Please welcome to the stage Greg Peterson, Vice President, Investor Relations.
Good morning. I'm Greg Peterson. I handle investor relations along with Kiran Dutt and ANSR. Great pleasure to welcome you to AGCO's 2024 Investor Day. A big thank you to those of you that are with us here in Manhattan, and we also appreciate the virtual attendees this morning. You can see the slides behind me, and we'll have the agenda up there here in a second. Eric will start this morning, and he's going to cover the strategic focus of our business, which happens to be for our customers. Our goal for our strategy and for our objectives is to create value for our shareholders. Following Eric, Seth Crawford, who is the general manager of our precision technology business, will be with us. Seth is going to give us an overview of what's very unique to AGCO, which is our retrofit-first, brand-agnostic approach to precision ag.
So Seth will cover that for us, along with an update on how our PTx integration is going. After Seth's presentation, we'll take a 20-minute break, and so that'll give us time to grab some coffee. And then also, we want to encourage you. Just adjacent to the kitchen over here is a technology area where we've got some of our precision technology experts. They're going to highlight some really interesting technology all the way around the crop cycle. We have Adrian, who's very excited to show you our talking AI-enabled talking tractor and targeted spraying and soil testing. So please take an opportunity to do that. So we'll have 20 minutes. Following the break, we'll have Cory Buchs , who is here. And many of you who were at our technology meeting in June in Kansas got a chance to meet Cory Buchs .
Corey is the chief architect of the integration that's going on between Trimble's data platform and AGCO's data platform. So that's hugely important for us. Corey's here to give us an update on how that's going, as well as an overview of our data strategy. After Corey's done, Damon will wrap up the day with a look at the financial implications of our strategy and finish off with the first look at our 2025 financial forecast. At the end of the meeting, we'll post our slides to our investor page on the website, and we'll ask that you hold your questions till the very end when all the speakers will be back up on stage, and we'll be happy to take everybody's questions at that point. So with that, let's look at our safe harbor. This morning's presentation will include some non-GAAP metrics.
The non-GAAP measures are reconciled to GAAP measures in the appendix of the presentation. We'll also make forward-looking statements this morning, including information about our strategic plans and initiatives, as well as our financial impacts. We'll discuss product development and capital expenditure plans and the timing of those plans and our expectations with respect to the costs and benefits of those plans and timing of those benefits. We'll discuss production levels, share repurchases, dividend rates, our future revenue, price levels, margins, earnings, cash flow, tax rates, and other financial metrics. We wish to caution you that these statements are predictions, and actual events may differ materially. We refer you to the periodic reports that we file from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the company's Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2023.
These documents discuss important factors that could cause the actual results to differ materially from those contained in our forward-looking statements. These factors include, but are not limited to, adverse developments in the agricultural industry, supply chain disruption, weather, exchange rate volatility, commodity prices, and changes in product demand. We disclaim any obligation to update any forward-looking statements except as required by law. Finally, we'll have a replay of this morning's event on our corporate website later today. And now, with that, I'd like to invite Eric up to the stage, and we'll get started.
Boy, it's great to be back with our friends in the investment community right here in your backyard. So it's been about two years since we had this kind of a program where we were all together live. And wow, has a lot changed in those two years. A lot's changed in the industry, and a lot's changed for AGCO. Two years ago, when we were together, we were talking about a market that was red hot and smoking. We were building everything that we could. We were constrained by supply constraints and the COVID issues. And now we've got a much softer market. There's usually, in every business cycle, one year where it goes from very good to not so good, and there's a big correction here. We're in the middle of that right now. This cycle is kind of playing out like many of the other cycles have.
And so it's not unpredictable, and it's not unusual. What is unusual and what's different is, I think, how AGCO is addressing this cycle. We're way more proactive, way more aggressive on taking costs out, taking inventory out, and being aggressive at making sure that we're managing through this cycle aggressively. Then what's changed at AGCO? A lot. We've fundamentally changed our portfolio this year. We've been making steady gains on some of our high-margin growth levers that we've been talking about, and we're going to unpack all of that today. So we've got three key messages for the day. AGCO, as you remember, is the largest global ag pure-play equipment company and technology company in the ag space. We've got a differentiated farmer-first strategy.
We aim to be the most farmer-focused company in the industry, and that's playing out more and more in our technology strategy, in our distribution strategy, and just how our people are wired. We'll talk about what that means. We've got a relentless focus on value creation. When I came up here with our management team the first time, we had never seen 10% margins, and we set an ambitious goal to say we are going to achieve that at the mid-cycle of the industry, which we did, then we raised the bar to 12% for 2026, the last time we were here, and we're on track to hit that, and today we're going to raise the bar again, so we'll talk about that at the end of my section.
All of it is focused on the foundation of adding more value to farmers, is a good thing because it can be harvested and added value to our investors. So just as a reminder of who is AGCO, not a very old company. 1990 was our start date. We're about $12 billion in sales this year. Last year, we were about $14 billion. 25,000 employees around the world focused on delivering solutions to the market through multiple brands. We've got our machinery brands that are differentiated, but then we've got this new technology brand, PTx, Precision Technologies multiplied. So that's going to talk a lot about that. But essentially, these now narrowed-down focus of our core brands allow us to bring to the market a differentiated value proposition targeted at different customers with different solutions. We are much more innovative.
When I look through our overall company, we're a much more innovative company today than we have ever been in the past. You can see that in terms of just things like our patent accumulation. We've nearly doubled our patent portfolio in the last five years. The whole company is focused on innovating not only on our product, but also on our business model. We're going to talk about some of the changes that we've made recently. The backdrop that we play on is the ag industry. So I'll just give a quick refresher here. We've got some nice tailwinds in this industry. It's just a natural growth story. Fundamentally, the world needs more grain, going from 8 billion people to 10 billion people, more mouths to feed.
