Garmin’s Q2 resilient, well ahead of estimates, COVID-19 fears

Garmin’s second quarter earnings and revenue were well ahead of expectations and highlighted how the COVID-19 pandemic did little to dent sales of its fitness trackers and smartwatches.

The company didn’t mention its ransomware attack in its earnings statement.

In any case, Garmin’s earnings did the talking. The company reported second quarter revenue of $869.97 million, down 9% from a year ago. Garmin’s fitness category sales were up 17%. Earnings were 96 cents a share and 91 cents a share on a non-GAAP basis.

Wall Street was expecting Garmin to report second quarter sales of $658.8 million with non-GAAP earnings of 39 cents a share.

Garmin CEO Cliff Pemble said the company had a quarter with “unprecedented challenges,” but noted that “business conditions rapidly improved from April lows driven by popular fitness, marine, and outdoor products.”

On Garmin’s site, the company said, “we are happy to report that many of the systems and services affected by the recent outage, including Garmin Connect, are returning to operation.”

• Garmin begins to restore Garmin Connect features, services, says customer data not impacted
• Garmin services and production go down after ransomware attack
• Garmin’s outage, ransomware attack response lacking as earnings loom
• Garmin Fenix smartwatches hit with GPS, run and activity saving glitch amid outage

On a conference call with analysts, Pemble said sales of advanced wearables and cycling products surged after a rough start in April. “Looking forward, we expect that the interest in health and fitness will remain very strong. We are ready to see this opportunity with a great lineup of new products with more new products on the way,” he said.