Good evening to those of you joining us on the webcast. Welcome to AGCO's fourth annual technology event. My name is Greg Peterson. I head up investor relations for AGCO. This year we have two specific objectives for our technology event. The first is to demonstrate the significant progress we've made to some very aggressive technology deployment targets, which culminate with being autonomous across the crop cycle by 2030. The second objective is to highlight the significant benefit that AGCO's gonna enjoy on both our top line and our margins from growing our Precision Ag business. With those two important, two important objectives in mind, let's take a look at what's ahead of us tonight. Eric Hansotia, our President, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer, will start with a brief overview of our strategy and explain how growing our Precision Ag business fits in with that strategy.
Seth Crawford, who runs our new PTx organization, is gonna give us an insight to that new organization, and then he'll also give us a heads-up on what's gonna happen tomorrow at the field event. Andrew Sunderman is here tonight. Andrew's the newly appointed general manager of our PTx Trimble joint venture. Andrew's gonna talk about the first 100 days of that joint venture, and he's gonna give us an overview of the products and services that the joint venture's providing. So that'll give you kind of a heads-up in terms of the technology you're gonna see demonstrated tonight. And then Damon Audia, our Chief Financial Officer, will finish up our prepared remarks, and then we'll finish off the program. Damon's gonna cover the restructuring announcement that we published yesterday. So he'll spend a little bit of time giving us a little more color on that.
And then we'll finish the session with about 15 minutes of Q&A. And then, following that, dinner. So let's let me go ahead and handle the safe harbor information. Tonight we're gonna refer to slides which are posted on our website. And as we go through the evening, we'll make forward-looking statements, including statements with respect to strategic plans, demand, product development, supply chain disruption, inflation, acquisitions, financial outlooks, input costs, sales, market share, margins, earnings, cash flow, and other financial metrics, as well as restructuring programs.
Actual results may differ materially from those suggested by these statements for a number of reasons, including declines in product demand and other adverse developments in agricultural and agricultural equipment industries, including those resulting from supply chain disruption, weather, exchange rate volatility, commodity prices, inflation, changes in product demand, and there are additional reasons, under the risk factors in our Form 10-K for the year ended December 31st, 2023. We'll also disclaim any obligation to update any forward-looking statements except as required by law. Finally, a replay of this meeting will be available on our website, later this evening or tomorrow. With that, finally, Eric, please join us. Eric Hansotia, Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer.
Thank you. Well, welcome, everybody. Sure glad to have all of you here live. These next few days are gonna be a lot of fun. We're gonna do some learning together. We're gonna get to see some product, talk about what it means for farmers and everything. For those of you that are new, let's talk about why the focus on technology. Well, you see a really cool tractor out back here. It's a Fendt 1000. It's got 20 times the compute capacity of a Tesla car. So that's what's already in there. And then some of the things that we're gonna show you, a lot of what we're gonna talk about is really the heartbeat of the industry. What do I mean by that? Well, I've been in this industry my whole career, in fact, my whole life, pretty much.
I spent a lot of time talking with farmers, and this is what they talk about. This is what they wanna know about. How can you give me a technology solution that solves the squeeze I'm in? It helps me either increase my crop yields, I get more output, or it helps me better manage my inputs, my cost situation, or it helps me with sustainability. I'm getting more pressure on that. So that's the main conversation farmers are focused on is understanding a technology solution to the problems they face. Our employees, when you think about technology, this is what gets them excited. They're like, "I wanna solve those farmer problems. I wanna figure out how to do it, and I wanna do it in a very simple way that's really affordable to them.
I wanna do so that they can get a payback in like one year, maybe two at the max. I wanna have it really easy for them to understand and get the payback on their farm." And I have to tell you, investors, this is one of the top things on your mind about how are you preparing the company to be able to be equipped to be able to make sure that you're well-positioned for the future and, and can continue to grow. So everybody loves this stuff. I love this stuff. We're gonna talk a lot about it. In order to, maybe just a little caveat, one of the things that we can all get kinda mired down is, well, what's happening with grain prices and isn't the market slowing down and all that kinda stuff? We'll have time to talk about that.
But today I really wanna just set the context of, you know, ag has its, you know, strong periods and weaker periods, but the big picture is all about this. It's all about this need to add more technology on the farm to solve these problems, help farmers generate a lot more output, with a better managed input. So that's the big story here. And regardless of what's happening in this cycle, we need to be really, really good at this to help our farmers. So that's the kind of context I wanna set. It's more about the strategy for the company and regardless of what's happening with the cycle. Those of you that have been with us for a few of these sessions can recognize the picture on the left side of the screen or on the right side of the screen.
It's essentially a pie chart showing simplify our whole strategy down to three main things. These are our growth drivers. The one that's highlighted here in red is common, but it's evolved. So it's about precision technology, precision ag, and getting really good at that and becoming the industry leader for smart farming solutions. That's the vision for the company. Well, we took a huge leap forward here in the last year by bringing together some awesome teams. They were awesome independently. They're even better together. So you see a couple names that are new to some of you: PTx Trimble and we've known Precision Planting. Those are the two engines working together now side by side and collaborating to become the absolute world leader in mixed fleet precision ag. That's what we are today already.
The mission is to work even better together and grow that lead. So what do we mean by mixed fleet? That means that we serve all farmers. That means that we're not only putting technology on great Fendt tractors like the one out front, but we're also selling technology modules to farmers who already have a piece of equipment that they don't wanna replace yet, but they'd like to have it have new capabilities. Now, some of our competitors talk a little bit now about retrofit, because we've had such good success with it, but they all have a very different mindset around retrofit. Our retrofit is for all farmers, all brands, all ages of equipment. The competitive view is, "I'll sell you some recent equipment onto my brand of equipment, not all of everybody else's." The other big differentiator is we have an entirely separate channel.
We sell retrofit through a retrofit channel. That's all they do. They wake up in the morning, they go to bed at night thinking about how to solve that kinda problem for those farmers. Nobody else has that. Now, the reason why these two pieces fit so well together, on the one hand, you think about great technology teams, awesome engineers who really understand how to develop technology, but it's this DNA common thread about serving the mixed fleet farmer that is a second big excitement that we have. We just, we're, we think about the world the same way. We think about serving all markets, whether it's guidance equipment or planter technology or sprayer technology, whatever it is, serving the entire market, all farmers, mixed fleet well into the history of the marketplace. So that's the first one.
When you combine all of these three, not only is this a big leap forward in precision agriculture, but it also happens to be a feeder to the other two pie pieces. So we've talked about retrofit. I've kinda hit that, and we're gonna talk about it more. But the technology coming out of the Precision Ag group is not only going to the retrofit group, but it's going to be a feeder for the Fendt product line. Fendt is the product that is the best of the best. It is seen as the technology leader in the marketplace. When you have the most demanding farmer that wants the most productive equipment, they go for Fendt. Well, what a great combination to have the best mixed fleet technology team not only serving the retrofit market, but then also serving the Fendt team.
As more and more machines have more and more capability, more and more intelligence on board and are connected, it gives us the opportunity to move from reactive to proactive in the parts business, be able to serve the customers before they have the need, either on maintenance, "Yeah, I see you're coming up on your maintenance interval," or on repair. When you combine those three things together, we're gonna predominantly focus on the red piece today and tomorrow. This is what leads us to have confidence in our overall objectives with the company. We've claimed already last year, a bar that we're going to get over, you know, is in terms of a goal of 12% operating margin at mid-cycle. So take the ups and downs out of it, like I talked about before. This is strategy, getting over 12%.
