What To Expect From Fitbit in 2017

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*Stock Advisor returns as of February 6, 2017

This podcast was recorded on Feb. 24, 2017.

Dylan Lewis:Welcome to Industry Focus, the podcast that dives into a different sector of the stock market every day. It'sFriday, Feb. 24, and we're talking techandFitbit'slatest earnings release.I'm your host, Dylan Lewis,and I'm joined on Skype by Fool.com senior techspecialist Evan Niu. Evan,how's it going?Evan Niu: Good!I'm ready for the weekend. It's been a long week.Lewis: Yeah.I think everyone could use a little break. Itseems like Fitbit could definitely use a little bit of a breakafter releasing quarterly numbers that were, frankly, pretty rough for them.Niu: Yeah.I don't think there were any big surprises. Even though it was a pretty bad quarter, the market didn't react muchbecause they issued preliminary guidance at the end of January that warned everyone how bad it would be,and it was pretty much right in line with expectations.Lewis:Yeah. The company's top line came in at $574 million, whichis down 19% year over year. That was well within the revised guidance they offered of $572 [million] to $580 million. But that revised guidance was walked backfrom original expectations of $725 [million] to $750 million. So,it was a big adjustment that took place in the market. Ifyou look back to late January or early February, that's where we saw the high teens, nearing 20%, sell off in the stock. There was no immediate reactiondespite the disappointing results. If you're looking for some of the other big numbers from the quarter,gross margins was one of the big surprises. That came in at22.4%. Usually, we tend to see that upsomewhere in the high 40% range.Niu: Right. That's afunction of a bunch of these one-time charges that they took. Again, they warned about that stuff. They had a big writedown for toolingequipment. They also had toincrease return reserves becausechannel inventory. They had to increase warranty reserves. All three of those items are added to cost to get sold. Then,on the flip side, they also had abunch of pricing promotionsbecause they had to start discounting stuff to get stuff moving. And that item comes as a reduction of revenue. So,you have all these charges,one of them pushes down revenue and the other three push up cost to get sold. So, it really pinches their margins. And,like you mentioned, it came in at about 22% on a GAAP basis. Typically they're around 49%. In fact, if you back out all these items,they would have had about 49%,which is pretty comparable to what they normally have. Sinceone of these items affects revenue,it also affects your average selling price calculation. They came in at around $85. It would have been $95 without these charges. Which,again, is pretty comparable to what they normally have. But the fact is that these charges were mostly because they reallyoverestimated demand, they really filled their channels, and thesedevices were not selling.Lewis:Yeah.I think it was easy to get caught up inhigh expectations looking at the growth trajectory that this company was on. In2015, this company posted150% year over year revenue growth. So, for them to even slow downsomewhere into the double digits,you would think it's fairly reasonable. Looking at the full-year results here, revenue came in at $2.17 billion, which was up from $1.86 billion in 2015. But that's only a 16% hike. You're seeing a lot of the effects of them overestimating demand. We can get into why. But,it certainly weighed on financial results,particularly in the holiday quarter, which istypically when we see a lot of these consumer device companies doing a ton of their business.Niu: Yeah,exactly. They were very up front, they owned it. They admitted that they were really caught off guard byhow weak demand was, and they over-forecast it, and they were a little too ambitious with their own expectations, internally. They fell short of their own expectations. They had to own it.Lewis:Yeah.I think one of the things I do really appreciate isthey signaled this to the market ahead of results. Issuing preliminary results,particularly for a really important quarter like the calendar Q4, it was great to give people aheads-up of what to expect. There wasn't as much of a shock to the system whenthey issued their results later on in the month. I think something else, and I think the ultimate cause of a lot of this stuff, this quote from management in the commentary, "Thesaturation of the Innovative and early adopter segments of the marketwas basically the cause." That'swhat they're seeing as the revised growth rate and really what pushed results down for them.Niu: Yeah. There's certainly a niche group of reallyactive fitness users wherethat's just part of their lifestyle. And that's a good market for them. But theyneed to break into the mainstream. Everyone wants to get healthier, and most people,even after they make that decision, theykind of let it go. How many times have yousaid you were going to start going to the gym, or whatever, and then two months later you give up? It's a common thing. Think about