Peloton reported on Thursday a 172 percent spike in sales during its fourth quarter. While the company's high-tech exercise bike has become ubiquitous in the COVID era, COO and co-founder Tom Cortese said the sales were just a continuation of its rapid rise.
"As far as we're concerned, we've been on a path since we put the first Peloton product in the first home in 2014, where we've seen almost a doubling of the company each year since then," Peloton COO and co-founder Tom Cortese told Cheddar. "We see what's happened with COVID as just an acceleration of the trend that has already been very well in existence."
Sales jumped from $223 million in the fourth quarter of last year to $607 million in its 2020 Q4, exceeding the company's own forecast of $582.5 million.
The New York City-based company's confidence isn't letting up either, with a forecast of more than $720 million in sales in the first quarter of next year.
Peloton's rise has been so rapid that it's struggled at times to keep up with consumer demand, in part because the company has kept much of its delivery operations in-house.
In a letter to shareholders, the company said that a resurgence in COVID-19 cases has created an "imbalance of supply and demand in many geographies, causing continued elongated order-to-delivery windows for our customers" that isn't likely to be remedied until Q2 2021.
"We've been investing in our own end-to-end supply chain for quite some time now," Cortese said. "We do a great number of our deliveries through our own trucks, our own staff, and we've scaled that operation up massively in all of the markets where we operate."
In addition to the roll-out of two new bikes, the original Peloton bike is set for a significant price cut — from $2,245 to $1,895 — potentially leading to even more demand.
"We have been able to see great efficiencies in the scale that we've created, and we thought the best thing that we could do with those efficiencies is pass them along to our customers," Cortese said.
In response to rumors of a new "strength" product line — which was hinted at in a recent job posting — Cortese maintained that the company would not be resting on its laurels.
"What I can confirm is that we are not sitting idly by," he said. "We've spent the last eight and a half, nine years building this company into what it is today."
