Okay, thanks everybody for joining. My name is Adam Tindle, and this is part of the connected devices and IoT coverage here at Raymond James. Very happy to have the team from iRobot, CEO Gary Cohen, CFO Karian Wong. And I did, my team and I did write this big long fireside chat, and they decided to do a presentation, which takes a lot of work off of me as well. So appreciate that. I think we will have some time for questions, though. If you do have questions as we go along, just raise your hand. I think the team would love to keep it as interactive as possible. So with that, great. Thanks, Adam. Thanks, everyone. Just a cautionary note, we may be making forward-looking statements, so please refer to our risk factors and our SEC filings. But thank you for letting us talk to you about the iRobot story. iRobot is the category creator in the robotic vacuum cleaner segment. We have a global iconic brand that has strong consumer and retailer appeal and a very long history of robust innovation. We have a growth category. We are primed for growth. It's been several years since the pandemic, and a lot of home goods categories are starting to rebound. We're seeing significant growth in our European markets, double-digit growth, in fact, due to the launch of premium new products. Those products are starting to be launched in the United States. That gives us confidence for growth, and we will be launching an entire suite of new products next year into that growth story. In addition, it's a relatively low penetration category. So all those factors, plus any additional benefit from consumer spending, would give us a great outlook for next year. We have a very passionate and talented team and very proud of the organization as part of iRobot. Just quickly on our history, we were started over 30 years ago, both in government business as well as the consumer business, founded by Colin Angle and his MIT colleagues. Fast forward to this year, post the Amazon termination of the acquisition agreement, I became the first outside CEO in the company's history. I joined the company in May of this past year, and since then, me and my entire management team have put together a turnaround story that we have branded iRobot Elevate. Just some factors on the business, you can see the market cap, the enterprise value, and the cash of $100 million. Real question is, how did we get to iRobot Elevate? Our team has been very much focused on strategic growth and turnaround. It's about restoring profitability and cash flow after several years of operating and cash flow losses. It's really becoming focused on the consumer after a few years of missteps, of not focusing on certain market segment growth opportunities. And it's really optimizing our R&D model and turning us into a marketing-led organization with an asset-light way to go to market that I'll talk about. That is allowing us to develop a robust innovation platform and a long-term platform for growth for our core business. And that's what we've been focusing on initially, really reprioritizing and focusing on our core. And then just obviously driving operational and financial discipline in everything we do, something I brought with me from my Gillette days, but it's all about strategy and execution. And that's putting in governance models and really making strategic choices so that we can turn the business around. We have branded our turnaround story, iRobot Elevate, and it's focused on five key elements: financial turnaround, and that's really expanding our gross margins and getting us back to positive cash flow. It's about focusing on the consumer insights and making sure that we build this great brand that we have and allowing us to build an innovation platform of new products. There's still ongoing cost optimization that we have to focus on in every company, and that will give us the expanded gross margins that we're looking for. The lifeblood of any consumer products company is expanding gross margins and reinvesting that into our growth drivers of marketing and R&D, and then obviously retaining and developing our best talent. We're elevating everything we do at iRobot to build shareholder value. Some of those core operational elements of Elevate that I identified is really changing our R&D model, and that's really having a design to value with a new contract manufacturing model where we have developed a core focus of innovative engineers and software engineers in our Boston area headquarters that we call iRobot Labs, having them innovate, design, and bring products to our contract manufacturers using third parties and our teams in Asia to really relocate and have lower value R&D and engineering functions in lower cost markets, but making sure that we do all the innovation in Boston. In the short term, we've paused a lot of our non-core floor care work so that we can focus on the core and develop a robust innovation platform on our core business. It's about centralizing and streamlining our global marketing activity so we can be more efficient and effective. And we use marketing mix and a lot of analytics to make sure that we're optimizing the spend. And it's really right-sizing our real estate footprint to accommodate the new size of the employee base that we have. I'm going to let Karian just show you the tremendous progress we've made in just a very short period of time on our turnaround. Thank you, Gary. As you know, since the terminations of the merger agreement with Amazon in January, we also announced a very aggressive but necessary restructuring