You combine that with the fact that there's more meat in the diet as economies mature, that's a multiplier of anywhere from 2-12, depending on whether it's chicken or beef. And the third one is biofuels. More and more demand for ethanol, renewable diesel, and other uses of grain to also be fuel. You add all those three together, and somehow the farmer has to create a lot more grain. But at the same time, the farmer is being squeezed to use far less inputs: less fertilizer, pesticide, herbicide, water, and there's no more land. So there's this squeeze on the farmer that can only be solved. The only way to solve that equation is through precision technology.
Have the machines continue to get smarter, be able to sense variation in the soil, then sense variation in the crop, and be able to automatically adjust themselves to optimize every spot on the field to make sure that they can do a better job than we were doing last year, so nice tailwinds in the market. We've organized ourselves to capture, train the sales to capture all the wind that is in this market. On the left, we've got our machinery business. We've got three primary brands there: Fendt, Massey Ferguson, and Valtra. Fendt goes after the customer that wants the best of the best, and our tagline there is, "Leaders drive Fendt." That's the most demanding customers wanting the highest technology, best quality, and best support. Massey Ferguson, straightforward and dependable solutions for a different customer segment. We come to the market with a different value proposition there.
And then Valtra is a very personalized solution, your working machine. We've personalized it to your solution, and we cater to those in the Nordics and in the tropics. So that's our machinery business. But in parallel to that, we've got a whole technology business. We've brought together two extremely powerful brands: Precision Planting, known for its innovation and farmer focus, and now PTx Trimble. These two working essentially in a fully integrated way now as one powerful team to deliver the market-leading, most powerful precision ag business in the world focused on the mixed fleet. And just as a reminder, the mixed fleet is. This group sells to every farmer. We sell to no matter what the farmer has bought in the past, we'll sell to them, whether they want to buy something new or upgrade an existing piece of machinery.
It could be a five-year-old brand X, a seven-year-old brand Y. We'll upgrade it to have new capability on that machine. Now, both of these businesses working side by side are focused on things like we say we want to be the most farmer-focused company in the industry. We measure ourselves on that promoter score, making sure that we're doing a great job of delivering the overall package for our farmers. Employee engagement, creating a fire in the belly, a passion for our farmers, a passion to be the most innovative company in the industry, and then profitability and growth. Our vision is to become the trusted partner for industry-leading smart farming solutions. We've been saying that from the beginning of our strategy rollout, and we've accelerated that significantly. We aim to be the leader in precision ag, and this year is a big step toward that.
FarmerCore is our innovative new way of thinking about distribution. I'm going to unpack that here in a couple of slides. And then operating efficiency. We threw the throttle fully forward on operating efficiency this year. And I'm going to tell you about some of the new ways we're thinking about making the company leaner, rewiring how we operate. Sustainability is a big part of our purpose. And so I wanted to touch on this. When we first renewed our strategy, we were actually kind of a laggard in this area. We put a lot of work, a lot of focus in being steadily driving this forward. We've reached all the goals that we set forward two years ago, in fact, several of them well ahead of time. So today we're raising the bar on our sustainability targets. We had four areas that we talked about before.
They're staying steady in that regard. The first one's on soil health and carbon sequestration. Anything that we can do to help the farmer more effectively change how they farm so that that plant captures the carbon that's in the air and can sequester it in the ground is good for society. We get the carbon removed, but it's also good for the farmer. It helps soil health. That just helps with fertility and flexibility for water absorption and things like that. So we're moving forward on that in a strong way. You'll see some of the technology demonstrations in our breakout area and be able to talk about some of those topics. The second one is decarbonizing our products. We were one of the first ones to launch a commercially available fully battery electric tractor. That's just the first one.
We're going to attend more over the next several years, not only battery, but other renewable sources of energy, and then while we're doing those developments, we're going to update our power trains to deliver 5% more efficiency across all of our power trains. In terms of our facilities, we've made big strides in how efficient we are in terms of emissions and water usage and things like that. We're raising the bar in all of those categories. You can see the targets here, and finally, sending a very strong message to our employees about how we care about them. You know, when we started, we had a TCIR, total case incident rate, that was in the mid-twos. That's just okay. We set an ambitious goal to someday get below one, be a world-class industry. We thought that was going to take many, many years to achieve.
We achieved that already in 2024, so our ambition is to continue to drive that forward and take that out to our farmers in terms of well-being and safety programs we can do for farmers, so full suite of sustainability solutions. We release a sustainability report every year. You can read a lot of detail there, but it's embedded in the heart of how we think about running the company. We want to be more productive for the farmer and do it in a more sustainable way, so I teased you a little bit with FarmerCore. Let's talk about that. We just launched it in January of this year, and it is super exciting. Essentially, our industry has operated in a way where we have had the customer, the farmer, always have to come to the business to do their interaction.
They had to come to a brick-and-mortar store where all of the industry operated to research their machine, buy their machine, get their parts, get their service, get their financing, all of those things. Well, we want to flip that 180 degrees, completely change the model, and say, instead, we're going to have the business come to the farmer. Many other industries have done that. Agriculture hasn't. In order to do that, we had to do three primary things, and that's what we're doing right now. Number one, work with our dealers to fundamentally rethink the network coverage. Instead of establishing big brick-and-mortar, heavy asset, large stores, we want them in the future to focus on much smaller footprint. Now put in parts-only stores or small service centers out distributed in the network, in the territory. Secondly, mobile on-farm solutions, a mobile-first, on-farm-first mindset through mobile.