Just a couple years ago, we were, we had never been over 10. We achieved that. We achieved 12% when we were a little bit strong market. Now our mission is to get 12% at mid-cycle. We aim to grow 4 or 5% faster than the industry because of these three things and end up with strong cash flows. One of the other things I wanna talk about that's also equally exciting for us is this differentiated deployment that we just launched. It's a very different thinking on distribution. So on the one hand, I talked about technology, solving problems for farmers in a different way. On the other hand, at the same time, whether it's out of our machinery business or this retrofit channel, we come to market differently. We launched what we call FarmerCore. Let me explain it to you.
Essentially, the whole industry for its entire life has been a heavily brick-and-mortar relationship. The farmer has to go from the farm to this brick-and-mortar store to research their machine, buy their machine, buy their parts, get their service, do whatever, everything where the customer comes to the business. And the infrastructure has been set up that way: very big, expensive, heavy asset, heavy investment dealer stores. Well, you know, you cover lots of different industries. One after another after another shifts from brick-and-mortar to at least digital, omnichannel. So brick-and-mortar doesn't evaporate and go away, but it gets utilized differently. Many of you, I'm sure, do a lot of online shopping. That's where, instead of the customer going to the store, the store comes to the customer. You research something online, you buy it, it comes to you.
If you wanna do customer support, you do that online. You never go to the store. More and more customers are demanding that because of its convenience. Well, think of a farmer and the cost of taking their machine from the farm into the store. Well, instead, this model flips it 180 degrees and says, "We're gonna do everything on the farm." Well, it's made up three main points. First of all, mobile on-farm solutions. I'll just reiterate mobile on-farm solutions, smart network coverage, and customer-facing digital solutions. Let's start at the bottom. First of all, creating the tools for the customer to interface digitally. I need to be able to research machine, configure it online, order my parts through E-commerce, or schedule service, do all of those things. We've deployed those.
Then I need to have a dealer organization that has pay out on the farm. So our dealers go out to the farm, do the maintenance and the repair on the farm with these nice service trucks. Well, now you've heard me talk about before in all of our team, we wanna be the most farmer-focused company in the industry. That's why it's informed our retrofit strategy on technology. Well, our distribution strategy was born out of that same thing. If we wanted, at first step, we said, "Let's make it the most convenient to operate." So we're going to them. But secondly, once we're on the farm, the notion is we're not gonna repair or maintain the product. We're gonna repair or maintain the farm.
And so once you're on the farm and you say, "I was gonna go maintain cause these don't, they never break down, so we're never repairing them." But I was gonna maintain the Fendt tractor. But now I look across, I was like, "Oh, you have a few of these other brands. Is there anything I can do for you on those?" And about 80%-90% of what the farmer needs done can be done by us, regardless of what brand of equipment it is. It's very much like the retrofit mindset on technology sales we can do with distribution. So it's super convenient for the customer. Dealers love it because they don't have to invest in fixed assets that are stuck in one location.
It could be that a different part of their market is getting hot, and so they can flex these trucks to wherever they be. Customers now have a service truck just down the road as opposed to where the dealer is. So customers benefit, dealers benefit, and AGCO benefits because it's a big-time differentiator. Once you have the brick-and-mortar, it's very difficult to move to a digital model like this and an on-farm model like this. So it's a very big strategic differentiator. So with that, I'm gonna turn it over to Seth to talk about how we're deploying our technology and leveraging this distribution approach to be different in the marketplace and be better serving farmers than anybody else.
Thanks, Eric. So good evening. I'm Seth Crawford. I lead our PTx business unit, and it's more exciting than ever.
If you've been with us for the last few years, you've heard about the growth that we've had in our overall Precision Ag business, and that took a whole new step forward on April 1st for us because that's the day we announced the formation of the joint venture where AGCO purchased 85% of Trimble Ag and brought it into the AGCO portfolio as far as how we're managing it going forward, bringing this together to serve farmers around the world. It's really starting at the bottom here. We're bringing together these technologies and solutions because the farmers have told us they want that seamless experience. They want the intelligent equipment, and they want someone who's actually focused on their needs and enabling them to capture value.
So as we did this, we went through and we did a long, hard look at what's important to the farmers and what do they recognize. That helped us in our branding approach. A couple things were clear. They wanted us to be able to bring together the advanced technology, make it easy for them. They wanted it to be very focused on agriculture and ensuring that it was the best as we brought it together cause if it's not easy to use, they're not gonna use it. They know that we have a history and reputation for doing this. By bringing it all together, there's a multiplicative factor in play that takes it to a whole new level. Then from the naming, you may say, "Well, why PTx Trimble and why Precision Planting?" Well, that one was relatively easy.
When you dig into the data, and we did, we surveyed farmers around the world about what brands do you know, what brands do you trust. Two names came out in the Precision Ag space above really all others. And so one of the things we knew is that we had to build off of the Trimble name and build off of the Precision Planting name. And so you can see how we've brought the brands together, brought the, the visual identities together, paid homage to the, the corn sprout with the Precision Planting logo, and highlighted Precision, whereas the planting is not highlighted any longer. It's still part of the name because that's what farmers know, but it highlights how we're moving around the full crop cycle. And I'm gonna talk more about that.
And if you recall, what we've talked about in the past is we had a lot of other businesses that we had picked up. What we learned through that is that they weren't nearly as well known. And through this effort, we were aligning them with either the PTx Trimble organization because they were part of the joint venture, or they were aligned with Precision Planting because they were wholly owned by AGCO. And so JCA Technologies was part of wholly owned by AGCO. It's now part of the joint venture, but the name is retired along with Trimble Agriculture, Bilberry, and Müller-Elektronik . On the Precision Planting side, we brought together not only Precision Planting, but Headsight and Intelligent Ag Solutions.
So now all of those resources are aligned, and the channel effort is aligned, bringing that together, optimizing our capabilities, reducing confusion in the market, and building off of great brand names that farmers know and trust. And we did that because we've talked about the opportunity before. And the opportunity is this total addressable market that we have out there. In past sessions, we've shared that, you know, we're not in a position to go out and calculate the entire market. We leverage data from others, including some of you who've gone out and calculated to tell us it's between $150 billion and $250 billion that's out there and available for us to go after, with big portions of it in the area of fertilizer, seed, their, their equipment, but also optimizing that equipment, labor, and, and all of these areas, chemicals used for, for application.
And so with that, it's not that they're gonna go away completely. We think we can optimize the usage, and we constantly work with the farmers to see how we can reduce it. If you remember our field station last year, we talked about the 220 million tons of fertilizer that are used, half of which is never taken up by a plant. We wanna help that along the way because we just in that area alone, we see big opportunities. Our portfolio is better than ever. With what we have with PTx Trimble, what we have with Precision Planting, we now have a great portfolio. We're gonna talk about how that enables us to even build a stronger channel, how it helps us in our international growth, and how it allows us to bring solutions for every season. It's all driven off of innovation.
