

Liz Coddington
CFO, Peloton

I did wanna reiterate that for Q1, we provided a guidance of around 35% gross margin, but we're not providing any further guidance for the year beyond that at this time. You also had a question about kind of subscription gross margin, and obviously that is, you know, that margin is higher than our product gross, our Connected Fitness product gross margin. As our subscription base continues to grow and mature, that will naturally have some benefits to gross margin overall as well.

Ron Josey
Managing Director and Senior Internet Analyst, Citi

Thank you, Barry. Thank you, Liz.

Moderator

One moment for our next question. Our next question is off the line of Lauren Schenk from Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.

Lauren Schenk
Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Great. Thanks. Just following up on that last one, how should we think about sort of the longer term or stabilized Connected Fitness gross margin? And my second question, in terms of the self-install option, is that only gonna be available on Amazon for the time being, any color on the margin benefit from that? It looks like pricing is similar or the same as having the professional delivery. In terms of other potential third-party partners, what are you looking for in those new relationships? Thanks.

Barry McCarthy
CEO, Peloton

Well, let's see. As it relates to long-term gross margin, I think increasingly the business is driven by the growth in recurring subscription revenue, that has an inherently higher margin than the hardware side of the business. The long-term trend for margin is towards the software margin rather than the hardware margin. The cost implications for self-install, well, let me talk about the implications of self-install generally. One of the challenges related to the delivery of hardware is coordinating the delivery schedule with the availability of the members who purchased hardware. If we could move to a drop ship model, we eliminate all of the majority of that friction, which would be a very good thing.

Secondly, if in the process of designing a self-install capability, we were able to decrease the weight of the unit. There's some last-mile cost-related benefits that would flow through to us as well. Lastly, if we can get to a self-install, we think it significantly improves the opportunities for international growth, which we plan to lean into when we are able to absorb the incremental cost for that expansion. There was a question generally about third-party retail partners. In my previous comments to investors, I had indicated this was a strategy that I hoped we would lean into. It's early. We're learning. This is not a substitute for our own retail strategy. This is a recognition that we need to be where our customers are.

Sometimes that's in the store, sometimes that's on our website. We know from our own research that there are roughly 500,000 searches a month on Amazon for Peloton. There's an opportunity to sell there and in other retail formats as well. It's important that we test and learn by broadening our distribution to see which of those could be cost-effective for us. Then we'll, over time, as we come to understand the margin implications, you know, that'd be great. In time, it'd be terrific if we could broaden the distribution to other Peloton hardware platforms on Amazon. At the moment, we need to be able to be drop shipped in order to be on their platform a nd our Bike+ doesn't lend itself to that solution yet, and which is why we have not yet offered it for sale on their platform.

You know, in time, I hope that we are able to find a solution to that short-term roadblock.

Take your next question, please.

Moderator

Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Edward Yruma from Piper Sandler. Your line is open.

Edward Yruma
Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst, Piper Sandler

Hey, guys. Good morning. Thanks for taking the question. I wanted to click down a little bit on engagement. I know you're gonna stop reporting metrics on a quarterly basis, but, you know, how do you think about engagement holistically? Obviously, I know lots of moving pieces post-COVID, and seasonality, but, you know, where do you see engagement going over time, and is there anything you can do to help drive that number higher? Thank you.

Barry McCarthy
CEO, Peloton

Let me jump in here. I said I wanted to lean into the software. It's important that we be great at both hardware and software. I think the primary growth opportunity for us is in exploiting our singularly unique competitive advantage, which is our content, right? It is the crown jewel. It continued to perform spectacularly well. Now, for you to be able to enjoy it, you have to be able to discover it. The way we improve engagement and lower churn and increase lifetime value and drive more organic growth from word of mouth is by making you more delighted with that content.

The way we do that is by helping you engage with it, by understanding, by personalizing it, by giving it a front end that understands what your likes and dislikes are, and then serving you content that is consistent with your preferences, right? This is why Netflix beat Blockbuster. This is among the reasons that Spotify has run the table as the world's largest streaming music service. The more content you have, the more important it becomes that you be good, even great, at building that personalized user interface. It is currently a focus for us and we will be relentless about it. I would say we're still really in very early stages.

I mean, there's a little bit of stuff we serve you that, you know, if you use the Bike by way of example, there's a little bit of stuff on your screen when you log in that reflects, you know, maybe reflects some of the instructors you've taken classes from. But there's a ton of stuff that we continue to serve to you that, you know, you have never engaged with that, you know, reflects what we think you should be interested in. But what really matters is what you think you should be interested in. So we need to close that gap.

