Hey, good morning. Let's go ahead and find our seats here. We've got a couple more spots in the back. Okay, yep, good. One more. Okay, good. Anyway, hey, guys, we are honored today to be joined by Latham Group. Latham Group is the largest designer, manufacturer, and marketer of inground residential swimming pools in North America, Australia, and New Zealand, marketing its products under its family of brands, including Latham, Coverstar, GLI, and Narellan. Latham has a coast-to-coast operations platform consisting of over 2,000 employees across 30 facilities, leading purveyor of fiberglass pools, prefabricated shells delivered directly to homeowners for dealer installation. Today, we are honored to be joined by the company's CEO, Scott Rajeski, and CFO, Oliver Gloe. Scott, I'll let you take it away with the presentation, and then we'll get some Q&A.
Great. Thanks, Andrew. I guess Andrew stole my opening. Very well done. You know, we're gonna have to hire you here, Andrew, to go on the road with us. Standard disclaimer out there. I'm not gonna read it. You guys are familiar with that. But if we jump into it, really, what we're trying to create here at Latham is really being a leading outdoor living company from a brand standpoint. We are the leading consumer brand in the residential pool market. And what's interesting is, right, we've also, we're the only pool company out there with a full broad lineup of products. We play in every product category where most of the competitors do not play. It's a really good market in North America, as well as Australia and New Zealand.
What we're trying to do, though, is drive the fiberglass penetration share gains. About 50% of the market today currently is concrete pools. We've seen the fiberglass share move nicely, and we'll talk about some of those numbers in a few slides here. As Andrew said, I think what positions us fairly differently from the competition as well is our model. We operate over 30 facilities. Why that's important, specifically with fiberglass, is we want to be close to the market we're serving. Distributing the cost of a pool can be pretty expensive, and we can hit 95% of the country within a two-day shipping from one of our plants.
We actually can hit about 75% within a one-day shipping cycle, and that's important to get that equipment back to the plant, load it back up from an efficiency standpoint. We got a pretty strong balance sheet. I think that's what Oliver and myself really like about the company. Well capitalized, and really where we are, you know, we really believe we're at the bottom of the cycle here for new pool starts, at this point here in 2024, with the guidance that we issued. We've really tried to position the company nicely for when the market rebounds. It's not when, it's, y ou know, it's not if it rebounds, it's when, which we see that being next year. And I think internally, we've done a lot to just become a better-run company.
Our value engineering, our lean initiatives that we've got going are really helping with profit margins, and I think when we see the economy and the industry rebound, we'll see a return to kind of the levels we had been at over the last few years. You know, a little bit about the significant competitive advantages here real quick. We talked about that reach and our ability to quickly hit where the consumers are for the pools. You know, our manufacturing processes and production capability, we've invested a lot in the company over the last several years, so we have plenty of capacity to grow into. You know, we just built a new Kingston facility up in Kingston, Ontario. Yeah, I think it's probably the world's largest fiberglass manufacturing facility out there right now, state-of-the-art plant.
One of the things we also do for all of our dealers is we act as a sales force for them. We generate leads, we push leads to those dealers, we train new dealers, we bring them in, we run boot camps for those dealers in Zephyrhills, Florida. What we really try to do is build them to be better business people through that lead generation effort and, you know, figure out how we can scale a dealer from doing 10 pools to 20 pools, to 40 pools, to 80 pools, with one crew. You know, we are the leader in every single category we compete. When we talk about inground swimming pools, that composes our fiberglass pools, which is the largest percentage of that pie, in the low 70s.
The packaged pool is a polymer wall or a steel wall system that's built and constructed in the field that a vinyl liner will go into. Our liner category, inground vinyl liners, what we like about that, there's over 2 million vinyl liner pools installed in North America today. Every eight years - 10 years, one of those liners needs to be replaced. So it's a really nice recurring revenue business for us. There's about 200,000 liners every year replaced in the U.S., and we have about a 40% share there. The cover business has two unique aspects to it. It's the winter safety cover, so when you're in the northern climates in the winter, you close your pool, that cover completely covers your pool off. And that's a very heavy replacement business as well.
