Despite bad winter weather, Forest City-based Winnebago Industries reports a better-than-expected second quarter. Revenues increased over 29-percent during the quarter to $228.8 million, up more than $51 million from a year ago. Net income rose to $9.6 million, up more than $3 million from a year earlier.
Winnebago CEO Randy Potts says he’s pleased to see his company’s positive results in a soft motor home market. Potts says they’re proud to have such good results given all the challenges of an under-performing RV market. He says the improvement in earnings was lessened by various factors, including severe winter weather conditions that caused some issues not only locally, but nationwide for Winnebago.
“Our employees had really a lot of bad weather to deal with just getting to and from work,” Potts says. He says they had some days where they had to shut down the plant. The weather also impacted the supply chain with incoming and outgoing freight being plugged up.
Potts says the Winnebago name continues to draw a strong demand for the product lineup, which will include several new products heading into the spring and summer.
“We’ve got some really exciting products that we launched. We first showed them in the fall and have gotten a lot of positive response from ou dealer base,” Potts says. For the first half of Winnebago’s fiscal year, revenues were $451.5 million, an increase of almost 22-percent from $370.7 million, with net income growing almost 52-percent to $20.7 million.
(Reporting by Bob Fisher, KRIB, Mason City)