Next question, Victor, please. Thank you.

Moderator

One moment. Our next question comes from the line of Eric Sheridan from Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.

Eric Sheridan
Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst, Goldman Sachs

Thanks so much for taking the questions. Maybe just a two-parter. You know, Barry, how are you thinking about the health of the brand today? You know, you came out of the pandemic with a lot of awareness of the brand, a lot of halo effect, but sales and marketing has been more of an area of reduction in the last couple of quarters. How do you think about sort of returning to sales and marketing as a channel, continuing to grow awareness of the brand and use sales and marketing as a tool to address sort of the better, best strategy you talked about in terms of amplifying the gross addition dynamic for the platform? Thanks.

Barry McCarthy
CEO, Peloton

Thanks for the question, Eric. Fortunately, I think the health of the brand is exquisitely good. The health of the business has been challenged, but the brand remains beloved, and the net promoter scores remain extraordinary. If you are what your track record says you are, we are a U.S.-based bike company, right? 96% of the hardware platforms in people's homes today are bikes. But there's so much more opportunity available to us to drive growth. Not just Bike+, but the Tread, the Rower, the Guide, and especially the digital app, and coupled with the good, better, best strategy that opened up a segment of the TAM we haven't you know historically targeted. The opportunity for us now is to invest in growing awareness.

By way of example, the Bike has a 53% unaided awareness, but the Tread is only 21%. The unaided awareness for the digital app is 4%. There's tremendous upside to be had if we can execute here. In part, the principal message of my letter is, okay, we're pivoting now. There are a bunch of things we had to fix in order to put ourselves in this position. Wish that it happened sooner, but it's happening now, and we're gonna tackle head on this challenge related to marketing and growth. What I've tried to articulate is the different initiatives that we're gonna pursue in order to drive success. The important thing to recognize is that the path to success involves having more swings at the plate.

So you've seen us deploy a number of initiatives to accomplish that objective. We're gonna connect with the ball. It's just a matter of time. I know from my Netflix experience and my Spotify experience, I can't tell you exactly which one of those initiatives is gonna get us where we wanna go, but I am confident of the cumulative effect. Next question, please, Victor. Thank you.

Moderator

Our next question comes from the line of Shweta Khajuria from Evercore ISI. Your line is open.

Shweta Khajuria
Managing Director and Equity Research Analyst, Evercore ISI

Okay. Thank you for taking my questions. I have one on the next quarter guide. I think this was somewhat asked earlier, but I just wanna get a little bit more clarification. If you exclude the Canadian members in the guide, organically, does that imply net adds decline? Because 85% of members actually did take the action. Could you please clarify that? Second is on gross margins. Possible to get a little bit more color on the magnitude of impact from the price increases versus the cost-cutting actions that you took related to customer service and outsourcing third-party logistics. The final question is, Barry, as you think about growth next year, possible to give a sense of how FaaS, if at all, the connected fitness market is expected to grow?

In terms of the magnitude of the impact of all these initiatives, whether it is FaaS or international or digital subscription, app initiatives, which ones do you think in order of magnitude will be most impactful, next year? Thank you very much.

Barry McCarthy
CEO, Peloton

Liz is deciding how she wants to-

Liz Coddington
CFO, Peloton

Well, I'm-

Barry McCarthy
CEO, Peloton

...answer the first two.

Liz Coddington
CFO, Peloton

...I'm trying to make sure I understand your question, Shweta. The first question was about the Canadian subscribers. I think what you were asking is, you know, if that implies a negative net adds as a result of the fact that these subscribers churned, but not-

Barry McCarthy
CEO, Peloton

They're not a gross add.

Liz Coddington
CFO, Peloton

They're not a gross add. If they had not churned, it just wouldn't be an impact, is the way that I sort of think about that. They're not considered a gross add, is effectively the way that we would think about that.

Barry McCarthy
CEO, Peloton

It shows up in the net, not the gross number.

Liz Coddington
CFO, Peloton

Correct. The gross margin question, I wasn't quite following what you were asking there.

Barry McCarthy
CEO, Peloton

Shweta, correct me if I'm wrong. How much of the gross margin improvement comes from last mile member service reduction as opposed to price increase?

Shweta Khajuria
Managing Director and Equity Research Analyst, Evercore ISI

That's right. Thank you.