There's about 120,000 winter safety covers sold a year. Every eight years - 10 years, those covers need to be replaced. Good recurring revenue. The automatic safety cover business, think of that as a garage door for your pool. It fully closes your pool. There's a good ROI. You can recover the cost of that investment in about four years. It lowers the energy usage of your pool, keeps your pool clean, lowers the chemical usage, prevents water evaporation, but more importantly, it's a safety aspect. Your pool is completely closed from access. No one's going to get into that pool. It will prevent accidental drownings as well, which is really important.
The number of pools that have an auto cover on them today is in the low 20s, so it's another huge growth opportunity for us to drive the adoption and awareness of an auto cover on all pools. Really what we like to talk about is fiberglass, because it really is the future of the industry. You know, it's a great, beautiful pool. It's highly customizable. It's manufactured in one of our plants, delivered right to the backyard as a service we provide to the dealer and the homeowner. It's about a 25% - 30% lower upfront cost versus a comparable concrete pool. And over time, with a concrete pool, it's gonna crack, it's gonna break. You're gonna need to do repairs, resurfacing, acid washes. That cost advantage will grow at about 35%-40% over a 10 year - 20 year ownership time frame.
The finish of the pool is much nicer than concrete. It's smooth, just like glass. Built to last, lifetime warranty. And if you look at what we've been able to drive in the industry, you know, in 2019, about 16% of all pool starts were fiberglass. You know, last year, our estimates were about 22% of the market was fiberglass. So, you know, 600 basis point improvement in a market that has actually been shrinking over time. If we look at Australia and New Zealand, that number is 70%. So when people ask us, you know, "What's the opportunity to drive this growth further?" 70% is kind of the number we're shooting for.
I think in the short term or near term, you know, more what the European market is at is 40% - 50%, and that's kind of the next target that we've laid out there for ourselves is, you know, when can we hit that kind of number that's out there? So it's not a matter of can we, it's a matter of when we will. With that, I'll turn it over to Oliver for the next couple of slides.
Yeah, a quick overview on our business by revenue, and that's 2023 revenue. You can see on the left side, you know, about half of our business, a little bit less in liners and covers. And as Scott already mentioned, a fair share of that is replacement business. 52% of that business is replacement, and that is especially in safety covers as well as in vinyl liners. But also a fair share of the auto cover business is replacement versus new installs. A little bit more than half of our business is inground pools, and of that, the very important category of fiberglass. So 73% of the inground pool category is fiberglass, and that is nicely up from prior year, about by about 3 percentage points.
That really is attributed to the conversion towards fiberglass that Scott just mentioned a slide back. As we move to the next slide, you know, our 2024 guidance, which we reaffirmed in our last earnings call, is at midpoint net sales of about $505 million. That is about 11% down versus prior year. The cornerstones of that guidance is really an assumption that year-over-year, the market of new inground pool starts will be down 15%, and which is partially offset by the continued conversion towards fiberglass, as well as the share of the replacement business. Adjusted EBITDA at midpoint, about $65 million.
That's really driven by, you know, a decrease in volume, which is partially but nicely offset by the continued efforts on, you know, working on our cost base, right? We've done a couple of restructuring projects in the past that are fully implemented, where we have a nice spillover, carry over into 2024, but then also a continued work on lean value engineering to really increase the efficiency of our site network. And then lastly, capital expenditure. We see the business at about $5 million a quarter, and that's really a sum of, you know, investments in maintenance, EHNS, but also in continued growth in our molds and into new fiberglass models, as well as lead generation and also, you know, digital transformation.
Finishing off here, you know, I think, as we say on the slide, a very compelling long-term growth story, driven again by the market share gains of fiberglass, the continued conversion, the potential that fiberglass has within the market. We are the leading consumer brand within our categories and have, as Scott described, the very unique direct to homeowner model, which creates that pull, which creates that lead for our dealers and installers. Again, you know, continuing to drive, you know, leverage through, you know, cost savings, through working on efficiency, lean value engineering, and all that, should both top line and bottom line, pro, position us for over proportional growth once the market returns.
Great! Let's jump into some questions real quick. I'll let, I'll throw it out to the audience, if anybody wants to start it off. Okay, I'll go ahead and start it off real quick with one. So talk about the fiberglass pools. You did talk a little bit about, about the advantages of kind of lower lifetime ownership. I guess first I'd like to, like to start with, what are kind of the upfront costs, and how to, how can that kind of vary by, by region? Let's start there.
