Malibu Boats CEO on the K-shaped boating market: payment buyers sitting out, premium buyers spending more

Malibu Boats: Nine brands, a bifurcating buyer, and a cautious global push

Steve Menneto runs Malibu Boats, a Tennessee-based manufacturer with roughly 3,000 employees and just under $1 billion in revenue across nine brands. The portfolio spans towboats (Malibu, Axis), runabouts (Cobalt), fishing and bay boats (Maverick, Pathfinder, Hewes, Cobia), offshore vessels (Pursuit), and Saxdor, a Finnish-Polish brand acquired in March 2025. Manufacturing runs across Tennessee, Kansas, Florida, and now Elk, Poland and Larsmo, Finland.

K-shaped demand

The sharpest insight Menneto offers is that the boating market has split cleanly along financial lines. Payment-dependent buyers — families financing a boat — have moved to the sidelines under interest rate pressure. The buyers still active in the market are skewing larger and spending more, pushing average selling prices up as they opt for bigger hulls and feature-rich builds. Menneto frames this as a trade-up effect rather than broad market health: fewer buyers, but higher tickets per transaction.

The technology driving premium purchases is partly convenience and safety — waypoint navigation, easier docking — and partly experiential. Malibu's wave-surfing system lets riders reconfigure the boat's wake profile for each person at the push of a button, which Menneto cites as an example of tech translating directly into time-on-water value.

“We are seeing that in spades — the K economy. The family taking a payment out on a boat is under stress. We have seen that buyer go to the sidelines. But consumers still in the market want bigger, more feature-rich boats. We're seeing average sales price go up and people are buying bigger boats.”

International expansion

Before the Saxdor acquisition, less than 5% of Malibu's revenue came from outside North America. The deal changes that equation, opening European dealer network opportunities for existing brands like Pursuit and Cobalt while also creating potential to bring Saxdor manufacturing stateside. Menneto describes the integration as active and ongoing.

Electrification and autonomy

Menneto is measured on both. Electric propulsion works for contained, lake-based use cases where range anxiety is manageable, but he sees meaningful unsolved problems — weight and charge capacity chief among them — before it becomes viable for offshore or saltwater use. On autonomy, waypoint navigation already exists across the industry, but fully docked-to-docked autonomous operation remains a work in progress across most marine manufacturers, including Malibu.

Defense

Menneto doesn't rule out defense applications. Unmanned surface vehicles are on his radar as an adjacent opportunity, and he suggests Malibu's boat-building expertise could support third-party vendors in that space rather than Malibu pursuing defense contracts directly.

The buyer journey

The average Malibu customer takes 200 to 250 days from initial research to purchase. The funnel starts digitally, gets reinforced by what people see on the water and through social media, moves through boat shows — Fort Lauderdale in late October being among the largest — and typically closes after sea trials at a dealership. Menneto treats the physical waterway as an underrated awareness channel: people see a boat they like, then go looking online.

Labor

Hiring is steady but not easy. The constraint isn't raw headcount — labor sheds around Malibu's manufacturing sites are functional — it's skilled craftsmanship. Gel coat application, lamination, cabinetry, and wiring harnesses all require trained hands. Malibu runs its own internal academies and works through industry associations to develop that pipeline.