Moderator

Thank you. One moment.

Barry McCarthy
CEO, Peloton

No, Victor, we're not finished with this question yet. Well, while Liz is noodling on that, let me jump in on the Connected Fitness market next year. Honestly, I don't pretend to know what's gonna happen to the marketplace as a result of different puts and takes with the economy. I think the challenge for us regardless is to grow the TAM and to reach market segments that we don't currently reach in order to accomplish that objective. Which leads me to the answer to your question, where do I think will be the principal leverage points for the business? I'm gonna put Rowers on the shelf for a moment in answering that question. Probably certified pre-owned. That just flew out the door.

In my nirvana, it would be followed by growth in the digital app, because I think that is singularly important to us from a strategic perspective. If we're successful with that initiative, we'll unlock access to the installed base of competitive hardware and use occasions that don't currently exist for our content, followed by Fitness-as-a-Service. If Fitness-as-a-Service really takes off, then there's a whole capital strategy that we'll need to figure out for that business. I'm confident that we'll have access to the capital if the margins are as attractive as we think and if it's really growing as FaaS, as you know, we think it might. I said I put Rowers on the shelf.

You know, we will have to see how that product does when it arrives. It's gonna be expensive, but I think we're gonna revolutionize the market, and we'll see how those two crosscurrents land. We anticipate that it will be a significantly better user experience than anything currently available in the marketplace.

Liz Coddington
CFO, Peloton

For the growth margin question, I think you were asking like how should we think about the composition of the growth margin improvement and how much is coming from price and how much is coming from our 3PL logistics moving to the 3PL outsourcing model for last mile logistics. In Q1, the vast majority is gonna come from pricing because we just announced the move to outsource the 3PL to third parties. That will take a bit of time. Over the course of the year, we still expect more of it, more than 50% to come from the pricing. The logistics will be very impactful, and it will be meaningful over the course of the year. Does that help? Does that answer your question, Shweta?

Barry McCarthy
CEO, Peloton

Next question please, Victor.

Moderator

All right. One moment. Our next question comes from the line of Kaumil Gajrawala from Credit Suisse. Your line is open.

Kaumil Gajrawala
Managing Director of Equity Research, Credit Suisse

Hi. Thanks. Good morning, everybody. Can you talk a little bit about the consumer and maybe the interaction between, in-person studios and gyms and Connected Fitness? Obviously, the industry is down quite a bit, and there's a lot of macro effects, but can you maybe just talk about what you might be seeing in terms of the pendulum maybe swinging one direction or the other?

Barry McCarthy
CEO, Peloton

You know, let's see. I'm not sure that our experience translates to the experience of our competitors. I think it probably doesn't. In our uniquely different ecosystem, where we've just opened up our studios, the amount of energy and among our passionate user base is, well, it's just something to behold. People lined up around the block for hours, classes oversold, crashing our reservation system. I mean, it's just insane. You know, that's not what the industry is experiencing, you know, generally. Now, that said, notwithstanding the passion and enthusiasm among their rabid member base, as a percentage of total classes taken live, relatively small, but it has an enormous halo effect and drives tremendous word of mouth, I think, all of which helps, you know, grow the brand. Is that helpful?

Kaumil Gajrawala
Managing Director of Equity Research, Credit Suisse

Yeah, that helps. Would you consider expanding the in-person studios and such? You obviously have a lot of excitement so far, but it's, you know, fairly small.

Have a lot of excitement so far, but it's, you know, fairly small.

Barry McCarthy
CEO, Peloton

I think there's an opportunity. I'll tell you how we are thinking about it. Jennifer Cotter, who runs that business for us spectacularly well, and I have spent time thinking about ways in which to create marketing and branding and PR opportunities, on a local basis, using the celebrity power of our instructors in different geographic markets. If we were to expand, I think that would be the sort of kernel of an idea that we would try to leverage, geographically rather than opening, say, incremental studios around the country. Just because the cost of doing that is so prohibitively high.

Kaumil Gajrawala
Managing Director of Equity Research, Credit Suisse

Thank you.

Barry McCarthy
CEO, Peloton

Thank you.

Moderator

One moment. Our next question comes from the line of John Blackledge from Cowen. Your line is open.

John Blackledge
Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst, Cowen

Oh, great. Thanks. Two questions. First, how should we think about the retail store footprint in fiscal 2023 and beyond? The second question on cash flow breakeven, is there any way to kind of think about the level of top line in second half 2023 to get to that, cash flow breakeven number? Thank you.