Buy these really nice service trucks and take it instead of the investment being in the bricks and mortar, put the investment in the service trucks. Now we can go right out to the farm and do everything. The service truck can do everything that you could do in the service bay. You can pull an engine, pull a transmission, repair anything that the farmer has, and once you're on the farm, you're not only servicing our brands of equipment, but because we're the most farmer-focused company in the industry, we can service the farm, not the product. It's a shift from product to farmer in our technology strategy. Now we're doing it in distribution, so they'll service any brand of equipment once they get on the farm.
And then we're enabling all of this in the background with all the digital solutions for a farmer to research online, configure their product, buy service parts, get financing, all of these things. So all three of these working in concert are the new strategy. We think it's great. Our farmers tell us they love having business done the way they want to do it, the business coming to them. Our dealers love it because it's a much more flexible, asset-light model. And we love it because it's a differentiated approach. It's very difficult for our competitors to follow this approach once they've established the heavy asset, large brick-and-mortar. So this is a win-win-win all the way around. But you hear me excited about it. You hear our team excited about it. It's because we hear it from our customers.
I'd like to share that same kind of experience with you with a short video here.
As a global leader in the design, manufacture, and distribution of agricultural machinery and precision ag technology, we are pleased to introduce you to FarmerCore, a transformative global initiative to deliver an exceptional Next-generation farmer and dealer experience built on three pillars: the on-farm mindset, smart network coverage, and digital customer engagement. It is an end-to-end distribution model designed to meet the changing needs of farmers around the world, bringing the dealer experience directly to the farm. The on-farm model positions dealers to meet their customers' needs at every stage of the ownership journey. Mobile sales support provides on-farm convenience, while a distributed team of highly skilled technicians with mobile service vehicles saves farmers time and money by maintaining and repairing equipment directly on-farm. More local outlets make it easy to do business.
Smart network coverage de-emphasizes the one-size-fits-all outlet approach, moving toward a hub-and-spoke model that adds light retail outlets, service centers, and parts-only locations. Digital engagement gives farmers 24/7 online access to sales and support, including online parts purchasing, dealer digital storefronts, online configurators, and more. FarmerCore represents a major milestone in AGCO's Farmer-First strategy, solidifying our unwavering commitment to help the world's farmers become more profitable, productive, and sustainable. FarmerCore.
So our farmers say it's better, and it's the way they want to be served in the future. We're excited about that. Now, let me start unpacking some of our three growth drivers that we've talked about ever since we rolled out the strategy. The first one's precision ag. Now, Seth's going to talk about this in great detail, and you can get your hands on the technology and the break.
But essentially, we took a massive step forward this year in our performance and our capabilities, our capacity relative to Precision Ag with the creation of the new joint venture, PTx Trimble. We've married that up with Precision Planting, and this is a massive leap forward in our ability to deliver solutions to our farmers, solving the biggest, toughest challenges on the farm. With that, we've got higher confidence now in our ability to grow this business. This year, we're going to be a little bit under $1 billion in sales, and we're confident in our ability to more than double that to over $2 billion in sales by 2029. Now, some of you that were with us in the beginning when we were originally putting this joint venture together recognize that that's the same dollar target, but originally we had targeted 2028.
This year has been such a drop-off in the overall industry that we're essentially starting from a little bit lower point. So the plan is still the same. The outcome is still the same. The destination is still the same. It's just that it's going to take us a bit longer to get there, 2029 instead of 2028. But strategy is unchanged. We're really excited about the early days of how it's coming together, how well these two teams are working together to be innovative and be farmer-focused. And Seth will talk a lot about that. Second one is unlocking Fendt's potential. Fendt is simply the best of the best for the most demanding farmers in the marketplace. It sits on top of the market in all of the regions. Unfortunately, it had always been kind of a hidden jewel. It was a tractor business focused in Europe.
When we put our strategy together, we said, "Hey, let's unleash the power of Fendt." So to do that, we had to do two things. We had to make it full-line, move from tractors to full-line products, planters, sprayers, combines, hay equipment, so we could serve the customer all the way around the cropping cycle. And secondly, we need to take that full portfolio and bring it to the global markets where it hadn't been before, predominantly North and South America, but also Australia, New Zealand, South Africa. So that's what we're right in the middle of doing. We've got the full suite of solutions. Every one of those products now has got industry recognition as being a top, top performer, the best of the best in the marketplace. And in parallel, we've been building out the channel.
Over this timeframe, we've gone from 0% coverage in South America to 80%, in North America from 40% coverage to 80%. So it largely covered the market. We still have a little bit of white space to go. But really, our focus now is on brand building, continuing to strengthen the awareness of the brand and what it means to be Fendt, and penetrating more deeply in the areas that we've already got coverage, really making the most out of those 80% of the market where we have coverage. With that, we have strong confidence. When you talk to a Fendt customer, which you're going to hear from in a minute, you can just feel the passion in their voice. They're like, "I never thought this was possible. I love the experience of the product and the support. This is fantastic.
I'm never going back." So we've grown from a $300 million business to $1 billion over the last four years. Actually, our growth rate has exceeded our expectations when we first launched this program. Up to now, we're aiming to nearly double again by 2029 to $1.7 billion in sales. And we have strong confidence that our track record with the products, our track record with distribution growth and building this brand is going to get us there. That's about a 35% growth rate during this time. You hear the energy in my voice on this one too. It's because when you talk to a Fendt customer, we did this. We brought about 500 customers over to Europe. I've never been around a more passionate group. So I wanted to share some of that with you as well today. So let's hear from a couple of customers. First one's in the U.S.