Yeah, so if we looked at a, I'd say, typical fiberglass pool project on average, you're gonna spend roughly $75,000 to get that pool installed in your backyard. Again, we'll deliver that pool to the backyard, and probably one of the other things that's important is that pool can be installed as fast as one day. So a lot of times they'll dig that hole that morning, the pool's delivered 11 A.M., 12 A.M., set into the hole, plumbed out, backfilled, equipment turned on, pool filled and running 5:00 P.M. in the afternoon. Our best dealers do it in one day. The comparable concrete pool would be about $105,000, and you're gonna have a crew of nine guys in your backyard building the pool part by part over a three month - six month period.
So you just start thinking about not only that $25,000 - $30,000 cost advantage up front, the speed to get the pool is that much faster, and the only other thing that's included in that is like, you know, think about just the three feet of concrete decking.
'Cause some of these pool projects can quickly get up to $150,000, $200,000, $250,000. And even with vinyl too, 'cause, you know, part of what we can do is also steal share against the vinyl liner pool. That comparable vinyl liner pool might be, say, $60,000 - $65,000, but again, it's gonna take over a month to construct that pool in the backyard. And over every 8 years - 10 years, you're gonna have to start replacing a vinyl liner at, you know, $5,000 - $6,000 a rip. So over, let's say, 20-year ownership, even a vinyl liner pool gets to a break-even point with a fiberglass pool. So just huge benefits across the board on all fronts there, Andrew.
I guess the important thing is, you mentioned the gunite pool. There are some drawbacks about fiberglass, one of them being size, also customization. But you've made, n umber one, your network does support, answers a little bit of the problem on the latter. But also I guess it's important to kind of step back here and think about the evolution of fiberglass pools themselves, how that's kind of developed to become a product that's more on par with gunite and can really stand up well with any other option now versus maybe 15 years, 20 years ago.
Yeah, let me touch the size one first, because, you know, our pools are limited to 16-foot wide, DOT shipping limitations in terms of what you can ship down the highway system. 85% of all pools built in the U.S. are less than 16 foot wide. So when we sit there and think about the market, you know, if someone does want an 18-foot or 20-foot wide swimming pool, we would move them to a vinyl liner pool, or we would still put a fiberglass pool in, and then we can add a 10x16-foot tanning ledge off the side of that pool.
So the, the particular model we sell may be set in terms of the shape, but the ability to customize it with inlays, tile, water descents, waterfalls, spillover spas, tanning ledges off to the side, really begins to mirror what a lot of people have been doing with concrete over the years. And, and I think if you go back, I don't know, what, you know, 30 years, 40 years ago in the industry, I wasn't in it, a fiberglass pool was an ugly white bathtub, pretty much. You know, it didn't have any features, any shapes. It was a rectangle, maybe a free form, no benches, no ledges. It was white.
It was viewed as a cheap white plastic tub, and I think, you know, when Latham got into the business, when we bought the Viking business back in early 2000s, they really started to revolutionize the industry. If you ever look at one of our pools compared to a competitor's pools, and, like, all of our competitors make beautiful pools, our finish is the best that's out there. And when we showcase our pool at the pool shows in Atlantic City, the competitors come over and wanna know what do we do to get our finish so beautiful. It clearly, you know, sets it apart from everything else, and we can put on a wall two vinyl pools, two concrete pools, two fiberglass pools, show pictures of these backyards. No one can tell the difference between them.
They, they all look the same, unless you actually know the vinyl liner patterns we have or the shapes of the pools we have. But look, it's a better product versus concrete. It's not gonna break. It's not gonna crack. It's gonna have easier maintenance. Algae's not gonna attach to it. It's just like an impervious surface. It's glass.
I think that's an important thing you just mentioned there, kind of the lifetime. I know you do offer a lifetime warranty. Remind us, is that an industry-wide practice for fiberglass? And just kind of what gives you comfort? And kind of remind everybody also what are the issues that pop up with vinyl and concrete pools.