the New Year's spike ingym memberships. Every New Year, people are like, "MyNew Year's resolution is that I'm going to get healthy," and thenby February they give up. So it's certainly acharacteristic of the market that it's hard to keeppeople engaged in terms of their health,but that's this company's whole point. So,it's an uphill battle in some ways, just by nature ofthe way that people are.Lewis:Andone of the benefits that we get from looking at their full-year results isthey discloseuser base information when they do the full-yearreporting. I think they just disclosedthey have roughly 23 million active users, and50 million registered devices. Do you want to touch on how that trends compared to previous years?Niu: Yeah. Theygive this number every year. Ilike to look at what proportionis active of their total registered base. Right now,like you mentioned, if we have 23 million active users and about 50 millionregistered devices, that's under half of the devices that are being active,it's like 45%. Over the past three years,this number is usually around 60%. 2013 through 2015, it's about 60%plus or minus a couple percentage points. That's apretty big drop in terms of engagement. Fitbit has said before that they don't want you to look at that ratio as the engagement proxy,because they argue that some people go inactive but then theyreactivate and become active again, and it tends to be bumpy so don't look too deeply at it. Butat the same time, I still think there's value in looking at this metric as aproxy for engagement, even if it'smaybe not perfect. I think there are still important things to note. I was looking through the numbers a bit more carefully, too. One thingthey mentioned that stood out to me was26% of activations in 2016 came from repeat customers. Of those,20% were reactivated. If we go back to that 26% of activations, last year, there werea total of about 21 million activated devices, if you justlook at how many more devices were registered throughout the year. If they're saying that26% of that is from repeat customers, thenthe other three-quarters is new customers. That's about 5.5 million repeats, almost 16 million new customers. Yet total active users -- which includes repeat and new -- only increased by around 6.3 million. So, you haveall these new customers coming in, almost16 million who bought a new Fitbit last year. But your total active users only increased by 6 million. So,there's a big disconnect there with how many people are buying them andhow many are still using them at year end. AndI think that's a pretty troubling disconnect,a big discrepancy.Lewis: AndI think those numbers really speak to the idea of, there is a dedicated group ofconsumers that, the Fitbit products meet their needsvery well. These are people who want metrics on their workouts, their heart rate, thenumber of steps to taking a day. And their products are perfect for that. That seems to be more of a niche group than a largeaddressable market as, perhaps,originally predicted. When you see that that's the group which is reallydriving a lot of those engagement numbers, you have to think that, maybe theceiling is a little bit lower than we thought for what the totaladdressable market is here, and really, the long-term growth prospects on the consumer side ofthe business for them.Niu: Yeah.I totally agree. I think we'vetalked about this with other companies before. It depends on what your growth expectations are. You can build a great business around this niche group of people that's really active, andyou cancount on them to start subscribingto the services that Fitbit wants to start selling, like Fitstar. You cancount on them to upgrade more regularly. But there's a lot of people that are fickle about their health, who are like, "Oh,I'm going to try this Fitbit out," andmaybe they give up on it. And yeah, Fitbit gets that sale, andmaybe they'll keep trying to appeal to that customer. But if they just temper down their expectations,there are a lot of people who are going to try and are justnot going to stick with it. If you just bake that into your expectations, andadjust your business strategy accordingly, versus trying to spendall this money to keep trying to win back all these customers if they're resistant to actuallycommitting to improving their health with these devices, then there'snot really a whole lot you can do. It's a tough dynamic to overcome.Lewis:Well,I think that wrapsthe looking-backwards part of our conversation, Evan.I think we're going to talk a little bit about what growthmight look for them down the road, how they might be able to reignite it withboth the consumer segments and some other options. But before we get into thatdiscussion and seewhat might be going on in 2017 for Fitbit, I just wanted to give Foolsa little heads up. If you're interested in income investing,we have a brand-new service called Motley Fool Total Income. Itincorporates dividend stocks, options, bonds,real estate and more. If you want to check it out,all the details are at totalincomeradio.fool.com. So, Evan, inaddition to some of the growth strategies this companytalked about in their