And with that, those levers will help us grow. They're gonna help us grow well past the $1 billion that we've been talking about in all previous events. If you remember right, we were talking about $1 billion by 2025. Well, if we factor in the PTx Trimble business based on last year's results from the Trimble financials, we would've been at $1.3 billion already. So obviously, we reset that, and the new target is $2 billion. And so we wanna help you understand what our efforts are in each of the areas as we go forward. So those efforts are starting really at the bottom left, innovations. There's one thing that we have to do, and that is innovate. If we don't innovate in our Precision Ag portfolio and in this business, it's dead. So that's why it's so important that we are driving this forward.
And that's why we like showing it off so much because otherwise, a farmer would just go to their OEM and they'd buy their, their equipment, and we'd only be talking about the equipment. But we think we can deliver differentiated results by innovating throughout the entire crop cycle. And that's what we mean by solutions for every season, not just planting, but the application phase where you're applying fertilizer, chemicals to control pests or herbicides, harvesting the crop, managing the water on your land, planning for the next year by sampling the soil. All of these are solutions that we bring throughout the crop cycle that no one has in the portfolio that we do. Then the other piece is the global expansion. We have a reasonable dealer channel around the world, but nothing near what we will have now with this full portfolio.
Bringing together the PTx Trimble channel and the Precision Planting channel, bringing these retrofit technologies forward, that's something that we can bring, and it'll be a broader channel footprint than we've ever had before. And then finally, it's getting more of the mind share of the dealers we have. And what's special about this is they're great at doing what they're doing. They love going to the field and demonstrating to the farmer, getting their boots dirty, getting their jeans dirty. Now they have more of a portfolio. They're not distracted by trying to piece together a portfolio on their own. We're bringing that portfolio, and we have many dealers around the world raising their hands saying they're ready to up their game just as we're doing the same internally.
And that's where I just wanna highlight what, what Eric mentioned again because we do hear the term retrofit a lot. A lot of, a lot of, other companies out there are using it, but we use it in a way that I think is different than everybody else. What retrofit means to us is that we take the current, we take products to market, Precision Ag products to market, and they will take your current equipment to a level that's above and beyond what that piece of equipment could have ever delivered when it was brand new out of a factory. To us, that is what retrofit technology is, okay? Aftermarket technology is a technology that you could have ordered when a machine was new and, and you didn't for one reason or another, but you wanna add it later.
And it just brings that machine up to what you could have gotten out of the factory. And then we'll talk about factory installed, which is just ordering an option the way you want it out of the book. But what's so important is the only reason that someone would wanna buy something in the retrofit market and pay that extra is if it's better than anything they can get from anybody's factory. And that's why we hit this message so hard. And we truly don't believe you can conquer this market by going through just equipment dealers. We believe that differentiated channel is an absolute must, and that's why we're building it and building it stronger than we ever have before.
And so as we look at our Precision Ag business, we're building up the channels that you see on the left-hand side of the screen here, the PTx Trimble channel and the Precision Planting channels to be the absolute best at delivering a full suite of precision ag equipment. And on the right side, we also sell to OEMs, including internal customers, which are Fendt, Massey Ferguson, and Valtra, plus 100 other OEMs that also recognize this is the best technology available, and I want it on my equipment because I'm not gonna be able to compete if I don't have it. And so that's how we compete: a retrofit, dedicated channel, and the OEMs. But to take that to the next level, within our retrofit business and the aftermarket business, we know that customers go to different places to get that equipment.
And we have two different types of dealers to address these markets. With the dedicated retrofit dealer, they're the ones that we really want out there on the leading edge because there are customers that they'll buy a new piece of equipment from a factory and be ready to strip technology off and put ours on because they know it's over and above. So it's really those tech seekers, those innovators that are out there.
Then there are also those, those farmer customers out there that they have a 5- or 10-year-old piece of equipment, and they look at the cost to trade up to a new piece of equipment, and they say, "Woof, I, I maybe don't have that much available." But then they look at what does it cost to buy the retrofit technology and keep that current piece of equipment, and that is much more affordable and scalable to help them on their journey forward. And so there are different capabilities that we're looking for here because then there's the farmer that just wants to go to their equipment dealer and get technology for their existing product. They don't necessarily want something over and above. They just want really good technology, and they wanna buy it from an equipment dealer they know and trust.
That's where we are now also enabling the aftermarket retail outlets. Dealers that wanna equip the machine for whatever brand that may be, whatever color that may be, they can sign up with us to be an aftermarket retail outlet. It really highlights this piece that I just covered, and Andrew's gonna talk a lot more in depth about this cause Andrew leads this part of our business for it. It, I think you'll really start to see how we're taking this a new direction, and deeper than ever before with the full-line retrofit dealer and that aftermarket retail outlet. That's a lot of what we have in our portfolio to grow the Precision Ag business, but there are also capabilities that we're developing within AGCO that supports the entire portfolio, and that's building up our artificial intelligence capabilities.
I wanted to just highlight a few of the things that we've been working on. We didn't highlight them last year because in some cases, they were so new, you know, most people couldn't tell you what Generative AI was when we had our field day last year. But we were already setting up our incubator in May 2023, and we tried out some of the capabilities in our, at what was our Head sight operation at that time, one of our smallest operations, to see if we could support customers better. We actually stood up the capabilities within one month. We put them into production by the fall harvest, dramatically reducing the time to serve customers by having this listening to the phone calls coming in and helping our agents solve problems much faster.
So problems that might have been solved in two weeks were solved in two minutes in some cases. So we believe the, the hype is real. So we've taken it, and we took it from one of our smallest operations to our biggest operations. Now it's supporting our Fendt tractor product support capabilities and delivering service like we've never delivered before. We also have it in other areas: demand forecasting, helping us forecast out with the, the underlying fundamentals, what's going to happen with our business, where are we in the sales funnel, how do we predict which farmers are gonna buy next, and feeding that, to our organization, automating our processes and, and helping us really in every area of the business. And then down in the, in the bottom, of course, you have to have a generative AI farmer, as the picture would, would highlight here.
But you'd be amazed at how many surveys we get back. Our surveys are our farmers are fans of our products. They wanna help us. But the reality is it's hard to sift through all that information. It's hard to scrape the web for all the information that's out there. But with the generative AI capabilities, we now can feed all of that in and feed it out to our product groups on a real-time basis. And so they can simply type in and ask our AI farmer what the issues are with the tractor cab, with the hydraulics, what they want next in their Precision Planting products. It's all available, and we're feeding it up more efficiently than ever before. But I know you hear these stories, but I want you also to hear from some of our practitioners about the work they're doing.
I found AI copilots to be hugely helpful in producing code for AI applications. Concretely, this often means discussing ideas, assisting with debugging, and automating simple parts of programming tasks. For instance, if I wanted to create a quick visualization of this data set, all I have to do is instruct the AI to make one. There we have it. Many small automations like this can add up to a lot of time saved. This is one example of the many ways AI copilots can help boost productivity. AGCO is on a journey to provide industry-leading machine uptime. This year, we launched Corrective Alerts, a condition-based predictive maintenance solution for our Connect-a ctivated, Fendt, Massey Ferguson, and Valtra machines.
Corrective Alerts combines IoT technology, analytics, and our customer support knowledge to provide our dealers with timely and customized alerts, including detailed diagnostic instructions and part numbers to help them quickly address issues and reduce the time to fix. Taking this practical approach creates a positive experience for our farmers and helps our dealers build stronger relationships with their customers and, in turn, reinforces AGCO's goals to deliver high-quality, smart solutions. Excited to share the contributions of our analytics and AI team to our FarmerCore initiative. We are leveraging AI and analytics to develop a data-driven, 360-degree view of the entire solution.
