Brunswick at Raymond James Conference: Strategic Innovation Amid Challenges

On Tuesday, 04 March 2025, Brunswick Corporation (NYSE: BC) presented at the Raymond James & Associates’ 46th Annual Institutional Investors Conference. CEO David Folkes discussed the company’s strategic initiatives amidst a challenging economic environment. While facing softening demand and high inventory levels in the marine industry, Brunswick is focusing on innovation and recurring revenue streams to bolster its resilience and market position.

Key Takeaways

• Brunswick aims to increase recurring revenue, which constituted 55% of its adjusted operating earnings in 2024.
• The company is reducing costs, having cut operating expenses by $70 million between 2023 and 2024.
• Brunswick projects 2025 revenue between $5.2 billion and $5.6 billion, with EPS guidance of $3.5 to $5.
• The company is navigating potential tariff impacts, estimated at $100 million.
• Brunswick is integrating its boats into the Freedom Boat Club, targeting 75% penetration.

Financial Results

• Revenue: 2024 revenue was just under $5.2 billion, with 2025 guidance set between $5.2 billion and $5.6 billion.
• Earnings Per Share (EPS): 2025 EPS guidance ranges from $3.5 to $5, accounting for a potential $0.70 impact from tariffs.
• Free Cash Flow: Expected to be strong in 2025, potentially surpassing 2024 levels.
• Operating Expenses: Reduced by $70 million between 2023 and 2024.
• Capital Allocation: Approved a 13th consecutive year of dividend increases, with $1.6 billion in share repurchases since 2019.

Operational Updates

• Market Share: Mercury Engines gained 110 basis points in market share, with U.S. share around 48%.
• New Products: Over 100 new products launched in 2024.
• Cost of Goods: 80% U.S.-based, with less than 5% sourced from China.
• Integration: Progress in integrating Brunswick boats into Freedom Boat Club, aiming for 75% penetration.
• Inventory: Ended the year with just under 37 weeks of inventory, with 12,000 pipeline units.
• Digital Sales: 40% of boat sales in 2024 originated from Brunswick web properties.

Future Outlook

• Revenue Growth: Modest growth expected in 2025.
• Tariffs: Anticipates a $100 million impact from tariffs, with mitigation strategies in place.
• Retail Sales: Flat sales expected for January and February; wholesale expected to rise mid-single digits if retail remains flat.
• Margin Expansion: Navico Group margins targeted to reach mid-teens.
• M&A Activity: Limited, with focus on the participation part of the market.

Q&A Highlights

• Tariff Impact: Potential $100 million impact, with mitigation efforts ongoing.
• Retail Performance: Flat year-over-year for January and February; high-end market performing stronger.
• Freedom Boat Club Integration: Progressing towards 75% penetration of Brunswick boats.
• Inventory Levels: Considered healthy, with 80% less than a year old.

Readers interested in more details are encouraged to refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Raymond James & Associates’ 46th Annual Institutional Investors Conference 2025:

Joe Altobello, Leisure Equity Research Analyst, Raymond James: morning, everybody, and thank you for joining us. I’m Joe Altobello, Leisure Equity Research Analyst here at Raymond James. And I’m very pleased to introduce our next presentation from Brunswick Corporation. Brunswick is a leader in the global marine industry with a comprehensive product portfolio that includes some of the best known boat brands in the world, including Boston Whaler, Sea Ray, and Bayliner, just to name a few. They are powered by its Mercury engines, which have been gaining meaningful market share for several years now while complemented by its Navigo technology segment as well as its parts and accessories businesses.

While the marine industry broadly has benefited benefit initially from COVID, the past few years have proven to be challenging characterized by softening demand and elevated, inventory levels. That said, 2025 could prove to be a year of stabilization, but there are still some, unknowns to navigate, including tariffs, which is the topic of the day. So with that, let me hand things over to the company’s CEO, Mr. David Folkes, who will walk us through the story.

David Folkes, CEO, Brunswick Corporation: David? Thank you, Joe, very much. Good morning, everybody. It is nice to see you all. Thank you for your interest in Brunswick.

Thank you for attending the presentation. Despite the turbulent backdrop, I think I have a lot of positive developments to share with you today. I’d like to point to our tagline, Next Never Rest, which is very appropriate for us. It is a reference to our sustained investments in new products and innovation on the product side and also on the business side, which is very important at all times, but certainly against this more uncertain backdrop. A little bit of admin.

