Sonos released corporate earnings on 12-August. CEO and executive management spoke to investors and answered questions from Wall Street analysts. If they won't answer customers, I thought we should see what they say to the analysts and their stockholders. For those who want to deep dive, the full transcript is here: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4532757-sonos-inc-sono-ceo-patrick-spence-on-q3-2022-results-earnings-call-transcript
But my concern as a customer is the backlog, specifically on the AMP. It seems like this could last into the end of the year, or into early next year based on the comments from the CEO.
Here are some highlights from the executives public comments on the backlog from 12-Aug:
“we remain supply constrained in some of our key products like Amp and Beam. And as a result, we continue to have a backlog which caused us to miss out on revenue opportunities in the quarter.”
“Finally, we will start to be in a better supply position on Amp in Q4, but do still expect to have a backlog exiting the year. We have seen the supply situation improve relative to last quarter and are catching up on our product availability.”
“we are now seeing a more challenging macro environment and the continued strengthening U.S. dollar impacting our results. And we have continued to be supply constrained on certain products, especially Amp. These factors led to mixed performance across our regions.”
And finally, Rod Hall the Goldman Sachs analyst covering Sonos asked the question:
“And then I guess I wanted to come back to the systems weakness. And I know you called out supply is the main driver of that. I'm just curious, particularly the Amp, we noticed the lead times are still really long, what is the challenge there with that product? And do you think there's any macro effect there? Or you really do think that's all just supply? It just seems like it's an expensive product, and it's a specialist installer type of products and wonder how those people are behaving these days in addition to the supply constraints:
CFO Brittany Bagley answer: Rod, it's a great question. I would say it's 1 that we have a little bit less visibility on right now just because we haven't had the product in stock to see how that's changed. I can tell you from what we are seeing and as we talk to installers, they continue to have an enormous amount of demand for that product and can't wait for us to get back in stock on it.
It is one of the products where we've had the biggest challenge from a component standpoint. And I think you can tell from my gross margin commentary in Q4 that we are doing absolutely everything we can to get the components we need to get that product back in stock, and it's back by the end of Q4 and certainly by Q1 that we'll be back to the inventory levels that we need on here.