Our team of data scientists and data analysts are leveraging a variety of data sets like consumer, market potential, geographical, and location-based data sets to arrive at intelligence and insights that would help us take key decisions on designing our omnichannel go-to-market strategy, as well as helping our dealers define the new operating models. There has been great progress made on this in North America, and soon we'll be rolling this out globally, starting with ANZ. Thank you. At Customer Experience, we use AI to understand farmer feedbacks that are coming to us to improve products and services. At AGCO, we use a framework called Ask, Listen, and Act. Through this framework, we ask farmers for their feedback on their experiences that they had. Through Listen, we deploy large language models to identify key themes that the customers have mentioned.
Through AGCO, we enable responsible teams to improve the overall experiences for the farmers. By deploying AI, we have automated a process from text feedback into valuable insights. Thank you.
Well, now it's the question of how does it enable our future? And the reality is we can't predict it all, but what we're doing is we're doing everything we can to arm all of our tech developers with the capabilities. And as part of that, building the workforce to a new level. So with our rotational development program, so all of our new university hires that we're bringing in, we have an extra focus on bringing in those with these capabilities so that they can hit the ground running. There's a lot of talk about where do you source this talent.
When you have something like GenAI that's really been in use for a year or so, you don't need to go get somebody with five years' experience. The university grads are coming in armed better than ever, and we're super excited about this. Our program accelerates their development to learn our business, to apply their skills to what we're doing and where we're going forward. We now have four acceleration centers, with PTx Trimble, as part of it. We have North Dakota State University, we have University of Illinois, we have Ohio State University, which was the Trimble, PTx Trimble site, and we have Arizona State University. Three focused in the Farm Belt and one focused in the tech hub for us, enabling our growth. We're continuing to democratize the capabilities.
We actively track how many of our developers are using GitHub Copilot, for instance, where we find these radical improvements in not only productivity, but also it improves the quality of the work and the quality of the developer's life. They talk about the mundane tasks are reduced, and they're much happier in their job. So absolutely, we're gonna keep this going. So we have a lot of opportunities as we take this forward, and it's embedded across our business and especially within our PTx organization. Now, the part that you're all here for, which is gonna be the field day tomorrow, I just wanna touch on this a little bit and give you an overview. First, I wanna talk about the setup of the slide because we're gonna follow this around this slide and at the farm tomorrow.
And we talk about what our effort will do for the farmer. So like in the plan and prep phase, it's gonna increase the farmer's efficiency. It's gonna manage, in the hay business, the ideal windrows to make them more efficient in a hay operation, or in the tillage operation here. And in each area, we'll talk about what does it mean for the farmer's income. You often hear us talk about we want a 20% net farm income improvement for a farmer over a five-year period. So, AT is autonomy, AM is automation, C is connectivity, G is guidance, S is sensing, and some will have an L for logistics. So that just explains the key a little bit there. So we have the plan and prep phase with autonomous tillage.
We have our planting and nutrient management helping you see how we're bringing this not just through the Precision Planting channel and enabling farmers, but also how we're bringing it into our, our Momentum planter. Then our automated planting and fertilizing and the value it brings. 5% net farm income, and you can see the areas of the tech stack that we're covering. On the crop protection, one of the things that's interesting here is with the WeedSeeker product, we've been in see and spray or targeted spraying for 20 years with the business that we have. And there's been all the, all the talk the last few years about how's this progressing. We've had WeedSeeker, WeedSeeker 2, and now you're going to see the latest evolution with the scouting, with the Symphony, portfolio products that we're bringing, with spraying.
Reducing waste, saving time, bringing up to 4% in improvement to the farmer. And then finally, in the harvesting phase, you know, helping us see how we can automate, reducing those losses, automating operations with that grain cart and improving the net farm income by 5%. So in the end, when you look at the farmer in the middle, they need to bring all this all together. So we're also gonna have one more station. There'll be five total stations with the farm office. And to see how we bring that from the planning stages all the way through to the harvesting stages and, and the farmer marketing that crop and getting ready for the next year. In the end, we're gonna show improvements for the farmer tomorrow of 18%. So I hope you're looking forward to the day.
It looks like we're gonna have a good weather day, and it'll be exciting for all of us. But with that, I'm gonna turn it over to Andrew Sunderman to now talk about where we're headed with PTx Trimble.
Very good. Well, thank you, Seth, and thanks everybody for being here. As Eric opened us, it's excellent to have you here at our PTx Trimble World headquarters right here in Westminster, Colorado. As Seth mentioned, my name is Andrew Sunderman, and I have the great opportunity to lead our PTx Trimble organization. And today, I'll share with you some of the things that we're doing for our future and performing here in 2024 and also transforming our business for the great places that we look to go in the coming years.
You know, as Eric talked about, there's a couple of key growth levers within AGCO, and one of those growth levers is Precision Ag. And that's exactly where we as PTx Trimble sit. And so as we think about this, our main purpose within PTx Trimble is to be the first choice for mixed fleet smart farming and autonomy solutions. Through our stations today and tomorrow, you'll see many of these technologies on display. But we do this in three key ways. The first way is in delivering high-quality smart solutions that create customer value, returning a positive net farm income improvement for our growers. We also look to be the go-to source for the mixed fleet platform farmers with the best-in-class retrofit platform. This speaks all around to our distribution approach.
And lastly, we look to be the supplier of choice for agriculture equipment OEMs around the world and throughout the crop cycle. So what have we been doing? We're about 100 days into PTx Trimble. We've had a number of things as we look to deliver on great success in the years to come. First, around innovation, we've been working on our next-generation guidance and steering products, which will ensure that our farmers are always in the right place during the growing season and delivering those crops into the field. We've had strong efforts on our data platform, digitalizing our products and ensuring that our farmers can access the critical information all year throughout the crop cycle from any machine, regardless of make, brand, and vintage.
As you'll see tomorrow, we have our autonomous technologies, which are well underway in delivering value for farmers, regardless of the available labor, and ensuring that they're working in the tight time windows that they need. And lastly, our team of product experts have been engaging with farmers around the world to ensure that we're understanding where their next problem lies and how we as PTx Trimble can solve those problems. Our efforts haven't just remained on innovation. As we look at our distribution approach, we've been executing on our farmer-focused distribution model. This means that we've been engaging dealers around the world through our full-line retrofit dealers and our aftermarket retail outlets that I'll speak a little bit more about in a minute.
To do that, we've also been engaging Fendt, Massey Ferguson, and Valtra dealers and activating those dealers to sell our PTx Trimble products and complement the Fendt, Massey Ferguson, and Valtra machines they sell today. We've also been revamping our OEM strategy, how we engage with our OEM customers, delivering more product solutions paired with our industry-leading support services and ways of developing those technologies specifically to their needs, which builds out a unique approach, all while doing this in a more digital way that we can serve farmers in the way that they want to be served.
And lastly, as we are a new business coming together, we've been working strong on our business effectiveness, building a more farmer-focused culture, ensuring that our efforts remain focused on what the value the farmer can achieve and how we best do that, engaging our key people and our talent and building a culture of what it means to be part of PTx Trimble and ultimately rolling out and developing the tools, systems, and business processes that we need to be a stronger company, more responsive to our customers' needs, and ultimately the best when it comes to supporting our customers.