My presentation will contain certain forward looking statements about future results. Actual results may vary. For factors to consider, take a look at our SEC filings. I’ll also be using certain non GAAP financial measures for reconciliation of GAAP to non GAAP. Also take a look at our SEC filings, which are all available on bronzwigg.com.

So I’m going to start with a video that brings to life that next never rests spirit, contains some interesting facts about Brunswick and also showcases many of our brands and some of our more recent products and, technology introductions.

Joe Altobello, Leisure Equity Research Analyst, Raymond James: Thank

David Folkes, CEO, Brunswick Corporation: you.

Joe Altobello, Leisure Equity Research Analyst, Raymond James: Okay. Okay.

David Folkes, CEO, Brunswick Corporation: Okay. Okay. Hope you enjoyed that. For those of you who are a bit less familiar with Brunswick, this is an overview of our business. We have three I’m sorry, we have five main businesses, our Propulsion business, our Engine Parts and Accessories business, Navigo Group, Boat Group and Business Acceleration.

And we have four reportable segments. We combine Boat Group and Business Acceleration into a single segment called Boat. Business Acceleration contains Freedom Boat Club and our service businesses. Mainly, it is our smallest division, but our fastest growing division as well. Underneath each of our businesses, you can see the industry leading brands.

Under Mercury, you see the Mercury family of brands, but also now Flyte, which is the electric surfboards that you saw on the video, and Avator, which is the electric outboard family. Under Boat Group, you see a lot of very familiar brands for the new one called Navan, which is our, premium adventure brand that we just introduced very successfully in Europe and in The US. The revenues on the bottom there in the reportable segments of full year 2024 include but they include about 400,000,000 of eliminations or synergy sales. That is sales of Mercury Propulsion Systems and Navigo Group products into our boats and boats into Freedom Boat Club, for example. Those synergies are a very important and unique part of our business.

Here are some of the places that we have the number one market share or number one brand, and there are many. This is not exhaustive. I think you know Mercury has the leading market share in The US and Canada and Europe and many other locations. Mercury Racing is by far the biggest provider of high performance propulsion systems. We own the world’s largest marine distribution business with about a 40% market share.

We own the world’s biggest boat club, Freedom Boat Club, which is an order of magnitude larger than any other shared access model in the marine space. Our boat brands, occupy the number one position in a lot of segments and subsegments. You know Whaler, you know Sea Ray, you know Bayliner, but we have Quicksilver, which is built in Europe for the European market, PrinceCraft built in Canada for the Canadian market, Ray Glass built in New Zealand for the New Zealand and Australian markets. Despite the fact that we have the leading brands and the leading product lines in a number of different areas, we do not rest on our laurels. We are constantly innovating.

Just in 2024, we received more than 100 awards for our products, for our innovation, for our people, our business, our culture, including, being named for the sixth consecutive year as one of America’s best large employers. Time Magazine named us the number one mid sized business in engineering and manufacturing. Why is that important? It means we can attract the best people to our business, and we do, from a lot of different industries. We also have an amazing cadence of new product launches.

We launched more than 100 new products just in 2024 across the enterprise. And relevant for today, about 80% of our cost of goods is U. S. Based. We have deliberately moved away from China.

China is now less than 5% of our cost of goods. And about 70% of our product is sold in The U. S, about 30 in international markets. I want to talk a bit about our business model. We pursue profitable growth just like most other companies, but we have made a deliberate effort through organic means and M and A to make our business more resilient to economic cycles than most other businesses in leisure and recreation, particularly by, leaning into parts and accessories, aftermarket distribution, shared access and subscription services.

So the top chart here is new boat sales in The U. S. Main powerboat category from 2,007 to $20.24 in units. You see the fall in unit sales during the GFC and then the steady rise over the subsequent ten or so years up until the 2020, which was the COVID peak. A lot of people think that there was some huge spike in COVID, but there really wasn’t.

It was virtually linear up through COVID because the industry could not build boats fast enough. So there wasn’t a spike, and there isn’t an overhang either. What has happened though since then is we have seen the impact of higher inflation and subsequently higher interest rates which have suppressed demand. So COVID peak or just before, COVID sales were in the 180,000 units a year range. Last year, they were about 140,000 a year.