Barry McCarthy
CEO, Peloton

I'll let Liz take the second one. Let me do the retail footprint. We don't know how many stores we're gonna end up with when the dust settles. Our objective is to repurpose about $50 million worth of run rate spending to deploy it more productively from a marketing perspective when the dust has settled, and we are done restructuring the retail footprint domestically and internationally. Liz, do you wanna do the capital?

Liz Coddington
CFO, Peloton

The cash flow question and thinking about revenue? As we mentioned, you know, that we are pulling all these different levers on the business right now, and so there's a lot of uncertainty about how these levers will bear out. We're not providing any full year guidance on revenue, but we did expect it to follow the seasonality in terms of revenue per quarter for prior years. Now, that being said, from a cash flow perspective, we do have this North Star goal that we are working to achieve free cash flow breakeven by the end of the year, and we will be maintaining a cash balance of at least $1 billion.

What we have to do in order to do that is make sure that we continue to work hard to right size our costs, as Barry mentioned earlier, to align with the run rate of the business. We will continue to do that in order to make sure that we achieve our goal of being breakeven free cash flow by the second half.

Barry McCarthy
CEO, Peloton

I would say by the way, related to the retail footprint savings, not expecting any savings in FY 2023. The cost of rationalizing that distribution chain will mostly consume whatever savings we would otherwise realize. The savings, if there are any, would happen in 2024. In my nirvana, there wouldn't be any savings. We'd take that $50 million, and we'd redeploy it in marketing to drive incremental growth. The question is, can we find ways to spend that cost effectively using our LTV to CAC framework?

John Blackledge
Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst, Cowen

Thank you.

Barry McCarthy
CEO, Peloton

Thanks.

Moderator

One moment. Our next question comes from the line of Youssef Squali from Truist. Your line is open.

Youssef Squali
Head Managing Director of the Internet and Digital Media Research, Truist

Thank you very much. I have a couple maybe for Barry. On the Amazon partnership that you announced yesterday, arguably you guys can do a lot more with Amazon. Wanted to understand just how you think about that partnership right now. It seems like based on the type of products you're allowing Amazon to sell or you're selling through Amazon, it's maybe fit the lower end of your good, better, best strategy. Is that kind of the way to think about your retail strategy broadly speaking, or is it just versus DTC, or is that just as you try to learn more about that strategy since you've basically pivoted from DTC to a broader retail strategy? Then maybe, can you just talk about the status of Precor within the company? What is the strategic rationale of keeping it?

Barry McCarthy
CEO, Peloton

I'll let Liz handle the Precor. With respect to Amazon, I'd love to sell all of our connected fitness platforms on Amazon good, better, best. But they need to be. At the moment, they need to have the ability for consumers to opt in to self-install, and that's not possible with Bike+ or Tread. And so until or unless that constraint changes, or if we complete a redesign cycle, you won't see those platforms on Amazon. How important will it be? We don't know. And we have modest assumptions in our forecast related to the impact to that business. I hope that has tremendous upside but, you know, we won't know till we know. We just.

The point here is to begin the process of learning and then based on the learning, make smart operating decisions about how to leverage the learning into a profitable opportunity both for them and for us. That's the journey we're on. Same thing with FaaS and same thing with Certified Pre-Owned, and same thing with the various flavors of digital app that we're gonna be rolling out. Use your intuition to figure out what to test, then use the data to inform you about how to react to the test results you're seeing, and take risks and move fast and don't be afraid to break stuff.

Liz Coddington
CFO, Peloton

With regard to Precor, there was a question in there about Precor. We're continuing to assess our strategy for Precor. It's been helpful for us as we've been building our Peloton commercial business. With all the other things that we're working on, all of our supply chain work, the FaaS work that we've been doing, the focus on Precor hasn't been our highest priority area. We don't have much else to share at this point.

Barry McCarthy
CEO, Peloton

It is true. There have been other priorities that have consumed our focus and attention. I did say when I first joined that if it wasn't Connected Fitness related, it wasn't gonna be part of our long-term strategy, and strategy needed to be about choice. All those things are true. Liz pointed out it's been very helpful to us. That acquisition's been very helpful to us with our commercial business. Our commercial business is growing at about 35% year-over-year in terms of revenue. Like to lean into that, like to accelerate that growth, making that a priority to, you know, make that happen. In the fullness of time, we'll have more to say about Precor, particularly now that we have more bandwidth to be able to think about the role it plays in our long-term strategy.