You know, as I talk to our team, the things that we have in motion have already started to prove out our winning outcomes, and I'm confident we'll see those more in the years to come, delivering value to our farmers and our OEM customers, our dealer partners, our employees, and ultimately then our shareholders. And so I'll speak through some of these now. So our PTx Trimble business is made up about a 50/50 split between our OEM business as well as our retrofit channel of the business. As we look at our retrofit channel, we've been working hard to engage with farmers and grow that engagement, connecting dealers to new customers and ensuring that every customer from PTx Trimble, regardless of dealer, has the access to support and abilities to engage with our products for the future.
We've been working on heavily retaining those customers, especially those served by other networks, making sure that we bring them into our camp for the years to come. We've been expanding our coverage in all markets with an asset-light, more mobile fleet of trucks and key support personnel and sales personnel that engage with customers more broadly throughout our global markets. And as mentioned, we've been actively engaging over 350 Fendt, Massey Ferguson, and Valtra dealers, which will be a key part of our go-to-market approach for the future. Now, our OEM business, which makes up today the other approximately 50% of our business, is mostly made up of our guidance and steering products as well as our implement control ECUs and software portfolio that we sell to these OEM customers.
While we've been working through the various market conditions that Eric spoke about, we've been engaging with our customers more deeply by engaging more technology products for them to use, as well as identifying new customers that can benefit from our OEM solutions. Also, I'm very proud to state some of the ways in which we've been able to work together with our Fendt, Massey Ferguson, and Valtra teams by now having our PTx Trimble guidance receivers as standard equipment on all of our large ag machines so that we can ensure that our PTx Trimble products deliver that value that we know we owe to our Fendt, Massey Ferguson, and Valtra customers. Seth mentioned that I talk a little bit more about our go-to-market approach. So as we think about our go-to-market approach, we again have our full-line retrofit dealers.
Our full-line retrofit dealers serve as our core backbone of how we serve farmers in our global markets with really strong capabilities focused on precision agriculture. As Seth mentioned, these dealers are really working and targeting customers that look to do things more with their equipment and their technologies than the OEM ever intended it to be possible. You'll see a lot of this in the field tomorrow, specifically with our autonomous solutions. But to do this, these dealers need some key characteristics. One, they need to be highly specialized precision agriculture dealers that they can make sure to serve the needs of our customers and have that full portfolio across every season of the crop cycle to do so.
They're skilled at matching the customer's needs with the products and services that we offer, and they offer the highest degree of support capabilities from replacement to even the critical fixes for our electronics hardware. Ultimately, they're able to engage with the customer throughout the entire customer journey, from knowing to the replacement phase and ultimately selling the recurring software products that we offer throughout our portfolio. Now, while the backbone of this market of our channel may be through these full-line retrofit dealers, these are complemented by a wide range of what we call aftermarket retail outlet dealers. Now, these aftermarket retail outlet dealers, you can think of as engaging customers that look to bring the machine's capabilities up to what they could have ordered from the factory.
Now, that in some cases could be a new machine, or in many cases, it's a second, third, or even fourth-hand machine that the original customer maybe didn't exactly want that technology. We offer that customer for the machine new to them to bring it up to the latest level of technology. In doing so, we leverage a wide range of dealers, traditionally your agriculture OEM equipment dealers, to do this, pairing up the technology products with the machines that they sell and ultimately offering that core product portfolio that we have within PTx Trimble. Now, these dealers need a high knowledge of the products as well as a high knowledge of the support capabilities, but ultimately are highly skilled at integrating our PTx Trimble products into these brands of equipment and other implement offerings that they offer throughout their dealerships.
Now, this transformation is well underway and has been going quite well, and I appreciate the work of our team to do this, but it's also highly driven by our view of the future and how we can innovate on products to make sure that our products are available to more customers. Now, one of the things Eric also talked about was how our Precision Ag really powers our Fendt, Massey Ferguson, and Valtra machines. And I'd like to give you a little bit of an illustration of this.
On the left-hand side, we see what happens today or many times in the past where that when a customer wants to drive one of the core outcomes or core needs that they have of a consistent experience across all machines in their fleet, really the best way in the past to do that has been to go through one manufacturer, one equipment brand. If that's a competitive customer for AGCO today, that may ultimately mean not having the equipment sale or the technology sale. Well, today, there's some what I call compromise solutions.
There's different third-party offerings that allow for some of the capabilities or some of the experience to be driven within different brands of equipment across that mixed fleet, but they also come with limitations of functionality as well as are cumbersome to use and integrate into the machines, so not delivering the customer experience. But this has the ability, in many cases, to drive an equipment sale, but not that stickiness of the technology sale that we look to drive with our customers. And so our approach is that we would leverage our technology products within Precision Planting and specifically PTx Trimble as factory-installed equipment on our Fendt, Massey Ferguson, and Valtra machines. That same technology with the same customer user experience is then able to be deployed on a customer's other brand of equipment already in their fleet.
Not only does this connect the in-cab experience, but through our connected cloud platform that you'll see tomorrow in the field, we're able to connect all aspects of the operation both in the field and in the back office for planning, monitoring, and executing all aspects of the operation. Ultimately, what that means is within AGCO and PTx Trimble, we are best suited to not only provide the equipment that our customers need, but also the technology that farmers demand today and ensuring this fits into one package and available for all customers regardless of the brands that they use in their farm. So what is the portfolio that we look to do this with and grow more as we think about PTx Trimble and AGCO?
On the screen here, you can see our retrofit platform of products touching a wide range of equipment needs as well as specifically the implement needs to do more with less and ensure our products are in the right place, right time, and in the right amount. One of the great things about our PTx Trimble portfolio is these technologies are available on over 10,000 various machines across 73 different brands of equipment. This ensures that any machine on the customer's farm, we're able to drive more value through our retrofit portfolio. But additionally, in the way that we engage with our OEM customers is across a wide range of portfolio where we serve over 100 different OEM customers.
I'm proud to say that in the market today, we have about 82,000 implements that run and work today in their fields running off of PTx Trimble technology. While this may be us today, this is what we look to grow in the future and do so based off of our distribution channel and the way in which we deliver products through both the retrofit and factory-installed perspective. So let me turn to what you're going to see here for the rest of the evening. This evening, we have a number of product demonstrations across our PTx Trimble and Precision Planting portfolios. First, starting with guidance, you'll have the opportunity to talk with Ryan about our guidance portfolios and how we ensure that our customers' machines and products are in the right place at any given time throughout the growing cycle.
You'll hear about our platform kits and how that makes us differentiate in the marketplace and the value that our products deliver. You'll have the opportunity to hear from Ben talking about our water management portfolio. Now, our water management portfolio not only has the ability to drive increased yields due to properly controlling the water, but also drives increased sustainability of our soils, making sure that we have sustainable growth year after year. You'll hear from Darren on our Connected Climate Exchange and how our products within PTx Trimble are able to drive a monetization effort for our customers in enabling them to monetize their changing practices of the crops that they ultimately sell to large food and beverage companies that are working to achieve their Scope 3 emissions targets.
Lastly, you'll hear from Eli with our Radicle Agronomics team about how our Radicle Agronomics platform is completely transforming how our farmers engage in nutrient management and fertilizer through the simple task of soil sampling. I look forward to the great stations that you'll be able to go to tonight, but now I'll hand it over to Damon Audia, who will share a little bit more with us about some of our restructuring program. Damon.