So that is the impact of interest rates particularly at the moment. The lower chart here, though, shows the number of, recreational boats registered in The US every year. That’s not just new boats. That’s every boat. Just like a road vehicle, you need to register a boat to use it in The US.

And that has stayed very constant at around 10,000,000 units registered every year. Remember, about half of them are powered by our engines, which is why our P and A business and our distribution business is so powerful. The dotted blue line is boats registered every year excluding those below 16 feet, which is small boats. We don’t really participate in that market. Our boats are in the range below here.

So you see it’s very, very constant. And so we’ve deliberately orientated our portfolio and business model to lean into that part of the market. And here are some stats that describe that. So our business model is outperform that new boat market with market share gains and increasing share of wallet, so profit density per boat if you like, but orient our portfolio more and more to those recurring revenue streams that you get from the participation portion of the market. So in 2024, about 55% of our adjusted operating earnings came from recurring revenue businesses exposed to that participation part of the market, the people who go boating every year.

We’ve developed a very scalable cost structure. We’ve reduced our footprint a lot and increased our asset utilization. We also have a scalable operating expense model. So between 2023 and 2024, even including acquisitions on an adjusted basis, we reduced our operating expenses by close to $70,000,000 to make sure that we are appropriately scaled for the market realities. We have made a deliberate effort to increase our profit per boat.

So about 50% of the bill of materials of every boat we sell is internally sourced. That’s Mercury Engines and Navico Group parts. So when we sell a Boston Whaler to a channel partner for maybe 25 points of margin, the real margin on that boat is probably in the 40s. It just gets charged back or allocated back to the engine business or the Navico Group business. Mercury has continued to outperform the market with market share gains.

Over a number of years, we gained another 110 basis points of share. Last year, our market share in The U. S. Is around 48% right now, but much higher in higher horsepower. We address a very wide demographic.

If you need a boat, we can get you a boat for $1,000 for $2,000,000 whatever your budget is. People ask us are people de contenting boats? No, they’re not because we could already provide them with a boat at whatever price point they want. We continue to invest heavily in digital. It’s very important to meet consumers where they want to be met.

About 40% of all of our boat sales in 2024 originated on one of our web properties. And just finally on Freedom Boat Club, Freedom has four ten plus locations. We’ll announce another three either later this week or early next and the and it is a subscription boating model recurring revenue. I mentioned Mercury’s market share gains, but this really punctuates it. This is Mercury’s share at late season twenty twenty four and early season twenty twenty five boat shows.

Dusseldorf, in January, Mercury had 55% of all the outboards by the way, outboards power about 90% of all recreational boats. 55% of all the outboards at the show were Mercury. If you went up to above 150 horsepower, 70% of all the outboards were Mercury outboards, up seven points of share year over year. Fort Lauderdale at the end of twenty twenty four, fifty eight points of share 58% share, up six points year over year. The boats on the water, which is a big boat, almost 75% share for Mercury.

And similarly, recently in Miami in February, ’50 ’7 percent of all the engines, up 4.7 of all the boats on the water. New York and Toronto are smaller shows with no on water portion because they’re in the winter. But even there, Mercury’s share is up. And recently, last week, the Dubai Show closed when we had 82% share of all the engines at the show. I mentioned 50% of the bill of materials or the cogs of a typical Brunswick boat is internally sourced, but we are providing systems, comprehensive system solutions to many other OEMs as well.

This is just a typical example of all the things we provide on a boat, and often that represents 30% or more of cost of goods on non Brunswick boats. So just getting into a summary now. Our strategy is working and we’re generally outperforming our peers, particularly with our resilience in these market conditions. Our brands are winning in the market. We continue to leverage our enterprise synergies.

We continue to invest in new products, but we also have a big focus on expanding our gross margins. We’re rapidly commercializing technology, including our electric product, connected product, autonomous product. We are still doing some limited M and A, but it is orientated towards that participation part of the market and it’s relatively modest in size. We’re working to make sure we have strong brand loyalty and affinity with exceptional quality service and customer support. We Behind the scenes, we are systematically controlling our expenses, our capital, our cost of goods and mitigating as many of the external risks as we possibly can.