earnings release, they alsooffered up guidance for 2017. It looks like we'll be seeing revenuesomewhere in the neighborhood of $1.5 [million] to $1.7 billion, andgross margins returning towhat we would reasonably expect,somewhere between 42% to 44%. That top-line number is a 20% dip from what theyposted in 2016.Niu: Yeah,it's getting harder before it's getting easier. Last year, they put up about $2.2 billion, almost. And they're already predicting another decline, adecline is definitely not a good sign in terms of investor sentiment.Lewis:And I think, when youlook at some of the strategies that they're outlining here for the turnaround plan,maybe it's not all that surprising. CEO James Park talked about some of the different things they'regoing to be pursuing, andone of them was increasing their promotionalactivity. This is something that we saw a little bit in Q4,and I think we're going to continue to see into 2017 with some of theirexisting products. Theytalked about the idea of having more in-store promotions, working with retail partners. And really, the aim of all of that is to clear out theinventory channel. Of course, when they do that,that's something that's going to push downaverage selling prices on devices.Niu: Yeah. Theyreally overloaded their channel during the quarter. They're getting these writedowns, they have reserves, they have to startgiving discounts to their channel partners. Like you mentioned, it is going to take a couple quarters to clear it out and get channelinventories back in line with a balance. But,it doesn't look too good right now.Lewis:One ofthe other things that they're talking about doing isimproving efficiencies across the company. We've seen this a little bit already with somereorganizations within the business. They'vemade some staffing cuts. Butone of the other things they talked about was restructuring theiraccessories business. They moved to this partner andlicense model instead of the designing andproducing accessories in-house approach. Thatobviously gives them a little bit less control, but it might help them out on the cost side, a little bit.Niu: Yeah. It's justoutsourcing it, more or less. I think that's probablythe right move,because they obviously have better things to focus on right now. And yeah,coming back to this idea, they just bet too heavily on growth. Youmentioned headcount, their headcountincreased by 60% last year. That's why they really need tocut back those operating expenses,and that's also why they laid off about 107 people. But,at the same time, they also did a bunch of acqui-hires. They acquired Pebble and Vectorwithin the past couple of months, and that certainly adds to your headcount, also. Butthose are much more strategic in nature,because those will help the development of the smartwatch,which they've been talking about. But yeah,they just needed to cut down these costs to really get back in line with morereasonable expectations.Lewis:Yeah, and you talked about that being a focused decision, too. I think reallynot having to worry about that stuff allows them to focus on two core things. One of them is,the products that they are offering, and maybe building out some more all-in-one smartwatch-like products, and the other one beingother ways for people to be using their products that are beyond the base consumer approach thatmost people are commonly using them for now. So, we talked about thisa little bit in the first half of the show, but they'vementioned that they have captured this innovator group already,people that are early adopters and wantfreshgadgets and fresh technology, and theaffinity group of people who want fitness trackers. They'vetalked about the idea of needing to transition to that mid-to-late adopter market, and then meet them withproducts that are going to be attractive to them. James Parkhad this quote in the conference call where he said, "Increasing thevalue proposition of our software beyond just tracking is key tobringing more customersto the Fitbit family andreigniting growth."I don't know about you, Evan,but to me, that sounds like it's going into smartwatches.Niu:I think it's both. There'sa couple things going on here, I think. They do want to get more into this premiumsubscription service game,which is why they bought Fitstar in 2016. It'sone of those many mobile apps whereyou subscribe and it gives you workouts,and all these other things.I don't think it's really taken off. They relaunched it,and the reception is pretty good so far, but we'renot really seeing a lot of revenue or numbers coming from it. But, I think they'remaking progress on that front. And then,the other piece of it is the smartwatchidea. They've been really cognizant of the overlap ofbasic wearable trackers and morefull featured smartwatches. Andthey have a couple products that are watches,but they don't even consider them smartwatches,they consider them, like, aGPS watch, for example. And that was a big part of why they bought Pebble and Vector. But Pebblespecifically has a platform that offers third-party apps. It'sone of those kinds of platforms that's on top of a platform, so if you have an iOS or