Second one's going to be in Brazil.
So Matt Barnard, Central Illinois. My brother and my dad and I and our wives, we run Barnard Farms Partnership. So a farming operation, corn and soybeans that span about six counties. Matt Barnard's farming operation is very unique. And he farms. I'm going to say he farms differently, but he's farming differently the way that he wants the farm.
A good idea can come from anywhere, and bigger is not always better. That's how we started to get the idea of Fendt. It was proposed to us about something that was super efficient, super reliable, very easy to use, and really a product that I kind of think is ahead of its time.
He started to say, "Hey, we need to explore other opportunities." So we bought a Momentum planter and then jumped into the IDEAL combine side of things and then went from one Fendt tractor to four. I completely underestimated the versatility of a 500-horsepower front-wheel assist tractor. So we always thought about it as being a row crop tractor, a planter tractor, but we've bought one now that we've just replaced a four-wheel drive 600-horsepower tractor. A universal tractor to be able to plant in the spring, side dress in the summer, and then run a big tillage tool in the fall. They have one tractor that can do all things.
It's true. It does. We'll add more to that fleet. You have the flexibility of that. You're also running at 14-1700 RPMs. You're burning 13 to 16 gallons of fuel. It's fast. RTK works. It just works.
When we talk about the Momentum planter, the ability for that planter to plant fast, transfer its weight, but also go through a lot of different uneven elevations out in the field is a big deal. And the combine's a completely different thing. The fuel efficiency and have all the horsepower and everything that you kind of know with Fendt, but the automation, the autonomy that's in that combine for the first time in my life has been fun because I actually just let the Fendt IDEAL do its thing, and it made clean samples and adjusted itself. And it was really easy that then when we saw the amount of efficiency in everything that it did this year, we added the second one going into this next year. He's handling residue management, which is then tying back into the spring planting season. It's all one big full package.
I think that's why so many people that I see get a Fendt tractor, often the first thing I say to them is, "You're going to get a planter. You're going to get a combine. You're going to get another one." And they're like, "No, I won't." And sure enough, they do because once you kind of get into that idea thinking and that family, I think that we feel very confident we're at a right spot to get us to wherever tomorrow's going to be.
And the next one from Brazil. So Matt Barnard. Sorry. We'll get this. There's a little bit of a lag there. Maybe somebody can help. Well, we might have to skip that one. I'm not sure what's tripped up. But essentially, it's the same story. In Brazil, customer never experienced Fendt. Got to experience Fendt.
Grew the product line throughout the whole portfolio and now talks about the difference on his farm in terms of profitability, how the operators love driving the machine, and how he'll never go back. That's the kind of thing we're hearing from our farmers that have experienced the Fendt experience. In all the markets where we take it, it's something new that creates a different kind of value, more value than they've ever been able to experience before, and they love it, and they're very, very sticky to the brand, so that's our second growth driver. I'm going to the third growth driver now, and that's accelerating our global parts growth. When we started this journey, we actually had to really focus on the foundation first, and so we focused on parts fill rate, making sure that when a customer came to the store, that we had it for them.
We aggressively went after parts fill rate and moved from kind of last in the industry to first in the industry. We've been sustainably first in the industry now for several years running by an independent Carlisle research. During COVID, the gap even got larger between us and the number two because our strategy was different. We prioritized parts going to the service department over parts going to manufacturing if there was constrained supply. And there was a lot of constrained supply for everybody during COVID. That difference really paid off in that the customers really said that, "Hey, you care about service and parts. You care about keeping us up and running," where others are kind of focused on building more machines coming out of the factory. So with that foundation, then we've now been able to go to the next chapter.
We moved from reactive to proactive, leveraging the connected fleet of machines and being able to anticipate when they're going to buy and when they're going to have a repair incident. Additionally, been putting in place tools like e-commerce. Now, e-commerce is cool. It fits with FarmerCore. It lets the customer operate the way they want to operate, do that digitally. But it's also good in that when we see customers doing e-commerce, we find that their average purchase is about 25% larger because when they go to buy item one, we give them a recommendation like, "Well, if you're doing this type of a project, why don't you buy all the parts for it?" And if we make it easy, they click, "Yeah, buy them all." So there's ease of doing business, doing it the way they want to, and parts growth.
This overall business is our highest margin business. It's about twice the profitability of the rest of our company, and it always grows, so I started my conversation with saying the industry has gone through its big correction year, and yet parts is going to grow just a little bit this year, so it grows more, grows less, but it never shrinks, so high margin, always growing customer-oriented business. Our aspiration is to not only grow our e-commerce business to 25% of the total, but grow the total from $1.8 billion to $2.3 billion over the planning period. We have high confidence we're going to get this done. We've got a great team leading our parts business, and then to kind of wrap up our operational topics, I want to talk about a big change we made in our mindset around operational efficiency this year.
We had this correction year of industry demand, and we talked to you in June about a downsizing of the organization, essentially a tightening of the belt, taking cost out of the organization to the tune of about $100 to $125 million run rate savings. That's kind of traditional stuff. That's what we've done before, and it's getting the cost in line with our business. But as part of that, we said, "Hey, what else can we do?" The whole leadership team got energized about using the new tools that are available, artificial intelligence and GenAI, to say, "Can we run AGCO differently? What if we rewired the company to change how we did work here?" And that's exactly what we're in the middle of. We call it Project Reimagine. Reimagine how AGCO operates. So we're standardizing how we do the work around the company.
