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If there was a more dramatic 100-day run-up to a US presidential election, we must have fallen asleep during that APUSH lesson.
Ask a CFO what they thought about the 2024 election back in spring or early summer and maybe they would’ve grumbled something about tariffs. Now? There’s no avoiding election chatter, but while everyone else is talking about coconut trees and couches, CFOs have a slightly different agenda. We sorted through recent earnings calls to see how some CFOs are talking about the upcoming election.
On one side of the court, there are CFOs like Honda Motor Co.’s Eiji Fujimura, who stayed relatively mum on the election’s potential impacts during a recent earnings call.
“On the presidential election questions, you may like to hear from us, how we would take the regulations and so on going forward. Mr. Trump or the Republicans would have a certain tendency for the regulation matters,” he said. “By 2028, no matter the presidential election [until] ’28 or so on, our business aim is going over the longer perspective, 2035 or so, that is to try to resolve the social issues, and those have to be handled and addressed by the society on the whole.”
Others have industry-specific concerns, like Marriott International, which cut its forecast for revenue per available room for 2024 due to weakening demand in the US and China. But there was an election tie-in for Q4 in particular.
“What’s going on in Q4 is as we described that we are seeing a bit lower group bookings specifically in Q4 around the election, which is having an impact on the expectations for US and Canada in Q4 versus Q3, though as we described when we look at the entire back half of the year, we do expect to see really a similar sort of [revenue per available room] growth number as you see in the first half of the year,” CFO Leeny Oberg said in the company’s Q2 2024 earnings call.
And Marriott president and CEO Tony Capuano was quick to add that knowing it was an election this year, they’d anticipated some “historical softness” around that time. “But when you look back over prior election cycles, we tended to see a little bit of group softness the week of election,” he said. “Given the unique attributes of this election cycle, we’re seeing that bleed into the week after the election as well.”
That might not be an industry-wide trend, though. When Ryman Hospitality Properties COO Patrick Chaffin was asked if the hotel and resort company saw the same election-time “choppiness” as Marriott, he said the company isn’t “seeing any kind of choppiness. If you look at room nights on the books, there’s no discernible difference.”