 reported earnings yesterday after the market closed. They are on a fiscal year which ends in April, so it gave us another month of data compared to other public companies that are on a calendar year.){kind=link}
American Outdoor Brands (NASDAQ:AOUT) reported earnings yesterday after the market closed. They are on a fiscal year which ends in April, so it gave us another month of data compared to other public companies that are on a calendar year.
Grilla Grills Growth
American Outdoor Brands (AOB) acquired Grills Grills in March 2022, and they’ve been happy with how the brand has grown.
E-commerce net sales of $87.2 million include our two direct-to-consumer-only brands, MEAT and Grilla. These two brands performed very well in the year and helped us grow our direct-to-consumer sales by 76% over fiscal 2022.
Andrew Fulmer, CFO of American Outdoor Brands
The growth figure is a bit misleading, because AOB only owned Grilla for around a month and a half of fiscal 2022. That makes it not a comparable business growth amount.
They don’t break Grilla out in their financials separately, but both MEAT! Your Maker and Grill together accounted for nearly 13% of their 2023 sales. That translates to around $25 million in sales.
New Products
AOB has been teasing new Grilla Grills products for a while, but their timeline keeps slipping. In 2023 they’ve released a new built-in cabinet for the Primate gas grill and a portable power station.
Those aren’t major launches, as they’ve promised previously. Their latest investor presentation still says that there will be in product launches coming.
Comparison to 2019
While pretty much all of the public companies in the outdoor space has used 2019 as a comp for 2023 growth, because of the outsized impact of the pandemic, AOB probably does it the most.
Their investor materials and earnings call continually use 2019 as a comp. While I understand the logic, there’s also a flaw with this thinking. It assumes that instead of outsized growth in 2020 and 2021, there would have been no growth.
I think a better comparison would be to assume the same growth rate as the years leading up to 2019, and use that as a base. Otherwise, it overstates the growth of the business.