All right. Thanks, Andrew. We obviously did not save the best for last, did we? I just want to spend a minute. I'm going to be remiss if we didn't acknowledge the 8-K that we filed yesterday. Given the increased weakening industry conditions, we had filed the 8-K talking about a restructuring. We'll be taking on around 6% of our global salary workforce.
For those of you, we had at the end of last year, we had just under 13,000 salary workers, so about 12,800 people. Our plan is to reduce that by about 6%. The facts, the cost, the savings, the timeline, all of that was outlined in the 8-K. So I won't go through rehashing all the details. It is part of the normal process we go through as a cyclical company. I did want to spend a moment, though, talking about part of the restructuring and how it really fits into the FarmerCore philosophy, how it fits into the farmer-first focus that Eric talked about, and how it's helping us deliver our next-stage metrics. So you see on the slide here a little bit of the structural transformation.
So as we heard from Eric, we heard from Seth, we heard from Andrew, farmers are asking, they're more technology-savvy than ever. They're asking for more information via technology. Our dealers are doing the same thing. They're pushing us to be more technologically advanced. And as we do our employee surveys, what we hear is we're inefficient. There's lots of things that we have to do manually. There's these rocks that delay us from effectively operating efficiently. And so as we've been looking at things like artificial intelligence and some of the technologies, and Seth gave you a snapshot of some of the things that we're doing, we've seen a tremendous opportunity to really streamline or rewire how AGCO's operating behind the scenes. And so as you see in the graph, the structural transformation is really a way for us to revisit how we operate inside the company.
Our philosophy is leveraging more shared service centers or these centers of excellence around the world where we standardize our processes, we globalize them, and we streamline the inefficiencies that we're experiencing today. But at the same time, overlaying things like generative AI to really accelerate the process and simplify this process. Some of the early indications of what we've seen in our organization is there is a tremendous amount of opportunity as we leverage the generative AI to really advance our structural cost. Now, what's in it for us or for our farmers? We know they'll get information faster, higher quality products, simplification in their ordering for our dealers, access to the portals, quicker information on ordering parts or machines or tracking their data.
For our employees, as this water level has dropped and these rocks have been exposed, it's giving us the ability to take that out of the way. How do we streamline those processes so they can operate more efficiently? We can get our information quicker. We can make better decisions and act faster for our customers and for our dealers. We see a tremendous opportunity to really advance ourselves leveraging that technology. Ultimately, for our shareholders, again, we have a goal, as Eric touched on, driving to this 12% mid-cycle operating margin. Last year, we were very close, but we were above mid-cycle. We're now going to be well below mid-cycle this year. Our plan is, as we do this simplification and the structural transformation, this is one more step in us getting ready to go north of that 12% with our long-term goals.
And what we're doing is obviously taking the structural cost out of the system, reducing the structural cost so it increases the trough margins, but at the same time drives higher highs as we get back above mid-cycle. So, you know, a lot more to come on this. I would ask, given that we're sitting here in our Technology Day and we're sitting in Westminster, I know you have probably some questions. Let's focus the questions on the technology stuff. Let's not get into the details of the 8-K. Greg and I will go through that with you. We'll talk more in the Q2 call about the restructuring, but I'd rather we focus the questions with Eric and Seth and Andrew here on the tech. So with that, Greg, I think you're going to lead us through a Q&A here for the next few minutes.
Yep. Thank you.
Thank you, Damon. So just a couple of rules real quick before we get started. We are webcasting, so please wait till Karen gets to you with a microphone and just tell the folks listening on the internet who you are and ask your question. So with that, who wants to jump in?
Kyle, over here.
Okay.
Kyle Menges from Citigroup. I was hoping that this is probably a question for Andrew. In the first 100 days, and as you're building the R&D budget, kind of how are you prioritizing investing in some of the different PTx Trimble technological solutions and maybe a rough mix of the R&D spend that you're kind of thinking about deploying for each of the different solutions?
Yeah, thanks for the question. So as we look at some of our focus areas, we have three main focus areas for our R&D. The first one is around how we ensure that, as mentioned a couple of times in my prepared comments, but around ensuring our machines are in the right place with little to no operator involvement. This speaks to our next-generation guidance and steering products as well as our autonomous solutions that you'll have the ability to see tomorrow. We also look at how do we leverage in-field data to more effectively manage the outcomes and the decisions that our farmers make throughout the growing season. This speaks to how we empower the implements to be more automated. And lastly, how do we leverage technology such as artificial intelligence and machine learning to more quickly respond to the changing conditions that we experience throughout the field?
As we look at where we focus our efforts in that way, much of our efforts right now are very focused on our autonomous efforts. Part of the reason for that is that drives the need to have higher automation in our implement practices. And so in doing so, we're able to not only provide to meet the targets that we've publicly communicated within AGCO about having a more autonomous crop cycle, but also able to deploy products to farmers that allow them to increase the capability in a more automated implement for the machines that they have in their farm today. Hope that answers your question.
Thanks a lot. Adam Seiden from Barclays. Just a question on the dealers. You guys spent a lot of time talking about the aftermarket retail dealer and the full-line dealers. Could you just maybe talk through some of the ambitions on the aftermarket side? Where are you in terms of the size of the dealer base today with the breadth of the organization, and where would you like to see that go over the next couple of years?
Yeah. So I can take that one. So as we look at our dealer portfolio, we have a very strong dealer network specifically in the EME region. We have some very large, highly focused Precision Ag dealers as we look throughout Europe. And so while we're working with those dealers to strengthen them and ultimately target some individual spots, we have a fairly strong network within PTx Trimble across Europe. Some of our areas for great opportunity exist within the North America and the South America markets. And this is, as Seth talked about, a great opportunity that we have as Precision Planting has a very strong network in North America. We're able to identify and grow our retrofit dealer network with some known dealers within the organization, both in North America and South America.
As we look at our full dealer channel, some of the areas that we're looking to expand is having dealers engage across our entire portfolio. We have some dealers that are very strong in specific applications, whether that's water management or guidance and steering portfolio. And so one of our main ambitions is building out dealers that are more focused around the entire crop cycle. And so between some of the regional focuses as well as some of the product focuses through those specific dealers, those are some of the key efforts of our channel strategy that we're implementing today.
Yeah, Adam,
I think he's got a follow-on.
Just a follow-up on that. Just the timeframe that you see getting through, getting your products in through the dealer channel here in North America with Precision Planting, some of that could be done probably sooner than later, but then also expanding that out into the broader regions. Just like what is the timeframe that you see the growth trajectory?
That is actively underway today. As mentioned, we've engaged 350 Fendt, Massey Ferguson, and Valtra dealers around the world today that we're actively working to activate with PTx Trimble products. That will be in place in large part, many of those dealers in large part by the end of this year. And then as we look for the balance of 2025, further building that out, especially with some of our full-line retrofit dealers in white spaces that we have existing today.
Hi, Kristen Owen from Oppenheimer. In the first 100 days, probably not a lot to say here, but on the technical integration, I mean, we've seen similar, not same size, but similar types of acquisitions in this space. Before, integration is a challenge from a technology perspective. How do you view the synergy from just getting the systems to work together, how that will influence this CAGR that you've outlined for getting from the $1.3 billion to the $2 billion?