Yeah. So, so the lifetime warranty, it's, it's for the original owner of the pool, and a typical homeowner stays in the house seven years. That's probably stretched out a little bit more. But even for a homeowner who takes over a second pool, we've not come across any issues with our fiberglass pools from a long-term warranty standpoint. The only issue you have, and you have it with any pool, is poor water chemistry. If you don't maintain your pH, chlorine levels, and chemistry correctly, you can get some scaling on a pool. That can quickly be brushed off or wiped off. Concrete, especially in the Northeast, colder climates, it's gonna break, it's gonna crack, it's gonna leak. The chemicals are gonna interact with the concrete. You're gonna get algae growth. You're gonna get staining of that concrete surface. You're gonna have to acid wash it.
Your PebbleTec finish is eventually gonna wear off, and some of the quotes I've heard recently for one refinish of a concrete pool could be $20,000 - $25,000 now, and depending on the size, that could go up from there. Vinyl, it is a vinyl liner. Same thing, you could have chemical, chemistry, water abuse with a vinyl liner, which would create a fade of the liner. More likely, it's gonna be a tearing of the liner. If you don't close your pool correctly in the winter, ice could damage the surface. If your dog jumps in the pool and is swimming, a dog's nail could cut the vinyl liner of the pool, like just happened to my son at his house over the weekend.
But that's, you know, the only drawback of a vinyl liner pool is it's gonna wear out eventually, and you will get some seepage from water because it's not an impervious surface.
Just, I guess, just a fun little tidbit. Correct me if I'm wrong here, like a, you can actually, in the Northeast, the water can freeze in a fiberglass pool, and it's okay, correct?
Yeah. Yeah. It, I'd say in any pool, fiberglass, the only thing with fiberglass, you always wanna keep your pool full. You don't drain it down. Like a vinyl liner pool, you typically drain it down partially to get below your drain lines, but there's many different dealers who view what to do with pool closing. But any pool should always stay full just from groundwater pressures trying to wanna kind of cave the walls back in, but with fiberglass, it's not gonna cave. It's a solid structure.
And then one thing, I know that you, the way you break it out, it's inground pools, and within inground pools is obviously the fiberglass.
Yep.
Versus the vinyl. But you've given a little bit of granular annual metrics on how fiberglass pools have performed relative to everything else, obviously, with the penetration going up. Could you share that? And I, I guess another thing we've learned in this kind of post-COVID cycle is the higher-end pools, higher income, those kinda are, are typically doing well. What's the demographics look like on a, on a fiberglass pool? Well, you'll know about Latham, but you probably get the industry as well.
Yeah, so if we do look at that inground pool category, you know, the fiberglass percentage of that revenue was in the mid to high 60s 4 to 5 years ago. I think what we quoted on our fourth quarter earnings call was that in 2023, that number was 73% of that product category. I think we'll probably play in that kind of mid-70s range and potentially see it grow. But again, when the industry bounces back and let's say the lower end of the market with vinyl liner pools comes back, we might start to see some faster growth there, but we still think those numbers will stay in the mid-70s range as we go forward.
When we look at the typical consumer, it is a higher net worth customer with a higher, median price point who is buying a fiberglass pool. We were talking to one of our local dealers. I was talking to him, yesterday, and he's doing a $250,000 fiberglass pool project in his backyard. You know, $2.5 million home. You know, so we're going into very expensive backyards and homes, no different than with concrete. I think the fundamental issue with why is fiberglass not a higher percentage of the market, people just don't know about it. The awareness of fiberglass pools is really the push we're trying to make with our branding, with our marketing, getting them out there. People just don't know about it, and I'll give you a great example in Florida.
So state of Florida, we call it one of our sand states, is predominantly a concrete market. Thin-walled concrete pools, you can build a pool really quickly, pretty cheap there. They're built when the home is built, out of the gate. And we're trying to make a big push to really penetrate that market there, because it's probably 20% of all pool starts in the country in one state, and our presence there is pretty small from the number of pools that we do. We put a fiberglass pool into one of our sales guys' backyards in a planned community development called Babcock Ranch. There's eventually gonna be 10,000 homes there. So think about 1,000 homes a year being built, 800 of those homes a year beginning a swimming pool.