plan to right-size our organizations to the current size of our business. Earlier this year, we targeted ourselves to reduce headcount by 31%, and including the restructuring effort that we did in November, we have now reduced our headcount by 50%. And from a sales and marketing perspective, exiting 2023, our selling and marketing expenses are about 22% of revenue, much higher than the industry benchmark for the size of our business. As a result, we set targets to reduce our restructuring for our selling and marketing expenses by about $40 million earlier this year, and through Q3 of this year, we have reduced our expenses by $38 million, representing roughly about 19% of our revenue through Q3 of this year. On our R&D front, we have targeted ourselves to reduce our expenses by $25 million. At the end of 2023, R&D expense was roughly about 15% of revenue, and again, it's higher than the industry benchmark, and we've worked diligently to reduce our expenses, and you can see that through Q3, we have reduced our expenses by $33 million. As of Q3 of this year, R&D expense represents roughly about 10% of our revenue. Now, if you look at our financials, you've seen that over the last couple of years, we have built inventory to a point where in Q3 of 2022, our inventory level was over $400 million, with a days in inventory of almost 200 days. Over the last couple of years, we worked diligently to reduce our inventory balances to align with our current size of the business. At the end of Q3, we ended our inventory at about $149 million, representing a significant improvement in days in inventory. As you can see, we're on track to exceed our operating expense reduction target that we set out earlier this year, and we'll continue to work on our turnaround plan. Thanks, Karian. So we have developed what we call the reasons to believe. Why will iRobot win again? And we've been sharing this with investors. We've been sharing this with our constituents. I just came back from Europe and have shared this with our team and distributors over there. And it's all about leaning into the global brand that we have and taking advantage of the large installed consumer base that we have. We have an extensive omnichannel distribution network that we can launch our new products into. And it's just great in terms of the visibility and prominence that we have. We have a strong IP portfolio, and we continue to build on that. And it's all about leveraging this new R&D model and asset-light model so that we can get to market faster with better products and margin-accretive products. And that will allow us to close a lot of the feature and technology gaps that we have in the marketplace today. What's great as a consumer marketer, I would have loved to have this in some of my prior brands that I worked on. We have a powerful proprietary database with real-time insights that we can leverage. And obviously, as I mentioned, an energized and focused and passionate leadership team that I'm so proud to lead. About the brand, we have a large installed base, a global brand with very strong brand favorability ratings, both in awareness, favorability, consideration, and trust. No other competitor has that. And that's what gives us a strong advantage in the marketplace. Another asset is our extensive global omnichannel distribution network. You can see the nameplates at the bottom. We have a very strong retail presence. We're distributed everywhere. If you go to some of our stores, it looks like a company store in terms of the number of sets and facings that we have. We have premium merchandising. We have premium presence in most of our store formats. And this gives us a great advantage in the marketplace. Correspondingly, our direct-to-consumer business has also grown. And it's grown as a percentage of sales. It's nearly doubled in the past three years. We have dedicated merchandising representatives in some of our top retailers and some of our top markets that go in merchandise product, but also refer products to consumers. So a very strong asset for us. I mentioned our intellectual property portfolio. It's not just on robots. It's in our other adjacencies as well. And we continue to build upon it. As you saw most recently in our reports, we had a negotiated settlement on taking advantage of some of the IP that we have. It is a very strong asset for us. We're leveraging this new asset-light model to go to market faster and better. One of the huge benefits that has already started to be baked into our P&L is that these are margin-accretive products. The products that we're launching are replacing products at a much better gross margin format. You're already seeing that in our results. Karian talked about reducing our R&D and supply chain cost to industry benchmarks. That allows us to bring product to market faster and win versus the competition. We've leveraged an Asia supply chain base to minimize risk. Importantly, all product that comes from the United States is not coming from China. We're in Vietnam. We're in Malaysia. We're in China. We're in China for Europe and Japan. But largely, we've mitigated all risk of tariffs. And that really gives us a strong footprint to be able to take advantage of future growth. These are three products that we launched this past year. They all are margin-accretive versus the products they replaced. And next year's product lineup will all be margin-accretive as well. I mentioned iRobot Labs, our U.S.