Moderator

That makes sense.

Barry McCarthy
CEO, Peloton

Victor, we'll take one more question.

Moderator

Thank you. One moment. Our last question will come from the line of Arpine Kocharyan from UBS. Your line is open.

Arpine Kocharyan
Managing Director, UBS

Hi. Good morning. Thanks for taking my question. In terms of your previously announced $800 million of cost savings, you know, I appreciate that you're probably looking at many moving parts to that, but just if you could sort of bring it all together and outline what's latest on some of the buckets that you're looking at and overall cost savings you should be targeting sort of more medium term. Just trying to understand, have you identified any areas where that initial expectation of how much you could cut could be much bigger than thought? And then as a quick follow-up, now that you've done some testing of removing that upfront cost for the customer to have them pay higher subscription over time, do you have a more kind of updated sense of what incremental demand opportunity that is for you?

Some numbers if you could share, whatever you're looking at. Thank you very much.

Liz Coddington
CFO, Peloton

With regard to the cost savings, it was a little bit hard to hear on the phone, but I believe you're referring to the restructuring plans that we had laid out back in February, the $800 million, of which $500 million was OpEx, $300 million was COGS. We're actually tracking ahead of the $500 million OpEx target at this point. We'll continue, like we said, to rightsize the cost structure of the business to align with the run rate of the business and whatever that requires. Some of the things that we've announced, the 3PL strategy shift is part of that cost savings opportunity. On COGS, sorry, let's talk actually, the 3PL shift is more related to the COGS side. Excuse me.

On COGS, our savings is coming from that for the most part, and also some headcount reductions. For that $300 million piece, we said that was gonna take longer, and it will, in part because it's very dependent on inventory, and so that will take more time as we move through the inventory that we already have to be able to realize some of those COGS savings.

Barry McCarthy
CEO, Peloton

It's a function of the way we account for inventory.

Liz Coddington
CFO, Peloton

Yes.

Barry McCarthy
CEO, Peloton

I'm pretty sure I didn't understand the second piece of the question related to upfront cost and subscription.

Arpine Kocharyan
Managing Director, UBS

Now that you've done some testing of removing that upfront cost and have the customer pay higher subscription, because last time you shared some sort of helpful numbers, do you have a more updated view or sense of what incremental demand that unlocks for you over time?

Barry McCarthy
CEO, Peloton

Oh, I see. This is related to the rental program with FaaS, I think.

Arpine Kocharyan
Managing Director, UBS

That's right. Yep.

Barry McCarthy
CEO, Peloton

Well, I think what I said on the call earlier, I should reiterate here. We're currently at a run rate of about 40,000 units annually, and I think a win for us would be something like 125,000-150,000 a year. The opportunity and the challenge for us is to move it from where we are currently to that higher run rate. How big a challenge will that be? Well, we really haven't marketed yet. Most people really don't know it exists. When we do market it looks like it grows pretty fast. You know, I'm hesitant to like share any numbers 'cause I really don't want it to be misleading.

There are a couple puts and calls which make reading the data a little dicey. We have changed price points, so the value proposition. We detuned the value proposition for consumers. Then we included Bike+, then we removed Bike+, now we're putting Bike+ back in. When we put Bike+ back in, we saw a 74% increase in volume over eight weeks, week over week. If we look back, you know, to the prior week when we had included Bike+ in the mix, it was only like a 35% increase over nine weeks. It's still a 35% increase over nine weeks. That's because we started to broaden the marketing of the FaaS program and create awareness for it.

Really the question is how high is the glass ceiling? I don't know how long it will take us to get there. My intuition is that we're onto something really important. The FaaS users, as I said, are younger. It skews slightly more female. A big surprise for me, they're actually more engaged than our core users, which isn't what I expected since they had a less of a financial investment in the product. Maybe that reflects the younger age demo. I'm not sure, and we'll have to see if that continues to scale as we broaden the market. It's quite clear that there's a big opportunity for us in the value-conscious segment of the marketplace. We're going for it.

Arpine Kocharyan
Managing Director, UBS

Thank you very much.

Barry McCarthy
CEO, Peloton

Thank you everyone for your time today. Hope you all have a good day.

Moderator

This concludes.

Barry McCarthy
CEO, Peloton

Have a good day.

Moderator

Thanks for waiting. You may now disconnect. Everyone have a great day.

Powered by