We have rightsized our internal and channel inventories. We had great cash flow last year, fantastic free cash flow conversion, 92%, and that strong cash flow has continued into 2025. As I mentioned, we continue to invest in our go to market and other technologies. So our guidance for 2025 that we issued at the January, revenue $5,200,000,000 to $5,600,000,000 versus just under $5,200,000,000 this year, so that would be modest growth. We deliberately came out with a wide EPS range, dollars 3.5 to $5 anticipating some of the tariffs and other actions that we are now seeing, at least for now, but really strong free cash flow again, in fact, probably better than this year even in 2025.

So last slide, we think a lot about returning value to shareholders. We just approved our thirteenth consecutive year of dividend increases. I became a CEO in 2019, and since then, we’ve made $1,600,000,000 of share repurchases. Between those two, we’ve returned 70% of our net income to shareholders. All right.

Thank you for your attention. I appreciate it.

Joe Altobello, Leisure Equity Research Analyst, Raymond James: We’ve got about ten or fifteen minutes left, so I thought I’d kick off the Q and A, and then we’ll open up obviously to the audience. But, you know, David, in that second to last, I think on your guidance, you mentioned the wide EPS range for some tariff eventualities. Is it safe to assume that if the tariffs that are being discussed now go into effect that you’re probably more comfortable with the lower end of that range? How should we think about that?

David Folkes, CEO, Brunswick Corporation: Yeah. You should think about it that, in our initial assumptions for the year that went into the midpoint of our guidance, we assumed a tariff burden this year of about 30,000,000, maybe a little bit more than that based on tariffs that were already in place. If the new tariffs, the 25 Mexico, 20 five Canada, plus 10 China plus steel and everything else goes into place, that is probably another 70,000,000 for us, so a total of about a hundred million, which would be roughly another $7.70 cents of of, EPS. That 70 that hundred million total is includes some mitigation actions that we’ve already taken, including prepositioning inventory like everybody else is doing, kind of no regrets type of actions. But there are other things that we can do that are not fully accounted for yet in terms of mitigating.

It has just been very difficult to initiate some of those actions in the very uncertain against the very uncertain backdrop. For example, a lot of our products are dual sourced. We can actually move products from one geography to another, geography. We can change country of origin. There’s a lot of things that we can do that we have not yet initiated, so we would obviously try and further mitigate that number.

Joe Altobello, Leisure Equity Research Analyst, Raymond James: Okay.

David Folkes, CEO, Brunswick Corporation: But really, just think I mean, honestly, think about 80 of our cost of goods is domestic, and we are less than 5% exposed to China.

Joe Altobello, Leisure Equity Research Analyst, Raymond James: So a hundred million is a worst case? It’s a worst case. Yeah.

David Folkes, CEO, Brunswick Corporation: Yeah.

Joe Altobello, Leisure Equity Research Analyst, Raymond James: Got it. And second question for me, I guess, if you think about the boat shows, you touched on some of these Miami, Fort Lauderdale, etcetera. When we met in Miami, it sounded like the year was off to relatively good start on retail.

David Folkes, CEO, Brunswick Corporation: I don’t know

Joe Altobello, Leisure Equity Research Analyst, Raymond James: if you want to give us a little bit of an update on what you’re seeing so far.

David Folkes, CEO, Brunswick Corporation: Yes. I would say retail is flat essentially to last year between January and February. January was a little bit down, February is a little bit up, but it’s kind of eerily within like a more or less percent of last year at the moment. Obviously, we’re in a part of the year where sales are pretty low anyway. I think the combined January, February is in the 15% range, something like that.

March is certainly a bigger month. But I would say that we’ve been generally pleased. We expected the shape of the year to be a bit back end loaded with maybe some further interest rate cuts through the year. So I would say that, we’re pretty pleased with the fact that we have relatively flat, retail at the moment. I would say still, the high end is performing a little bit stronger.

Joe Altobello, Leisure Equity Research Analyst, Raymond James: That was my next question. So you’re seeing a little bit better performance on the previous year?

David Folkes, CEO, Brunswick Corporation: In Miami, you know, Sea Ray what Sea Ray is doing unbelievably well. Sea Ray had record share again in in Miami. Boston Whaler had very strong sales to US customers. We sell a minority product to Latin American customers. Those sales were a little bit off because of interest rates.

But in aggregate, yeah, we’re we’re in pretty good

Joe Altobello, Leisure Equity Research Analyst, Raymond James: shape. Okay. Any questions from the audience? Go ahead.