-based innovation team that is really harnessing the great experience base that we have to leverage a complete lineup of new products. Next year, we're revamping our entire product line across all good, better, and best price points. And we're very much taking a consumer-centric approach, delighting the consumers wherever we can at every stage of the product experience, not just with the product, but from unboxing to using our new iRobot Home App. So next year, our entire product line will feature an upgraded app that has a much better user experience. And as I mentioned earlier, you have to use an app to get the best experience with our product. That connectivity gives us a robust data set on our consumers. We have millions of consumers that are operating monthly, but we have data on cleaning, how people clean, when they clean, when they have issues, what part of the floor they clean most often. So we can give communication back to consumers. And we can also make our robots smarter. So the robots, particularly with the vision technology, identify areas in the floor that are dirty. We can actually help consumers figure out obstacles. And that machine learning gives a much better user experience. And finally, I mentioned the experienced and energized team that we have. I just came back from Europe. Here are some pictures of our team. Just blessed to have a new leadership team that's supported by a deep bench. We've elevated an entire next generation of leaders across R&D and across many of our functions. And they all want iRobot to win again. And that's what makes it so great to work there and one of the main reasons why I joined the company. So I'm going to turn it over to Karian to give you some financial highlights. Thank you, Gary. Before I start on the financial discussions, I want to remind everybody that today's financial discussion is going to be focused on historical actual results through Q3. And we're not providing any update to our Outlook until Q4 earnings call early next year. As Gary mentioned, improving the financial performance is one of the core pillars of our iRobot Elevate strategy. And over the past years, you've seen a significant improvement in our cost structure, resizing our cost structure to align with current business model. We've made tremendous improvements on our inventory balances over the last couple of years. And with our focus on executing our turnaround plan along with discipline on spending, we've continued to improve our working capital. And at the end of Q3, we have a cash of about $100 million versus in Q2 of this year of $109 million. We continue to improve our cash use from operations quarter over quarter, and we'll continue to focus on our liquidity and cash flow management over the year. In Q3, you can see our turnaround is on track with the launches of our new product this year so far. Along with our restructuring efforts, we were able to improve our gross margin by 590 basis points. From an operating expense perspective, we reduced our operating expenses by $42 million, including a benefit from our recent IP settlement litigations of about $13.5 million in Q3. We continue to focus on financial priorities in improving gross margin and operating margin. As you can see with the launches of new product this year so far, along with our focus on restructuring effort, we improved our gross margin in Q3 by 590 basis points. With the new product that we're launching in 2025, all of them will be margin-accretive to our margin expansion strategy, which will then allow us to reinvest in our growth drivers, such as sales and marketing, as well as R&D. Operating expenses, you've seen the significant improvement on our operating expense reductions. We're on track to achieve and exceed the target that we set out earlier this year when we announced the restructuring plan. With all the restructuring effort, we're able to narrow our operating losses. You can see the improvement we've made so far. Through Q3 of this year, we have reduced our operating losses by more than half compared to last year. Now, we're really excited about our prospects of 2025 as we continue to execute on our iRobot Elevate strategy and the new product launching that's coming up in 2025. Thanks, Karian. We are truly in a turnaround, but we are making strong progress. And we are positioned for success. Just to summarize, we are a market leader with an iconic brand and innovative new products. We're featuring a portfolio that has significant benefits, such as advanced technology and concepts for all elements of cleaning the house. We have a near-term plan for improving our operational performance. And you've seen some of that already baked into our performance that Karian took you through. And that really just comes from aggressive cost-cutting, focus, discipline strategy, and focus on execution. And it's really been about stabilizing the business, but then focus on building the brand and innovation. And that innovation, that focus on innovation, is going to give us a long-term growth portfolio and investing in higher value products. And it's really, you know, we've transformed the company in terms of everything we've done. So it's really been great to be part of this. We're in our early stages. I've only been here six months, but it's great to see the progress we've made. Turnarounds take time. They take focus. They take energy. But I'm really pleased with the progress that we've made to date and excited about the future. So with that, I'll turn it over to any questions. So, two questions. Can you talk about your opportunities outside the vacuum space? And