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Powersports Business • April 2025 • 5

Polaris hosted its 2025 Capital Markets Day meeting on March 12. During the event, the company provided an overview of the powersports industry and its long-term strategy to remain an industry leader while executing a number of initiatives to meet its mid-cycle financial targets. During the two-hour-long briefing, Polaris’ leadership also discussed its commitment to dealers, innovation and customers.

“ The actions we are taking today give me confidence we will emerge stronger when the powersports market returns to growth,” comments Mike Speetzen, Polaris CEO.“ Our teams are focused in the right areas to not only continue our leadership in powersports but also to improve the financial strength of Polaris, which I believe will ultimately lead to creating shareholder value.”

Speetzen says the current market environment needs some context. He thought it was a good opportunity to provide an update on the market conditions, which weren’ t at the top of his mind when the meeting invites were sent out in September.“ We weren’ t necessarily thinking about the current

During the two-hour-long briefing, Polaris’ CEO, Mike Speetzen, discussed its commitment to dealers, innovation and customers.

environment [ in September ]. The point of this discussion is to reinforce the strategy and talk more long-term about the setup that we’ ve got going for the company, which we think is strong when we talk about this down cycle that we’ re in.”

According to Speetzen, a recession is defined as two successive down quarters.“ You look at each one of our segments, and we’ re well past that. That’ s no surprise to most of you; there’ s been a lot of fallout from this. It’ s a bit staggering when you look at the number of competitors who are either exiting categories, shutting down completely, or have filed for bankruptcy and gone through that process.

Speetzen says Polaris is the best house in a recovering neighborhood.“ We’ re trying to work on ensuring that this company is positioned incredibly well so that when the recovery comes, we will be positioned better than anybody else to take advantage of that and grow the company.” about the positioning that we took. If you remember, I said I didn’ t think EVs would move rapidly through powersports. There are a lot more challenges within the powersports category. And in fact, that’ s what made us different than most. We listened to customers and let that guide where we went …”

Polaris is not investing in electric vehicles at the same levels they thought they would previously.“ At this point, just given how much slower that market has developed, we are continuing to make advancements. And I’ ll be honest with you: we learned a lot through this relative to connected vehicles; we’ ve been able to watch and see how

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PROMOS Speetzen acknowledges they’ ve fielded a lot of questions about promotions.“ Yes, it is elevated,” he says flatly.“ We’ ve got consumers who are stressed. From a debt perspective, interest rates are high, but we also have a lot of competitors who haven’ t managed their inventory with our level of discipline, which puts a lot of pressure on the market.”

Speetzen says they won’ t respond to all of the channel’ s promotional activity and that Polaris will not discount its newer technology.“ Quite frankly, that’ s not sustainable share, so we’ re trying to be as disciplined as we can and make sure that we’ re pointing promo in the right areas, whether that’ s targeted offers to specific consumers, broad offer categories getting aggressive around financing, given that interest rates are likely to stay high for longer.”

Speetzen also discussed the EV category and its expanded relationship with Zero Motorcycles.“ We talked about EV at our last Capital Markets Day. I still feel good