ELKHART, Ind. — The industry is employing a “disciplined and thoughtful” approach in the Q1, but Patrick Industries is anticipating a modest uptick in the second and third quarters of 2026, officials said, adding that the company’s scalability will allow it to keep pace with that increase.
Speaking to investment analysts following its Q4 and 2025 financial performance report Thursday (Feb. 5) (See: “Patrick Industries Reports $4 Billion in Net Sales for 2025”), CEO Andy Nemeth credited entire Patrick team for its efforts and determination despite macroeconomic uncertainty.
“Our businesses once again proved resilient in 2025, and our focus over the past two years on product development and innovation efforts paid off in the form of meaningful content growth with the 2026 model year changes as we continue our ongoing evolution toward our full solutions model,” said Nemeth in his opening remarks, adding that the company acquired Medallion Instrumentation Systems, Quality Engineered Services, Aegis Group and Lilypad Marine.
“These teams and businesses bring new technology, innovation, deep entrepreneurial spirit, strong engineering leadership and additional aftermarket content and runway to Patrick. … Additionally, early in 2025, we strategically complemented our existing investments in composites through the acquisition of Elkhart Composites,” said Nemeth, who was joined on the conference call with President Jeff Rodino and Chief Financial Officer Matt Feiler.
For his part, Rodino said the end markets which the company serves continues to be shaped by “a combination of macro uncertainty and tariff volatility, resulting in cautious consumer behavior.” OEMs and dealers, he noted, have shown “tremendous discipline,” with OEMs having remained thoughtful in aligning production schedules with retail demand and dealers having prioritized well-managed inventory levels and selective ordering patterns.
Rodino, too, highlighted the company’s continued investment in composites, saying they believe they are “a superior solution to wood products, which have been increasingly impacted by tariffs and other governmental actions.”
“Teams in collaboration with our Advanced Product Group are focused on the development and production of our new composite solutions that further unlock potential avenues of content not included in our current total addressable market,” he said. “Testing on our previously discussed roofing solution has been successfully completed, and we are excited about the related organic content opportunities.”
While also singling out the company’s intentions to further its manufacturing capabilities and aftermarket penetration — the latter of which was highlighted by the more than 500 Patrick SKUs on the RecPro site as well as a 30% year-over-year aftermarket sales increase — Nemeth also introduced the “Experience, which he called an “industry-leading full-scale virtual design and reality solution.”
“This technology provides actual scale modeling and product development technology to further deepen our collaboration and partnership with our valued customers,” he noted, adding that it builds on Patrick’s existing design platform at its Product Showcase Studio in Elkhart.
Rodino provided further context for the Experience
“As Andy mentioned, we recently debuted this industry-leading investment, technology and venue that leverages virtual reality, advanced product scanners, and a massive LED display to bring customizable life-size design product solutions and marketing showcase to our customers,” he said. “This 50-foot wide by 14-foot tall screen is capable of presenting in virtual reality RVs, boats and powersport vehicles that we specialize in at a one-to-one scale. The Experience enables customers to walk through their virtual renderings of their products and experiment with design and solutions changing in real-time, reducing the number of prototype units needed.”
Since its launch in late November, Patrick has hosted over 30 comprehensive demos for its customers, Rodino said, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive.
What follows is an edited account of the conference call’s Q&A portion.
Q: On the company’s estimation that full-year 2026 RV retail registrations will be flat, with wholesale unit shipments increasing low to mid-single digits as a result.
Nemeth: As of right now, what we see is inventory levels are extremely lean — even with a little bit of restock that we saw in the fourth quarter. We think inventories were incredibly lean at the end of Q3. We’re really excited about is there’s just tremendous discipline between the OEMs and the dealers today as it relates to managing inventories. It’s really positioned everybody well to be able to scale — at least us, certainly — to be able to scale going forward.
So, right now as we’re in the early parts of Q1, there is optimism and we’re excited about the potential that exists, but dealers and OEs are staying very, very disciplined to maintaining these lean inventories. As we move into the selling season — in late Q1, Q2 — is when we would expect to start to see things move, or hope to start to see things move. So Q1 right now is what I’m going to say, disciplined and thoughtful. And we would expect an uptick in Q2 and Q3 as the selling season occurs.
And, like I said, I think we’re really optimistic about where we can play in this especially with our scalability value proposition. We’ve positioned ourselves really well. We used our working capital in the form of inventory a little bit heavier on inventory in Q4 in anticipation of this uptick, we’re going to be able to move very, very quickly when things do move.