Remember, we've got a lot of acquisitions that built up AGCO. We're standardizing how so that we can then automate the work. Anything that's repetitive that you're just moving from here to there, we want to automate that, have these new automation tools, and it's remarkable the power of automation. You're going to hear from some of our AI experts in the breakout about some of the tools that are already available, but it's unbelievable what it can do, and we're trying to leverage that to the maximum, then we're looking at other areas that we can say, "Hey, some of this work that can be standardized, why don't we do it in a lower-cost location or even outsource it to someone who just does this type of work?" Payroll, parts of our IT, things like that. Farmer doesn't care who does payroll in AGCO.
Let's just let somebody who's really good at payroll do it and lower our costs. We'd rather be lean here and put all of our investment, all of our people's energy on being innovative for the farmer, whether that's on our product or in our business. So when you add up where we think that chapter is going to go, there's another $75 million to $100 million on top of the restructuring that we've done that we expect to be a run rate savings that'll show up between now and the end of 2026. So big change. We've thrown the throttle all the way to the front on figuring out how to get more lean within AGCO and rewire how we operate. We think it's not only good for the lean aspect, but every one of those projects has an assigned task of AGCO has to operate better.
Something has to get faster, a new capability. The farmer has to get something better. So it's both lean and better in terms of how we're going to operate. And I think when we're all done, we'll look back, and the employees are going to say, "This is just a much more fun place to work. I'm not doing repetitive tasks anymore. I'm always able to innovate." So it's kind of a win-win-win in that regard. So you bring that we've kind of talked about the operational topics. I also want to touch a bit on the fundamental portfolio shift we made in AGCO, biggest portfolio shift we made in the history of the company. So it started with creating this joint venture, PTx Trimble.
Massive leap forward in our ability to accelerate our delivery of precision ag solutions, becoming the industry leader in precision ag solutions for the mixed fleet. Just bar none, best product line, most full product line, best all-tech channel, unique to us. Nobody else has an all-tech channel separate from their equipment business. And we think this is the heart of what's going to drive agriculture going forward. So we're super excited about that, but it also opened up a door for us to reorient the portfolio and exit our Grain & Protein business. It's our lowest growth, lowest margin business, least synergies with the rest, allows our leadership team to really get focused on driving excellence in precision ag. So that was accomplished this year.
With the proceeds from the Grain & Protein, we're also able to pay down some of the debt that we took on with PTx Trimble. So nice fit of doing these two things together. So let's bring it all together. You've seen this chart on the right here about our growth drivers. They're the same growth drivers from the beginning of the strategy. We are staying focused on what has been true from the beginning and is still true today. We just iterate on how we can execute toward those. And now we're raising the bar yet again. The first time we stood in front of you, we raised the bar to say, "We're going to deliver 10% margin. We've never done that in the history of the company." And then we did it. Then we raised the bar to 12%.
We said, "We've never done that in the history of the company." And we're on track to do that by our commitment date of 2026. And today, the AGCO leadership team is very excited, very proud, and very confident on raising the bar again. We're going to take it up to 14% to 15% at mid-cycle, much like we've done using the same direction, leveraging different tools, different techniques within the company, with our farmers, with our dealers to have a much stronger company that has less variability throughout the business cycle. Higher at the mid-cycle, but also higher lows and higher highs. And the picture of that is really right here. In the last business cycle from 2013 to 2019 or so, we had a cycle that at our trough, we only delivered 4% margins. At mid-cycle 6%, and at their peak 8%.
So we were like a 6% company. With that business cycle behind us, the leadership team said, "We can be better." And that's why we set that 10% goal and then the 12%. So the 12% is reflected in that upper line that you can see here. The 12% at mid-cycle also brought up our trough margins to be such that even at the trough business cycle, we're delivering rates of returns that are in excess of our cost of capital. And now when we take the bar up again to 14% to 15%, the whole line shifts up. The whole thing goes up like a high jump.
Once you clear that bar, we move the bar up, delivering significantly stronger returns all the way through the business cycle. Great returns for our investors allow us to reinvest in the company to continue to make strong solutions solving the farmer's hardest problems. So we're recognized by the industry as a strong innovator. Probably many would say we're the most innovative company in the industry. Our entire organization has spent a lot of time building this plan, and we are absolutely aligned around delivering it. Our farmers love what we're doing, and they are thirsty for more and so with that, I'm going to talk about one of the core elements to get there, and that's the technology development and the channel to carry it out to our customers.
Those two things are very different in AGCO compared to anybody else in our industry, and Seth's going to explain the details behind that. Thanks for your time. I'll be back with you in the Q&A session.
Please welcome to the stage Seth Crawford, Senior Vice President and General Manager, PTx.
Thank you, Eric, for that introduction. It's great to see so many familiar faces today. It's exciting to be with you because many of you were with us this past summer when we were out in Kansas seeing the equipment, the technology in the field. Today, I want to take it to the next level and talk about what we've been doing. The first number I'll share is 263. Today is day 263 of bringing PTx together and launching our new brand. We're in our ninth month of operating. It's been an exciting nine months, without a doubt. To remind everybody what we're even talking about here with PTx, precision agriculture combined with advanced technology multiplied to serve farmers around the world. That's what we're talking about.
If you rewind the clock to January 2017, before we even acquired Precision Planting, we had about 150 employees focused on technology, the electronics, the software within AGCO. Today, we're more than 15 times that in terms of employees. How did we do it? We did it by bringing together multiple brands, by investing internally, organically. You see the brands that we brought together and how they're organized today. About half of them fall under the PTx Trimble brand, the legacy Trimble business that we brought in for the agriculture side and JCA Technologies. Within Precision Planting, we brought together Headsight and the Intelligent Ag Solutions or Appareo Systems, all coming together. The key here is they're all focused in one direction now, not operating as separate companies with more capabilities than ever, driving forward.
