Exercise equipment manufacturer Peloton Interactive Inc. has had to issue a recall for pedals on around 27,000 of its bike because of risks of injury. That has come at a challenging time for the firm as it has faced surging demand but also logistics congestion that has slowed deliveries, according to CEO John Foley, who does "not expect to return to normalized order-to-delivery windows in the U.S. prior to the end of Q2 FY 2021," or December.
Deliveries are at least arriving at the ports to meet demand, though. Panjiva's data shows that U.S. seaborne imports linked to Peloton, including peripherals and merchandise, jumped by 124% sequentially in the calendar third quarter versus calendar second quarter and reached a record high in the month of September.
Peloton, like other exercise equipment manufacturers, is having to fight for logistics space with a wider spread surge in imports of consumer discretionary products. As outlined in Panjiva's research of Oct. 12, this is being driven by a mixture of underlying increased demand for stay-at-home products heading into the winter as well as an apparent assumption by retailers that shoppers will make holiday purchases earlier than normal.
The more established fitness equipment manufacturers have also seen marked increases in their imports. Total U.S. seaborne imports of fitness equipment jumped by 137% year over year in September and by 102% for the third quarter as a whole.
The fastest growth among the majors has been seen in shipments linked to Nautilus Inc., which rose by 406% year over year in the third quarter, while those linked to ICON Fitness Corp. rose by 106%. Traditional retailers are also scaling up their imports, likely to avoid being disintermediated by direct-to-consumer suppliers, shown by an 83.7% jump in shipments linked to DICK'S Sporting Goods Inc.
Christopher Rogers is a senior researcher at Panjiva, which is a business line of S&P Global Market Intelligence, a division of S&P Global Inc. This content does not constitute investment advice, and the views and opinions expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of S&P Global Market Intelligence. Links are current at the time of publication. S&P Global Market Intelligence is not responsible if those links are unavailable later.