what does the core business need to look like before you can really go after it? And does it worry you that competition is probably far ahead in terms of maybe a humanoid robot or something that should be largely yours? You're stuck in a turnaround while. Yeah. So we have paused a lot of our non-floor care activity, but we didn't mothball it. So we've got a lot of IP. We've got a lot of technology at the ready. It is very important that we focus on the core, get the business back to growth, get our margins expanding, and then to be able to reinvest those margins back into the business. That's the virtuous circle of consumer products. Once we do that and start to get that growth, then we can start to look at adjacencies. And we have many adjacencies that we can go after that are obvious extensions of where our product line is today. I think humanoids is a little further down the road. But obviously, we have to take competition seriously. And I think that's something that the prior team didn't do as well. We have to be maniacally focused on the competition and the consumer, and that's how we're going to turn this company around. Did I answer both of those? It's hard for you because the numbers are obviously exposed. But would it be fair to say you need a few years of positive free cash flow somewhere close to historical margins? Maybe too ambitious to expect historical gross margins before you can actually go after an adjacency? I think we can do both at the same time. But obviously, we have to be very patient about when that comes in. In terms of, we're not giving any outlook on margins, but we're very focused on publicly traded consumer companies and what those margin profiles are, and we know that we've got the ability to do that. Karian Wong, you've been at the company six months, as you mentioned. So presumably, prior to joining, you would have analyzed a lot of different opportunities and ultimately landed on this one. I wonder if you could maybe just take us back through your process, since a lot of investors in this room and on the webcast are probably going through something similar as they reengage with iRobot. Take us through your process in deciding to join the company. Sure. Well, as I said, I have built my career. For those of you that don't know, I spent 20 years at Gillette and then a few years at Procter & Gamble. Marketing and innovation is my domain expertise. I then went to Playtex as part of a turnaround, and we sold that business, and then I went to Timex, the watch company. I've had a robust experience of working on multiple iconic brands, then I went to Qualitor, an aftermarket auto business, which was private equity backed, and that was a true turnaround situation, but we had a consumer business. We sold Michelin wiper blades to big box, and we used a similar model and taking an asset-light model, developing our own IP, bringing that to Asian suppliers, getting the best cost for that, letting people bid on it, and then bringing that back to the U.S. to our big-box retailers. So I've done it before. And that model is something that I saw that I was able to do at iRobot. We've got a great iconic brand that we can leverage that has really strong assets. We have an ability to innovate and a team that still has an ability to innovate and an asset-light model that we were able to develop where we can use the best of our own internal teams, our teams in Asia, plus third parties. And that's what's going to allow us to get this speed to market with products that are better, that are differentiated, and do it in a much faster way that are all margin-accretive. And that margin accretion in terms of innovation is the platform for success. So we've already met with our iRobot Labs team to develop pillars of innovation to go after the consumer-end benefits that we want to go after. That's a different framework than coming at it from a technology standpoint that says, here's technology. How do we sell it? We're looking at consumer needs, pain points, and figuring out how we can solve their needs. So I knew that with that ability to do that, we could be very successful. And obviously, a very talented team that has existed already. I haven't made any changes to the team in terms of bringing folks in from the outside. I've changed over almost 80% of my team. And a lot of that was elevating folks within the team, such as Karian, who are just ready to take this business to the next level. Our restructuring person, Jeff Engel, I was able to convince him to join us this summer. He's now our Chief Operating Officer. He saw the same thing that I did, which is he was convinced that we could turn this company around. Got it. OK. And as you think about turnaround stories, part of the delicate balance looks like you're doing a great job on optimizing the cost structure and executing on that. When you go through those periods and you're reducing headcount, it can be a little bit difficult to transition then to the period of growth thereafter. Maybe you could just describe your vision for that and the time for that growth transition. Do you think that's a 2025 event? Or how are you thinking about timing on that? So going back to our guidance from last earnings call, we did say that we see opportunity for revenue growth next year, both in absolute and the second half. And that is a function of us developing and getting all these new products into market. And it's also our expectations that the category will grow because of the new products and the premium products that are going to