Androiddevice, you used to go and download the Pebble app. Inside the Pebble app is an app store. It was never very big,there wasn't a whole lot of stuff in there,but the point is,they had one. So Fitbitwanted to use that as a foundation to build their ownthird-party platform. It's unclear if they'regoing to try and do it on their own,or if they're going to try and take the same approach of a platformon top of the platform. But either way, that'sdefinitely a big part of their strategy. They want to expand intocreating a third-party ecosystem,which is really when, generally speaking, you seea lot of innovation on top of platforms, is when you reallyopened up to other developers. They want to get into services,they want to get into software, and really create this smartwatch platform. So,those will be the really big, important things going forward. And also,that would help them diversify a little bitaway from hardware,because right now, the whole business is built on hardware sales. Withconsumer electronics products companies,it's a really fickle market,it's really hard to rely on recurring revenue when you're a hardware-based company.Lewis: Yeah,it can be a little bit tougher to anticipate whatconsumer upgrade cycles might look like device to deviceand how long they'll hold on to them. Additionally,working insoftware and services offersFitbit a totally different margin profile. We talked about how theyhad to do some heavy discountingin order to clear through some inventory, andthat's something we're going to continue to see in 2017. That whole product segment won't besubject to the same wild swings and margins,if they're able to build it out to be a meaningful partof the business.Niu: Right. Anddefinitely, it's scales much better. If they could really get Fitstar off the ground...butthat's a really competitive market. There are so many apps out therenowadays that are really geared toward fitness, and they'resubscription-based. There's already a lot out there. Fitbit is entering a pretty crowded market.I guess the challenge will be,how do they differentiate themselves in that market? And certainly,they have some advantages because they integrate with the device itself, and they have their other platform thattracks your biometric data and all these other things. But it'll be tough.I think it'll be pretty important to see if they can pull it off.Lewis:Yeah. Outside of that consumer realm,one of the other things we got some color onin the management commentary following results was the push into some of the health techinitiatives that we saw some of in 2016,and I think the company is going to continue to push. As anexample of where this comes into play for the company,last year, they announced a partnership withMedtronic,and basically, that partnership synced upMedtronic'scontinuous glucose monitors with Fitbit'sactivity trackers as this integrated solution. The idea was that it helpedindividuals with type 2 diabetes, to help with theirmanagement of that, and give a betterdiagnostic on general activity,and might have improved outcomes as well. For context, there are tens ofmillions of individuals with type 2 diabetes in the U.S. alone. That is a very large market. Obviously,these are some very early partnerships. They also havesome stuff going on in the insurer space withUnitedHealth. But, in my mind, that is really wheresome of the big growth opportunities might be for them. And they spent a decent amount of timehighlighting that on the conference call.Niu: Yeah,I think that's definitely another area of opportunity for them. If you canintegrate with these other existing health providers, you can really differentiate to a greater degree, and really build up yourpresence. At the same time,there are these corporate wellness initiatives, which,again, is also very competitive, too,because you have much larger companies likeApple(NASDAQ: AAPL) that havealso been working actively to work with corporate wellness programs. Apple has a deal withAetna, and Fitbit has a deal with UnitedHealth. Bothcompanies are trying to get into this corporate wellness stuff, becausecompanies see that as a way toreduce their healthcare costs over time. So,I think there's definitely an opportunity for both,and that's probably growing enough to whereboth can succeed withoutnecessarily being a zero-something. The pie isgrowing so big that there's probably enough to go around,considering how young the wearables market is.I think corporate wellness is really, as an industry,is only now starting to reallyembrace some of the technology that'sbeing offered out there. I think we're still in the early innings of that.Lewis: Yeah. And insurers are ultimately looking foras much data as possiblewhen it comes to the population ofpeople that they're providing coverage for. I'm sure that's anappealing option to a lot of those insurers. That'sall to say, with the healthcare applications andwith what they might bedoing on the consumer device side and some improvements in their product line, it seems like there are still some opportunities for Fitbit. This is a beaten-up stock. I know there are a lot of Fools that own it and reallylike