Our view is if we can start to push fiberglass there, it will be huge. We put the pool in in one day. Neighbors watched it. We videoed it with a local dealer. In that first weekend, with that pool being there, we got 100 leads in that neighborhood for people wanting a fiberglass pool. They saw the pool, how beautiful it was, the finish, and the speed of that pool going in, and that's what it takes. It really just takes getting one of these pools into a neighborhood, getting people to see it and experience it, and you can kinda quickly go from there. And that's, that's just one community, that's planned. It's one of the top. It's either one of the top 5 or top 10 communities, depending on what stats you look at.
So I think doing more stuff like that in those warmer climates, and, you know, you asked a question earlier, as you do get south, that cost differential of fiberglass versus concrete does start to shrink. Let's just say it gets to a break-even point. You still then have that, you know, resurfacing 10 years down the road, you're going to have to do there, where that difference quickly then will swing back to a 20% to 25% advantage.
Do you get a lot, like, I mean, it's, I guess it's one of those things. Do you get a lot of questions early in the process about lifetime? But also, I guess as we've gone through this super cycle, a lot of people put pools in. They've also realized problems. How does bringing the awareness of that issue come about?
Yeah, I, I think it really starts. What we're trying to do is, right, with our websites, when people start thinking about a swimming pool and they want a swimming pool, they're doing their research, we try to guide them to all pool types. So it all starts with education. There's concrete, there's fiberglass, there's vinyl. Here's the pros and cons of each, and then we lead them down that journey of why fiberglass is the pool of choice they should select for all the reasons we've talked about here, this morning. And then, you know, I, I think what, what really gets them, and it's the one I always forget to stress, you can have that pool in, in a day to a week. So in a, you know, Amazon instant economy, where we want everything right now, you can get that pool installed in a week.
Now, look, that's not all of the landscaping, the fence, and everything else you see for the final backyard, because once the pool is installed, no matter what the type, the cycle for everything else is the same. So we kinda dismiss the finishing of the backyard. It's getting the vessel in the ground, and, and to me, that's number one. And then I think number two really just comes down then to that upfront cost. But again, someone who's contemplating a vinyl liner pool, we will also try to talk them up to buy a fiberglass pool saying, "Look, you might save $10,000-$15,000 today, but 5, 10, 15, 20 years down the road, you might be two vinyl liners in, you're back to a break-even point, and you're gonna have to continue to do that the rest of your life of owning that pool.
You mentioned strengthening kind of the communication. How about, like, you know, your dealer network, you've strengthened that? And then I guess it'd be also a good time to talk about supply chain.
Yep.
Bringing Kingston, what that means, not only from a cost perspective, but also from a sales perspective, who you can reach.
Yeah, look, the dealer is the lifeline for us, and let's just talk our Grand Dealers, which is part of our fiberglass program. So I'll say the majority of these guys are exclusive to Latham. There are some who might buy some products and shop from some of the competitors, which is fine. But think of these guys as typically exclusive, and the majority of them being fiberglass distinct. You know, I think if we look back over the last four years, we've added almost over 100 dealers who are doing more than five pools a year. So we have 300 of these exclusive grand dealers. They typically get an exclusive territory in a particular market. And if you think about the building cycle, assume, you know, 40 weeks of installation time on average in the country.
So if you're a really good dealer, you should be doing 40 pools a year. If you're a really, really good dealer, you could be doing, you know, three pools a week, 120, and that's with one crew of three people. So what we try to do with these dealers in this dealer network is grow the number of pools they're building, because most dealers, the average is 10 pools a year. So if you think about that, and you, you hire a concrete guy or a vinyl guy and get them to start doing fiberglass, their mind has been programmed to only do 10 pools a year. They just slow the pace down of everything. So what we do is we teach them to speed that up. We push more leads to them, so they have more business, so they have to go faster.
We try to get them to one pool a week, which is the 40. The next hurdle is to get them to two pools a week, to the 80, and then get them to three pools a week, which is that 120 number. At that point, they then have to start to decide, do they add another crew? Do they really want to grow their business? But the, the point is, we have a ton of dealer installation capacity available to us right now when the market rebounds, to quickly get those pools in and push them to continue to learn how to, how to grow with, you know, the business and the cycle and not have to add more costs. It's all, it's all good productivity because they make the same amount of money on every pool install.