So today, we can confidently say we've brought together the best in the industry, formed as one, ready to lead even more in the precision ag business. PTx is the precision ag engine within AGCO. But what you want to know about is, "Okay, now the business is together. What are you going to do about it? How are you going to grow this business?" Well, we have four very clear growth pillars. The first growth pillar is our mindset around retrofit and innovation. To win in the market, we have to innovate. We're bringing forward about three to five new products a year today, but we can accelerate beyond the three to five. And there are many derivatives of those three to five, and you're going to see a lot of those today, and I think it's quite exciting.
The other aspect is we have the full crop cycle that we can cover going forward, and you're going to see that in our product demonstrations during the break, and I'd encourage you to go station to station and just hear the message and how it all ties together because I think it's a very exciting story for farmers, for AGCO, and for the investment community, but to make all of this work, we have to develop the channel. We have to have a channel that can deliver it to farmers, be on the farm. Eric hit hard the message around FarmerCore, well, we have an entire full-line Precision Ag dealer channel that's out there that's ready to be in the field demonstrating these innovations to farmers, and then the final piece is the global expansion, and we're better able to drive that global expansion than ever before.
We have the full portfolio. We have brands with the Precision Planting and the PTx Trimble brand that are recognized and trusted by farmers around the world. And we have task controller capabilities that are now part of our organization that enable us to move well beyond North America stronger than ever before. But at the core is our retrofit-first strategy. And you hear this in every presentation you go to. But I'm telling you, you hear it, but there's only one company that truly lives it. And when we say we're living the retrofit-first strategy, what I mean is we innovate not for our own equipment. That's actually a side benefit. We innovate for the farmer. We innovate to solve their problems with their equipment, regardless of the brand, regardless of the age. You'll hear us talk a lot about the mixed fleet.
With the farmer, we talk about their fleet because that's really what they care about. Whether they have a 15-year-old tractor, a five-year-old combine, a three-year-old planter, whatever it is, whatever brand it is, we can help them as long as they believe in better, and we can deliver. The other piece with our innovative approach is that we can be faster to market. By being in the field side by side with the farmers, we're going to be able to demonstrate these products, learn, iterate, and be back again, and some of our products with the modern development capabilities, we're able to iterate multiple iterations overnight to be back in the field because I think you all know in farming, you have small windows. You have about three weeks to plant, and you have about three weeks to harvest.
So if we're not going with that new design multiple times, even in one season, you're falling behind. And that's how we're so disruptive with this model. It also helps us accelerate by having capabilities that we can scale with the farmer. You don't have to buy a million-dollar machine. You can buy $20,000 worth of components and enhance your output this year with rapid payback, oftentimes in one to two years. So the farmer sees clear value, and they trust our brand, and they trust our approach. And that's the key. It improves their profitability and that trust. And I hope you'll be able to join us at our winter conference customer event where you'll be able to see the farmers and how we talk about helping them get better every day.
And then finally, I can only emphasize that this market is so large because we're not just talking about new equipment. We're talking about all equipment. Many of our products go on products well beyond 10 years old because there's a lot of good equipment out there. It lasts a long time. It's not uncommon to see 10-, 15-, 20-year or more tractors or sprayers or combines out there. But technology doesn't necessarily stay current that long. So about every three to five years, we believe there's a tremendous opportunity to step a farmer up into that new technology. We can't forget that only 7% of farmers buy new equipment each year. That means 93% are looking for some solution. And we're there to deliver solutions to that entire addressable market.
And if you think we're not serious about the retrofit market, then I would just point to the bottom of the screen where we highlight again that 90% of our retrofit technology goes on equipment other than that of what AGCO makes, highlighting how we truly are focused on that mixed fleet. This is where it really gets exciting because just a few years ago, if you look at the PTx Trimble portfolio and the Precision Planting portfolio, it was mainly guidance products and planting-related products. Today, we're truly operating around the crop cycle with the marquee launch of our Outrun autonomous grain cart system, having the first mixed fleet system readily available in the market, putting those systems out in the coming year. We had a great year in 2024, looking to grow that in 2025.
Our Symphony Vision targeted spraying system, launching that into the market, new capabilities in a new portion of the crop cycle. Radicle Agronomics. We talk about helping the farmer get better every day. You only can do that if you truly understand what they're dealing with from a soil condition standpoint and the nutrients in that soil and how we can make it better to help with the planting, help with the nutrient management, help with the chemical application to make the most of that crop. So feeding that with better nutrient information than ever before. Then planter innovations. This is clearly a pull from farmers. They said, "You helped me enhance my current planter, but will you give me a complete row unit so I don't have to do it piece by piece?" The strong answer is, "Yes, we will." We have.
That all builds on the capabilities that we have across the bottom. What's exciting there is we're bringing the capabilities together because when you look at an operation like going through the field and planting, there are over 250 tasks that the farmer would have to complete without any automation. We're automating them one by one and delivering value for every one of those steps that we automate that they see value in and they're willing to pay us for. That gives us ongoing growth and a nice revenue stream for years to come. That's what's so exciting as we take this around the full crop cycle. One of the questions you've all asked us about, so we're going to hit it hard today, is tell us about targeted spraying, tell us what it means to the farmer, and tell us how you're different to competitors.