the business andhave been following it for a while. Looking at guidance, thecompany is trading at 1X2017 sales at this point. We can't do a P/E valuation, we have to do a price-to-salesbecause the earnings have turned negative, and will, over 2017. But that'sa pretty darn cheap business.Niu: Yeah. That's the thing.I don't think Fitbit has this great business going on.I think they have a pretty solid business,but I don't think it's something where I'm like, "Woah, that looks awesome."I'm pretty neutral overall, I would say, andspecifically because it's so cheap,it's hard for me to be bearish, given how cheap the stock is right now. Given thecurrent valuation, the expectations are pretty low. You don't have to really execute that well to meet lowexpectation. If the stock were higher,like it was a year ago,I would probably be a little bit more bearish. But I'm not bullish, either,becausethey have a lot of uncertainty,they obviously just had a really terrible quarter,and it's not clear if they're going to reallybe able to pull off some of these big strategies they'retrying to pull off to grow. And they haveopportunities that we've talked about. But, yeah,I'm kind of neutral, because they're really cheap,but I don't see a whole lot of upside. There's not evena lot of upside in their own guidance,as you can see. So it's not like they have this huge runway ahead of them, necessarily. But, I'm kind of in the middle.Lewis: Inthe past, I've likened them toGarmin, the GPS company, in that early on with Garmin, that seemed like atransformative technology, andit was, and the growth was hugein the first couple years. And then things leveled off,partially because the GPS technology got integrated into smartphones,but they wound up serving a really hyper-focused niche of people that neededperformance navigation devices,people that wanted really high-performance smartwatches, people that wantednavigation for more extreme weather andsailing and stuff like that. It's a business that has a core group, and that core groupisn't necessarily going anywhere. That is kind of what I see withFitbit right now, with the caveat that they do have a largeopportunity in the health tech space. I think that Fitbit, as it continues to be --as it looks right now, if it continues to be this company,I don't love the growth prospects. If they'reable to make that pivot over to the digital health world and becomemore of a software services and general platform company that has these health partnerships, thenit becomes really interesting. They need to do quite a bit to make that move, though. On my end,I'm not really looking at them until I see somesolid evidence that that transition is taking root.Niu: Yeah,I think it's going to be really tough to transition to smartwatches. Apple isgoing to be a huge presence in smartwatchesspecifically. It's going to be so hard for Fitbit to compete against them. We weretalking about this before the show. Fitbit's total market cap is, like, $1.5 billion. Apple makes 5X that in a single quarter. So,in terms of resources, you just can't compete. And Apple certainly started off with smartwatcheswithout doing anything like the basic stuff. Now, Fitbit made its name with basic wearables and basic trackers, and now they'retrying to move up-market to challenge Apple in the smartwatch market. Not that the smartwatch marketis doing very well right now. It kind of stumbled last year. Butconceptually, it's going to be really tough to compete with Apple.Lewis: Yeah. So,ultimately, this might be a business that winds up servicing its core user base for an extended period of time, and doing a very good job at that. There are growth opportunities,but they have to be quite a bit to really make them materialize, and make them into large ramps for this business.Niu: Right,andthey have so many different areas that they have to execute on to really pull this off. The question is, can management actually focus on each of these areas? It's a lot to juggle.Lewis: Yeah. We will look tofuture earnings results and see. Thanks for joining us, Evan!Niu: Thanks for having me!

Lewis: Well, listeners, that does it for this episode of Industry Focus. If you have any questions, or if just want to reach out and say, "Hey,"you can shoot us an email at industryfocus@fool.com. You can always tweet us @MFIndustryFocus as well. If you're looking for more of our stuff, subscribe on iTunes, or check out The Fool's family of shows at fool.com/podcasts. As always, people on the program may own companies discussed on the show, and The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against stocks mentioned, so don't buy or sell anything based solely on what you hear. For Evan Niu, I'm Dylan Lewis, thanks for listening and Fool on!

Dylan Lewis owns shares of Apple. Evan Niu, CFA owns shares of Apple. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Apple and Fitbit. The Motley Fool owns shares of Medtronic and has the following options: long January 2018 $90 calls on Apple and short January 2018 $95 calls on Apple. The Motley Fool recommends UnitedHealth Group. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.