Well, I think tomorrow's in-field events are actually going to be a perfect display where you can already see that coming together. So as we look at our data platform, for example, that's been a core part of our focus in terms of integrating different technology sets as we look at some of the internal developments within AGCO as well as some of the recent acquisitions within AGCO of the NEXT Farming platform, and now, of course, from PTx Trimble. So you'll see that on display and how our teams have already brought some of that together and have a clear roadmap that even delivers new value in 2025 for farmers. As we look at some of our other in-cab products, some of those products already work today, especially because of our clear focus on what we call ISOBUS technologies.
And so that ability to have more industry standards that are driven by a lot of our PTx Trimble team allows many of our products to already work with existing solutions in the field, some of which are coming from AGCO today as well. So I think you'll be impressed with what you get to see tomorrow in that front.
And I would just add on that one, Andrew, to Kristen's question. We also see the opportunity where we've innovated and we've brought products to market with our proprietary 20|20 architecture that as they go later in life, there are a lot of our OEM customers that would actually prefer and be on board if they would transition to an ISO architecture. And so it's a real opportunity, and the teams are already actively discussing ways of how do we manage products through the life cycle to maximize the growth and the market penetration.
Hi, this is Tami Zakaria from J.P. Morgan. So I have a several-part question. The full-line retrofit dealers, who are they exactly? If I wanted to become one, what do I need to be one? And do they sell competing brands? And do they also provide after-sales service? If so, does PTx get a cut of that services revenue, or is it just you get money for the parts you sell? So could you break that down a little bit?
So I'll start on this, and I think Andrew will fill in the blanks. But Tammy, for the full-line retrofit dealer, we actually already have quite a few because there were a lot of dealers out there in the world that had the Precision Planting contract and had a Trimble Ag contract in the old way. And so automatically, they now have the PTx Trimble and the Precision Planting contract. So they have the full portfolio, and they're expected to perform in their trade area. And that portfolio, as they know, is growing, and you're going to see it at the Tech Field Day. So that's the ideal state for us because then we see a dealer that's out there that knows the way we want to do business, that operates culturally the way we want them to do it by being in the field demonstrating it.
And then I think the next part of your question was, do they have competitive brands? A lot of times when they're the full-line dealer, they actually are seeing well over half of their business or more coming from the products that we're offering. So they don't have much for competitive brands. Now, when you look at a dealer that's just a Precision Planting dealer or just a PTx Trimble dealer or some of the brands that we're retiring, they actually often had a variety of brands to fill out their portfolio. And where we have white spaces or we have market opportunities, we're always going to those dealers first, sharing the opportunity to grow with us. And as part of that, we want to make sure that they're appropriately representing our products. And we think we have the best thing going from a Precision Ag portfolio.
We know there are a lot of dealers excited for that. On the services they provide, we get our revenue from the products they're buying from us. If they're buying the services from us as well, we're getting our revenue that way. If they're delivering service, if they're doing some labor with it, we're not getting any type of a royalty or anything like that. That's part of their business to grow. We're trying to bring more and more of a portfolio to make them the strongest Precision Ag business in their trade area.
That's Steve over here.
Yeah, Steve's been patient.
Thanks. Steve Volkmann with Jefferies. I have a question. Eric, you were talking about this kind of mobile service capability. Can you say more about how big a deal that is? I mean, how many trucks are out there? How many might there be eventually? And is this like a big change? Do you think ultimately most service will be done this way, or is this just sort of an extra offering from existing dealers?
A couple of things to unpack on FarmerCore. We just have launched it officially, but we've been piloting it in our company-owned dealership for about three years. So AgRevolution is a dealership we own. It's grown from about $25 million to $100 million in three years. And it's because customers really like this new way of operating. It's so much more convenient for them. So we expect that will every customer go this way? No, some people still go to the mall. But will more and more customers like this? The business comes to me, we think for sure, yes. And so we're betting this is a differentiated approach in distribution, and we're betting hard on it. We're rolling it out as a first stage in North America and South America for a couple of reasons.
One is the market seems to be more thirsty for convenience there, and we have a really strong dealer network in Europe. We're well covered there. So if we want to double our market share in North America, as an example, we could have either said, "Dealers, please invest $8 million-$9 million a pop at putting in these big service or big dealer fixed assets," or put in the trucks and satellite parts depots. They love it. They're like, "That's a way better way for me to grow." Now, they can still use their existing service hubs as a hub-and-spoke model. So they don't go away, but it's just way more leveraged. Now, you can say, "Well, why can't competitors follow?" Well, once you have the mall, once you have a 25-bay service site, you have to drive customers to it. You've got that fixed asset.
You have to keep it fed. So that's why we think it's a differentiator for our customers that they're going to like it and they're going to move, like many other brick and mortar. The dealers like it because it's way more flexible, and it's a differentiator relative to the competition. Where are we? We're early days. In our pilot dealer, it's quite mature. In fact, we just announced same-day parts delivery as just one more feature. We're going to be able to get on that same day within two hours in some cases or with the same day. So that's the sharp edge of the spear. We want to keep adding one more feature at a time there. But many dealers in North America and South America are picking this up now and adopting it.
I think it's going to be the way of the future for sure.
My quick follow-up, Damon, these have all been technology questions so far, but I fear we risk sell-side malfeasance if we don't at least ask the question. You obviously didn't take the opportunity when you announced the cost savings to talk about industry conditions. Is there anything we should read in relative to Q2 or 2024 trends that you'd like to talk about before we end the webcast?
Yeah, well, I think as we put in the 8-K, we are seeing increased market weakness. Steve, I think since we did our Q1 call, one of our competitors has come out. As you saw, they took their numbers down. They took their industry outlook down. And so we are seeing increased weakness. We didn't make any formal statements in the 8-K. We'll go through our quarter end here. We'll sort of see how the markets shape up. But again, what we're seeing is things are getting softer here. Not a surprise when you look at the industry downturns. You go from a really good year. There's a big correction in one year, and we're trying to see where the bottom of that is going to be. And it's continuing to become more challenging, especially in places like South America. That's no surprise to the team here.
But we'll reassess our market outlooks here, and we'll give that we'll communicate that at the end of our Q2 call here at the end of July.
Hi, Jamie Cook, Truist Securities. I guess, Eric, I feel like as I think about precision ag and the evolution over the past, whatever, 5, 10 years, Deere is here, AGCO and CNH are somewhere else, but everyone's precision ag strategy sort of merging. You know what I mean? Some guys just focused on OE. Now, Deere is focusing on retrofit too. So I guess my question is, what do you think the risk that CNH or Deere try to move more into your sort of retrofit strategy and offer their highest technology on your Fendt tractor or Case IH or New Holland? And how long would it take them? How long is your competitive advantage there? How long could it take them to do that? And if you don't think they could, why not?
Well, let's go back to the two types of channels. Let's go back. This is a super important topic, so I want to hit it hard. Let's go back to the two channels that we described. One is an OEM channel selling aftermarket equipment. So that's a CNH dealer, an AGCO dealer selling pretty much sprayers, tractors, combines. And if you want to upgrade your guidance, we'll do that for you. That's the mindset of an OEM dealer. We have found very few of those of any brand, whether the Trimble experience or the Precision Planting experience, where that same dealer can be good at retrofit. Almost none anywhere in the world. And so that's why we have this whole separate channel. Those folks are agronomists, seed salespeople, technologists. They can help go to the farmer and say, "Let's look at your crop.