So first of all, we listen to farmers, and we deliver it in a way that they've asked for. And that means the brand that they choose, the brand that they have, we want to be able to put our system on it. And we're able to put it on machines really up to about 10 years old. And that means self-propelled machines. That means tow-behind machines. Whatever that sprayer may look like, we're able to offer them a solution. And that includes feature levels. And we're going to talk about that with a side-by-side comparison coming up in the next level, but we'll get to that one. And then the other key is the dealer support that suits them best. We have a full-line Precision Ag dealer for those customers that are really looking to be out on the leading edge.
But we also can serve them through their current OEM dealer, depending on that OEM dealer's engagement with us. But we offer that type of contract because we want to make sure wherever that customer is showing loyalty, we're there to be with them to give them an appropriate amount of support. And we give them a very clear value proposition for what we're delivering to the market. So over on the right-hand side of the screen, these are the steps that a farmer can step into. I talked about steps and the scalability that we offer. Well, first of all, with our vision module that has a dual camera sensing system on the sprayer with AI built into each module operating on the edge, the farmer's able to just start by potentially scouting their field. Maybe they're not sure if they even want to invest in the system.
We give them the opportunity to make a minimal investment, go through the field where they're able to scout what they have in the field and determine if targeted spraying is right for them. If they are, what they'll see from our capabilities is that our system with the dual camera sensing and the way we've built it with the unique approach in the industry, we're able to tell what type of weed it is, not just if it's a weed or the desired crop, but what type of weed is it? Is it a broadleaf weed, or is it a grass? For those of you who've ever tried to control weeds, this is a really important question. The other question is, how big is it? We can spot weeds and target weeds as small as a dime.
But the reality is sometimes you'll go through a field, oftentimes maybe where there's been a waterway, maybe it had a heavy rain, it took a lot of those weed seeds and spread them out, you'll have a big patch. If there's heavy pressure, what you also need to know is how heavy is that pressure? And then when I look at the label on the chemical that I'm applying, what rate am I supposed to apply for the weed density? Every label will tell you this, and we have that information so that the sprayer can respond. And so that way we can control it. We can control it. We can visualize it on the display. And then with our Pulse Width Modulation nozzles, we're able to apply the right amount at the right time modulated to make sure that we get the best coverage throughout the field.
And this is all built on top of our capabilities that we launched a few years ago with our Reclaim system where we have that boom recirculation. So when you turn your sprayer on, you can rest assured that the chemical's all the way out at the end and you're not having any misapplication. And then when you're done, you can look at all of this information on your Panorama application, visualizing it anywhere. Which one of the things I know you always are interested in is how's that going? Because I know you charge $500 a year for Panorama. We're seeing tremendous uptake of Panorama, and it enables more customer engagement because of the way we're able to support those farmers by being in touch with them all through the season.
So now, going side by side, just highlighting here, when we talk about the market, we talk about all sprayers over the last 10 years. Again, self-propelled, pull type, doesn't matter. Our system can be fitted to them in the modular scalable manner. The other folks, they're talking about 2018 and newer self-propelled of their machine. So a much larger system. The nozzles talked about, we can offer it on that full market. Rate and pressure control, we offer it in the full market. Swath control, variable rates, weed scouting, we offer it for all of those machines in the market. Where we start to be different is truly the metrics, the crop scouting metrics because we're not focused on just putting the chemical on the field with a sprayer. That's product focused. What's the farmer focused on? They want to know about their crop.
I want to know how has my crop emerged? What's my count? I maybe planted 40,000 seeds. As I go across the field, what's my count now of plants per acre? We're able to scout the crop in that way and bring that information to the farmer so we get to see it step by step throughout the season, the other difference here is the live vision variable rate, and that is what rate am I applying? With our dual camera sensing, we're able to sense size of weeds, density of weeds, adjust our application rate to make sure that we're able to take care of the weeds, and that is of high value to farmers because that's what they do.
The way they've traditionally done it is they're going through the field, they see a spot of weeds, they're very quickly hitting a screen trying to dial up that rate, and then as they get past it, they dial it down. Okay? That's done automatically in a much more consistent and reliable way. From a value standpoint, we believe with our scalable approach, you can get into our system at a lower price point, but also step up our system with clarity where the farmer realizes more value overall. That's how we're more farmer-focused. That's why we believe we're going to be able to step that forward. So I hope you enjoy the demonstration during our break on that one. But there's a lot of technology here. So how are we truly going to get it to the farmer and how are we going to help them?
Because usually if you're not buying a new piece of equipment, you're not going to get a lot of attention from an equipment dealer. That's why we believe that it's also important to have a dedicated retrofit-first channel with dealers that are ready to deliver this technology on whatever brand you own. And when you're doing it that way, the farmer builds more and more trust. So we are pushing forward with a full-line dealer concept. This full-line dealer concept means they're going to carry the full line of what's traditionally been a Precision Planting product and the full line of what's traditionally been in the PTx Trimble portfolio. All of the dealers have the opportunity to grow with us, but they have to show the commitment.
But what's been fun for us and fun for the dealers as we engage is they see our vision, they see the portfolio, and they see this is the brand they want to grow with. And that's especially exciting for us. But there's also a certain customer segment where they say, "You know what? I've been dealing with this customer or with this dealer, and I've been dealing with this technology for 20+ years. I don't want to go somewhere else." So we offer a base dealer contract where that equipment dealer, they may not be able to get it through their OEM anymore, but they can sign the base dealer contract with us and still serve their farmer needs in their trade area. Beyond that, we serve over 100 OEMs, and that market is growing. And I don't think there's any better compliment than we could have received.
