The sporting goods company Peloton, which experienced a rude awakening after the Corona boom, has recently slowed down its descent. In the most recent quarter, the loss fell to $335.4 million from $439.4 million a year earlier. The number of users has remained stable at 6.7 million for the past three quarters. Sales meanwhile shrank by 30 percent year-on-year to around 793 million dollars (a good 727 million euros), Peloton announced on Wednesday.
For the current quarter, Peloton has announced revenue of between $690 million and $715 million, exceeding average analyst expectations. The stock gained more than 5 percent in premarket trading.
Peloton had benefited greatly from gym closures early in the pandemic. Sales of the training bikes and treadmills soared, and some interested parties had to wait a long time for their equipment. However, Peloton did not interpret the boost as a special boom, but as the beginning of a growth era and invested in the expansion of capacities up to the construction of a factory in the USA.
That turned out to be a serious miscalculation: With the lifting of corona restrictions, interest in the company’s devices decreased again, Peloton was sitting on high inventories, and construction of the factory in the USA was canceled again. Last year, Peloton decided to outsource device production entirely to a contract manufacturer. Company boss Barry McCarthy, who was responsible for finances at Netflix and Spotify, among other things, wants to focus the business more on subscription models instead of device sales. (dpa)