Let's understand why do I see this variation in height or in performance? Let's get to the root of that. Let's pull it up. Let's talk about what caused this. Now let's talk about the technology to solve it." That's not a tractor salesman typically. And so it's this whole different set of talent, this whole different set of channel, and this different mindset of the go-to-market combined with the engineers that wake up saying, "I got to design this module so it fits on everybody's." Pretty much everybody up here has had experience with other brands. You know my background. And every company has a culture, and it fits kind of where they're going. The culture of our main competitors is pretty much focused on their brand. The engineers don't wake up thinking about all brands, and they have one OEM channel.
So I think it's a very big deal. Those are not just instructing the engineers to design differently. It's the whole ecosystem that would have to change. And building up this channel, super difficult. Where are you going to go? Where are you going to go to build up a precision ag tech channel? That's pretty much nobody has it. There's not one to go buy. And so then you're kind of creating it from scratch. And we've seen other players. That's why no startups succeed. I'm kind of being black and white on that one. But startups bump up to a ceiling, and they say, "I've got this really cool module. It does a lot of good stuff, but I can't scale because I don't have a channel." And farmers trust the channel.
Farmers are going to say, "Yeah, well, maybe that thing works." But usually, startups, they have a success. They sell to their neighbors, but then they get stuck. So this channel thing is a big deal in technology if you really want to become big. And creating one is very, very hard. So that's why we think it's different and why we think it's sustainable.
Maybe I can add just two little data points, Jamie, to this. When you ask about how long would it take, I don't know definitively, but when you look at what we've built up with the PTx Trimble channel and the Precision Planting channel, it's 30 years in the making, really for each of them. And there's a very specific culture that is embedded in how they go to market, which is distinctly different than an OEM. And on the topic of OEM dealers are generally not good at this, we actually have OEM dealers of our own that will come and say, "You know what? I don't want to be the premier dealer.
I'll just be the basic dealer, the aftermarket dealer, because I can't do all that." Because they find that less than 10% of our Precision Ag dealers, whether it's PTx Trimble or Precision Planting, are actually an equipment dealer as well. So less than 10%.
Okay. Well, I did ask a strategic question, and Steve opened up the can of worms. So I'm going to ask just one. I mean, July's next week. I think we are expected to hear something on just sort of GSI. So can you give an update there and just give an obviously, fundamentals are much weaker than anyone would have thought. Does that just push things out? That's not necessarily a bad thing, right? Because you have cash flow. You have a good balance sheet. You don't need to sell for the sake of selling, but just an update there. Thank you.
Yeah, no. So still in the process. As I think we said on the Q1 call, we're under the strategic review. I think we'll make a decision here in the summer. We know the internal value of what it is for AGCO. Our Grain & Protein team has done a good job delivering on their numbers this year. Been very pleased with what they've been able to achieve. Equally happy. We've gotten a lot of external interest as well. We're filtering through that, working through with our advisors. Again, I think the environment we're working through is not going to change the decision we make. Again, we'll work through that. And I think by the call at the summer here, we would expect to make a more formal announcement whether we choose to monetize that asset or whether we're going to reinvest and double down to grow it.
We should know that here by the, call it, July-August timeframe.
And I think to your point, Jamie, again, important. We don't need the cash. Again, part of this process has been allowed management focuses. We brought PTx Trimble into the fold here, and Andrew running that along with Seth. Management's time and attention to grow that technology stack. And whether that's Eric, myself, or others, this business may not be as core as what it was a couple of years ago. And so we're going to look at that and what we can do with that cash to pay down the debts of what we've taken on to fund the Trimble acquisition and other initiatives. So hopefully by the end of the summer, we'll be making it public.
Mig, you'll be our last question.
All right. Thank you for squeezing me in. Mig Dobre with Baird. Maybe going back to Andrew, a couple of questions. First, on the full-line retrofit dealers, I recall that Trimble had around 2,400 distribution points. How many of those distribution points do you aspire to get to be full-line retrofit dealers? And the second part, just in general, thinking about retrofit, is that really an opportunity for older machines? I mean, does it make economic sense for someone who has a two-year-old Deere piece of equipment to completely overhaul the technology we are offering?
Okay. So a couple of different questions there. And so I'll take the one on the retrofit channel first. So we don't have a set number of dealers that we look to fill out the channel. Where we're very much focused on is where do we have dealers that are performing well and helping them to grow in their markets? And where do we have either dealers that have not performed to what our expectation is or areas where we don't have a dealer presence at all? And so while we don't have a set number, we've got very targeted areas where we look to do that.
We've also taken the steps to implement for the first time a set of dealer standards and performance requirements, which are the key metrics of what dealers will need to both, one, commit to, to becoming a new dealer, and will be measured on as we think about the future and our longevity as a dealer for both PTx, Trimble, and Precision Planting.
Can I maybe press you a little bit on that? When you look at the dealers, how many of them today are both Trimble and Precision Planting dealers?
It varies by market. I don't have an exact number for you. In Europe, we have a good number of them. In North America, it's certainly less than 50%. And in South America, it's quite low as well. So that creates a good opportunity for us as we think about networks and leveraging the existing dealers that make up our retrofit full-line dealer going forward.
On the older equipment versus new?
Yeah. So on the older equipment, this actually is one of the best parts, I think, to the approach. So as you look at both PTx Trimble, and if I can, I'll speak for Precision Planting as well since I know that business well. We offer very scalable technologies. And so it allows a farmer to enter into our technology suite for a specific need that could be on their planter. It could certainly be in the cab of their machine and enter in with a single or one or two pieces of technology. And then as they become more familiar with it, as they see the opportunities that we can solve, the problems we solve, and the opportunities that our technology presents, they can add to that year after year.
By us coming out with consistent flow of new product introductions, we're continuing that opportunity to engage with new customers. So as we look at our customers, it is very common for that 2- to 5-year-old machine, I would say, especially because that's generally the time that it may change hands in some cases. So it gives us a great opportunity to engage with those customers at least once in that time period and generally then provide new technology products throughout the lifecycle of what they've just engaged with us on.
I'm just going to double-tap on that one a little bit more. I go to Winter Conference every year myself, and that's where Precision Planting launches their new features. And you're sitting among there's 5,000 farmers from all around the world, the best of the best farmers that show up to that thing. And I like to sit in the morning and in the lunch and all this stuff and really talk to them. And every year I go there, I'm talking with farmers, and they'll tell me their story of, "I just bought a brand new 24-row Brand X planter from the factory, and I stripped off all their gear, threw it in the bin, and I put on Precision Planting because it's the best." You say, "Well, why is that?" There's features Precision Planting has that nobody else has in the market. Smart Firmer is a great example.
It's a sensor that runs in the trench, and it can measure soil temperature, moisture, residue, and organic matter. Nobody else has got that. Now that planter can say, "Hey, I'm getting into a higher organic matter part of the field." Well, that's higher fertility. It can handle more yield. I'm going to plant more seeds there automatically. So there's features that come out each year, and that's what Andrew's talking about. And Seth mentioned about the innovation engine. We've got to keep coming up with new features that nobody else has, and it keeps driving that same behavior. So even on a brand new from the factory, farmer after farmer is keeping ripping off that brand new equipment. That tells you that it's just absolutely the best.
Great. Thank you very much for your questions. That does conclude our webcast. Thank you very much for your interest in AGCO.