be in the marketplace. So we don't have to wait too long for that. Obviously, the sustainable long-term is our ability to innovate a roadmap with a pipeline of new products that meet those consumer needs that I talked about. So we don't have the luxury of waiting. I mean, we've reduced the life cycle of our new product activity in half. That's still too long for me. But it is something we just have to be patient for in the marketplace. Is that efforts and R&D spent enough to bridge the gap on the technology and product side? Yeah, it is. Because if you look at what we had spent historically, we had a lot of science projects. We had a lot of focus on non-core activity, and frankly, we weren't utilizing our model in the best way possible. We self-directed a lot of spend. We did too much in the U.S., and so we have to leverage third parties. We have to leverage partners, and we have to leverage a lower cost supply base to be able to do that and hold our contract manufacturers more accountable for delivery and for better cost savings. I have a question about post-production line transitions. How long may they fully consume the last favorable gross margin? Is it reasonable to look at the inventory amount, say it's like $149 million, and then given the revenue rate, could it may show how many orders it may need to fully consume the last favorable gross margin products? You're talking about how fast we're going to transition the old inventory and the new inventory? Yes. Yeah. Do you want to? When will it reach close to 100% of new favorable gross margin profile? Yeah, presumably your FIFO and so. Yep. And so, in the November 6 earnings call, we talk about the new launches and with the expectations that full year 2025 will be revenue growth is stronger in the second half versus the first half. And first quarter will represent a transition period. And granted, with our inventory, we also have programs that we talk to our retailer for next year's promotional period. So don't expect that will be turned immediately 100% next quarter. But keep in mind that we manage our inventory based on our days in inventory. So we work closely to make sure that we manage our inventory to the level that meets our business needs in the future. You can see the significant progress we've made to date on that. How high are the gross margins of the new products versus the old products? Well. We're not giving guidance today, so we'll give more details in the upcoming Q4 call earlier this year or next year, but what we can say is the gross margin expansion you've already seen in Q3 performance. Those are based on the three product lines that we launched this year, along with the restructuring activities that we took this year. With next year's launches, we know that all of them will be margin-accretive compared to the product that they were replacing. That's incremental margin accretion next year. Compared to what right now? Which is a little bit unusual for new products. Oftentimes in consumer businesses, we think of them to be lower margin initially until you scale them with your CM, et cetera. What enables the new products to be higher gross margin? Just curious. I think it's the historical model that we used. Our products were high cost. They, in many cases, over-engineered. So by changing the model, that's allowed us to get a better cost profile. How do you do that while maintaining that premium brand aspect and kind of premium view within your retailer footprint? Well, as I said, one of the benefits that we have is that retailers are rooting for us. They want us to win. So they've kept space for us at the shelf. And we have premium space. We have prominence display space. And we invest significantly in merchandising and our footprint. So when these new products launch, we actually have really good visibility already. And we'll upgrade all of our merchandising. It really has a premium look. That is probably the one distinction relative to an online view if you actually go to retail. We stand out. We look premium. And that's a huge benefit for us that helps elevate the brand. Karian, how do you think about the capital structure? I know you've done some maneuvers here over the past number of quarters. How are you thinking about current capital structure and future cash needs? Liquidity and cash flow management is definitely a top priority of ours. And you've seen that we manage our working capital efficiency very closely. And we continue to manage our inventory level closely to align with our business need. We have an ATM program out. And it's approved for $100 million earlier in Q1. That gives us preserved flexibility for us if we need financial needs in the future. And again, top priority is to manage cash flow, improve the use of cash flow as we continue to move forward with our turnaround plan. Maybe time for one more? So sales and marketing and R&D seem to be pretty right-sized. So in order to have profitability, you should be able to get that gross margin back up? Gross? Gross margin and top line. But as I said, a lot of that gross margin is already baked into what we're doing. So it's not. That's good that we're already starting to see it. All the new products have pretty much been all planned already. We love a good turnaround story. We love to root for an underdog. Certainly following it closely. Congrats on the first six months. It looks like a compelling plan. We'll leave it there. Thank you, guys. All right. Thanks very much. Appreciate it.
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