LiveWire Group, Inc. (NYSE:LVWR) Q3 2023 Earnings Conference Call October 26, 2023 9:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Jochen Zeitz - Chief Executive Officer

Jonathan Root - Chief Financial Officer

Karim Donnez - LiveWire Chief Executive Officer

Edel O'Sullivan - Chief Commercial Officer

Shawn Collins - Director of Investor Relations

Conference Call Participants

Craig Kennison - Baird

Robby Ohmes - Bank of America

Joseph Altobello - Raymond James

James Hardiman - Citi

Tristan Thomas Martin - BMO Capital Markets

Noah Zatzkin - KeyBanc Capital Markets

David MacGregor - Longbow Research

Brandon Rolle - D.A. Davidson

Operator

Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Harley-Davidson 2023 Third Quarter Investor and Analyst Conference Call. Please be advised that today’s conference is being recorded.

I would now like to hand the conference over to Shawn Collins. Thank you. Please go ahead.

Shawn Collins

Thank you. Good morning. This is Shawn Collins, the Director of Investor Relations at Harley-Davidson. You can access the slides supporting today’s call on the Internet at the Harley-Davidson Investor Relations website.

As you might expect, our comments will include forward-looking statements that are subject to business risks that could cause actual results to be materially different. Those risks include among others, matters we have noted in today’s earnings release and our latest filings with the SEC.

With that, joining me this morning for the first part of the call are Harley-Davidson, Chief Executive Officer, Jochen Zeitz; also, Chief Financial Officer, Jonathan Root; and LiveWire CEO, Karim Donnez. In addition, for the Q&A portion of today’s call, Harley-Davidson Chief Commercial Officer, Edel O'Sullivan will be joining us, as she usually does.

With that, let me turn it over to our CEO, Jochen Zeitz. Jochen.

Jochen Zeitz

Thank you, Shawn, and good morning everyone. Thank you for joining us today for Harley-Davidson and LiveWire’s Q3 results. I will start with an overview of the HDMC business for the quarter. Karim will then provide commentary on LiveWire, and Jonathan will run out the financials for HDI including HDFS before we go into questions.

As we closed out the third quarter of ‘23, it is clear that, the macroeconomic backdrop has been a challenge for our customers globally and in turn for our business with both inflationary pressures creating affordability challenges and high interest rates contributing to slower upgrade pipeline.

We’ve continued to work through the effects of the unplanned production suspension in June and July, which impacted Q3 by delaying the availability of some of our high demand products, as well as altering our inventory mix, especially in North America.