Polaris Industries, the manufacturer of snowmobiles, off-road vehicles, and motorcycles, has purchased pontoon boat maker, Boat Holdings.
Forbes has reported that the all-cash transaction totaled $805 million, will round out Polaris’ portfolio of power-sports products, and the company hopes it will give them cross-selling abilities.
Elkhart, Ind.-based Boat Holdings makes deck boats and cruisers, in addition to pontoon boats, with more than 200 models under the Bennington, Godfrey, Hurricane, and https://rinkerboats.com/ brands. Founded in 1997 by boating entrepreneur Steve Vogel, the company had $560 million in revenue last year, with Ebitda of $74 million. Boat Holdings has been growing faster than the industry and is at the forefront of the shift to high-featured, high-performance luxury boats, Polaris explained in a release.
We thought if we were going to get into boats, we wanted to get into it with a major player,” said Wine, 50, a former naval officer who became Polaris’s CEO in 2008 after stints at United Technologies, Danaher, and Allied Signal.
“Most of our competitors have water products. We’re kind of late to the party,” Polaris CEO Scott Wine told Forbes in a telephone interview. Yamaha, Kawasaki, and others that compete with Medina, Minn.-based Polaris in its existing markets already have boat divisions, he noted.
The U.S. market for new powerboats is $8 billion, and pontoon boats are the largest and fastest growing segment of the industry with an 11% compound annual growth rate since 2010. There’s a strong overlap between the different types of power sports with some 30% of Polaris’s existing customers owning a boat.
We thought if we were going to get into boats, we wanted to get into it with a major player,” said Wine, 50, a former naval officer who became Polaris’s CEO in 2008 after stints at United Technologies, Danaher, and Allied Signal.