If you're building a concrete pool, a vinyl pool, or fiberglass, you make the same amount of money per pool. So if you can put more pools in, it's just more profit with less people.
And then kind of Kingston? Yeah.
Yeah, so Kingston, you know. A lot of people laugh about the Canadian market, but it is, it is a great market for swimming pools, and we love it. You know, 80% of all the pools are in, in the greater Toronto, greater Montreal area. We were basically shipping fiberglass from West Virginia or Tennessee up there, and we talked up front about the cost of transportation, in some cases, can be almost as much as the cost of the shell. So the closer you are to the market to serve, the better cost advantage you have. So when we were looking to site a new facility, we saw a huge opportunity to drive fiberglass in that market. We were having good success there. We were also out of capacity in the other facilities trying to feed the entire Northeast.
So building that plant there, right, we're local in the community. We can quickly hit both Montreal and Toronto, splitting it. It was a state-of-the-art facility that we built. Tons of capacity there. We're actually feeding volume back down into the Northeast, which has now given us the ability to relieve, let's say, Tennessee and West Virginia from a capacity standpoint and go target those areas for growth again, bringing new dealers on. Kind of, you know, we kind of look at capacity in total, but we also like to look at it regionally. And that's also why, you know, we did the Oklahoma facility as well to target that, you know, South Midwestern market. You know, Dallas market's huge. Being able to get into Vegas, you know, that whole part of the country, which again, is predominantly a concrete market.
We've had really good success in Texas, cracking the code there, as we like to say, against concrete, and we needed capacity there to feed that market. And right now, that's probably our fastest growing region for fiberglass with that new facility coming online.
Well, we got a couple of minutes here. Let's kind of visit guidance. Let's remind everybody what guidance is kind of predicated on. Kinda get into the trough or looking for the kind of trough in the cycle on the revenue, and just remind us we know incentive comp. It's incentive comp and the SG&A rebuilding, plus some discretionary investments. Kind of take us through that real quick as we close it out here.
Oh, perfect. Yeah, if we go back to guidance, again, you know, on the revenue side, $490 million-$520 million at a midpoint, about 11% down, as I mentioned earlier. And really, you know, we think it's, you know, the industry is down another 15% versus last year. That is primarily due to, you know, high interest rates. And so, you know, certainly this is where fiberglass conversion comes in, helps us to benefit a little bit from the segment growth in that area. And as well as, you know, our share in R&R, right? Then, what are the other inputs into our guidance? You know, price versus raws. I think kind of flattish pricing after huge increases, inflation-driven over the last few years.
We see that prices are sticking. We do see modest, small levels of deflation coming in. And then it's really beyond that, cost savings, right? You know, that's under our control. We have the benefit of past restructuring projects. We have the benefit of lean value engineering that are kicking in very nicely, and offsetting some of the volume losses that we see. With regards to incentive compensation, you mentioned it, the snapback of normalizing performance-based compensation. Year-over-year headwind is about $7 million, and that all brings us to a midpoint guidance of about $65 million for the year. We do believe that we are at the trough of the season. We are planning for a growth in 2025 versus 2024.
We are actively investing in growth when it comes to lead generation, fiberglass conversion, digital transformation, marketing, to be in a position to participate in the growth when it comes, you know, as we think in 2025.
Yeah, and just watching the clock, so I know we're probably out of time here. But I think one thing that's really important we probably didn't touch upon is Latham has outperformed the market in all cycles, if you look back over our history. When the market's up, we're up more than the total market. When the market's down, we're not down as much. And I think we've shared some data over the last, you know, several earnings calls highlighting that. And I think if you go back 9, 10 years, that statement holds true. And I think that's us driving that share gain with fiberglass against the other pool types, driving the auto cover adoption. And I think it's just also the management team, all the folks we have in the company, very robust supply chain.
You know, we brought in a lot of people with a lot of bigger company experience. You know, this market will get back to 100,000 pool starts, which is kind of the 20-year average. We're sitting, you know, this year, probably, you know, in the low 60s. So huge opportunity for growth and a huge opportunity to get back on the profitability and EBITDA margin, where we were back in 2021. Thank you for your time.
Thank you, all.
Thank you.