David Folkes, CEO, Brunswick Corporation: No. It’s not completely finished. It’s a good question. So if you didn’t hear, the question was about where are we in integrating Brunswick Boats and, I guess, Mercury Engines into Freedom. So Freedom is a hybrid model.

About 35 ish percent of the locations are corporate operated and the balancer franchise operated. I’d say across the entire fleet, we’re about 50% penetrated in Brunswick boats right now, so we still have quite a way to go. The boats turn every two to three years, in freedom. We anticipate eventually getting to about 75 ish percent, so we’ve still got a way to go. So the amount so the percentage of boats incoming into Freedom is higher than 50%, right now.

There are some boats that Freedom uses that are not part of our portfolio, so we always anticipate that maybe 25% of Freedom will remain non Brunswick boats, but with Mercury engines. So, yeah, we’re making good progress. When we bought Freedom in 2019, it’s 170 locations. Now we have four ten. When we bought it, there were almost no Brunswick boats in Freedom at all.

So every cycle, as these boats come in, we continue to increase the percentage. Yeah. I think well, first of all, we are not considering separating the business. So, but, I think, you know, you have to be realistic about how long you can maintain a relationship with a separate entity. If you look at supply agreements, for example, engine supply agreements in our industry, the typical engine supply agreement is one year.

Some of them are three years. It is difficult to maintain five year or something like that relationships because, a lot of things change. And when people buy things, they sell them on again and do all kinds of stuff with them. So the reality is could we, over a period of time, maintain a contractual relationship? Yeah.

I’m sure we could. Would it be long term? It would be more difficult for it to be long term. Well, it’s it’s kind of interesting. If you look across our businesses in 2024, remember that we, in boats and engines, we significantly underproduced retail because we wanted to get our inventories in really good shape.

So if you think about and I’ll get back to you. Don’t worry, I’m gonna get back. So both retail was down about 10%, but we but our wholesale was down in the high twenties just to get inventories in the right spot, similarly with engines. So both down kind of 25% ish on revenue. Our P and A business was slightly up on revenue because it is aftermarket.

Navico Group was down 13%, and it is 40% OEM and 60% aftermarket. So if you just kind of draw the straight line between businesses that are 0% aftermarket and 100% aftermarket and go from, like, zero to 25, then Nabaco is performing pretty much exactly as you would expect it to perform with that mix. Are the absolute margins where we need them to be? No. They’re not.

Nabaco’s margins were in the sixes, in aggregate. Obviously, it’s a very wide range of products, and we would expect that business to eventually be in the mid teens. So we have continued to introduce a lot of new product that makes us competitive in the aftermarket. So in 2024, we introduced a lot of product that is more aftermarket e commerce type product that you would sell on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, holiday season type product. We really didn’t have those value products in ’twenty three.

So we gained share at the back half of ’twenty four. We’ve just introduced more, I think, very exciting new products. That is our MO. You know, we’re a product driven company. Every time we do that, we expand margins.

So I think, Navica has a lot of room to run-in terms of margin expansion, but the overall behavior from a mix perspective is as you might expect from a sixty forty company.

Joe Altobello, Leisure Equity Research Analyst, Raymond James: Probably have time for one more if anybody has a question. If not, I’ll ask it. Inventory, Dave, you mentioned that you undership demand pretty significantly. Where does inventory stand today? Is it healthy?

And would you expect wholesale and retail to

David Folkes, CEO, Brunswick Corporation: be in alignment going forward? Yes. We think it’s very healthy. We ended the year at just under thirty seven weeks, which is very typical with pipeline units in the 12,000 range, which is about couple of thousand below last year even. So we produced 30% less boats in the second half of last year than the first half just to get inventory down to the right spot.

80% of our inventory is current less than a year old. I think There’s always gonna be a little bit of more here and less there. A premium boat inventory is twenty five weeks, I think. So, I’m very pleased with what we did on inventory, and I think we’re in really good shape for the assumption of flat, retail.

Joe Altobello, Leisure Equity Research Analyst, Raymond James: Okay. And if retail is flat, what would that imply for wholesale?

David Folkes, CEO, Brunswick Corporation: Up mid single digits, maybe a little bit more.

Joe Altobello, Leisure Equity Research Analyst, Raymond James: Okay. Anybody else? Well, great. Thank you, Dean. Thank you.

Appreciate your work, and enjoy the rest of the conference.

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