Whereas at the Farm Progress Show in August, meeting with one of the major OEMs, they said, "We're growing our market share because we have your components on our machine. We want to know how we can do more with you." That's exactly what we want to hear. I think that highlights our strategy where farmers believe in us and the other OEMs believe in us. Of course, we're working very closely internally with our sister brands with the Fendt, Massey, and Valtra organizations. That's what brings me to how we're going to make this grow. When we look at our global growth, our target markets to grow the traditional Precision Planting portfolio are Europe and South America. There are big growth opportunities. We're nicely penetrated in North America, lots more to build on, great brand name.
But really, Europe and South America are the next big opportunities. And the task control capabilities that came into the PTx organization through the Trimble Ag acquisition is a huge step forward. That JV is yielding value in that sense for sure. With the PTx Trimble portfolio, the opportunity that we have here is that we have North America and South America where we can grow. We have great dealer coverage already. Now we need to bring those products in and help them grow in those key markets. And I talked about taking those products around the full crop cycle. As this full-line channel engages us, engages with us across the board with a farmer base that already has a high degree of appreciation and respect for that channel and the brand, we see a lot of growth opportunity.
From a performance standpoint and optimizing that performance, we've already been able to optimize the organization, and we're well on our way to what we talked about for synergies when we announced the joint venture and when we closed the deal. We've taken steps to rationalize the overhead structure. I talked at the beginning. We brought eight companies together, and then in April, we closed the deal on a big one. So there's a lot to rationalize there. That brings cost savings. But what's even more important is it brings an aligned approach. Aligned approach to how we develop the product, aligned approach to how we develop and grow the channel, and aligned approach to how we run the business in the background and how we bring everything together with the common systems and the common approach going forward.
So in the end, we believe we're well on our way to capturing the synergies and growing this business. There's also this side benefit that I mentioned of having a great Precision Ag engine, and that is it feeds technology to our equipment brands. So the Fendt, the Massey, and the Valtra portfolio. So I have a few graphs here that I think highlight that. When you look at the impact on Fendt and the options sold and the net sales, we continue to see more and more available. How we do this is when a Fendt machine is sold, it has FendtONE on it, which is an onboard and offboard capability where we're able to transfer information, have that machine connected, but it also allows us to unlock additional features.
And what we've seen is an increase year over year in those features that are unlocked and the value that the farmer's able to realize in their farming operation. So we continue to see that. So the revenue from a Fendt tractor is not just what's captured on day one, it's over the next few years. The other thing that we talked about when we announced the joint venture is that we were going to be able to move our take rates of the PTx Trimble receivers on our AGCO whole goods that are produced. And we're nearly double what we thought we would be at this point in time. So it's greatly exceeded where we thought we were going to be. And the farmers are embracing the technology that's part of our portfolio.
And the other thing, when we talk about the bottom box here, the unlocks, there are a couple of things here. One is as we have more capabilities available and we see more of our full line and our equipment dealers focused on Precision Ag, and we have the highest level of accuracy of any receiver and any Precision Ag company in the market, farmers realize that true precision pays, and they're willing to invest and grow with us. And you can see that in nearly 2X the options that we originally planned. So then to sum it up, I just want to highlight again, I believe our strategy is clear and differentiated. One of the messages we hear about others in the market is they think all technology will be factory installed within five years. There won't be anything available to address your machine.
If you follow that logic, that means when you buy a tractor and you run it for 20 or so years, you'll never see technology evolve. Think about that. Think about how technology has changed in each of our lives. Do we really think farmers are going to operate that way? I don't. The only way that is true is if we stop innovating serving the installed base. We are the only company that's truly focused on innovating across the mixed fleet, mixed ages, mixed brands. We're innovating and having the channel to deliver that. We're not holding the farmer captive to buy the new equipment. We're innovating so they want to grow with us. We're doing that by delivering through the channel.
And then finally, as we do this right and continue to lead the industry in Precision Ag, we believe that $2 billion target is very much in sight, and we're going to deliver the value to farmers to make it happen. One of the things I didn't talk about was how we're bringing all the data together in our connected cloud and the data platform. So we're going to take a break, and then Cory Buchs is going to come up and talk about that connected cloud and where we're headed. Thank you.
We will be taking a short break and resume programming at 10:30.
Please take your seats as we resume the AGCO Analyst Meeting. At this time, can everyone make their way to the event space? The programming will resume momentarily. Please welcome to the stage Cory Buchs , Senior Director, Software Product Management, PTx. All right.
Hello, everyone. Hopefully, everyone had a good break and got to check out some cool technology. Lots of awesome stuff over there, very indicative of all the great innovation happening at PTx and broader AGCO. My name's Cory Buchs . I lead the Digital Farming Solutions team at PTx. Our team is responsible for the data platform. So, as those of you that joined us back in June, in Kansas, may recall, we provided an initial introduction to our data platform strategy, as well as our high-level vision. Today, we'll be reviewing that vision.
We'll go a little bit deeper from a strategic roadmap perspective. We'll also share an update on progress. We've been making great progress over the last several months. And then finally, we'll try to bring the platform to life a bit by sharing a few of our user experience designs, as well as talk about some of the farmer use cases that we are addressing today and plan to address in the future. So, diving right into it, AGCO is not new in this space. We have a very broad and rich portfolio that spans many channels and many markets globally.
Some of those capabilities and offerings were developed in-house, such as our FendtONE, AGCO Connect, and Precision Planting Panorama app, all applications centered around the machine and helping the farmer understand the performance of their machine, diagnose issues when they come up, and really ensure that things are operating as expected. Other components in our portfolio came in through acquisition. So, our Next Farming application is a German-based software company that we acquired in late 2023 and has a very dominant presence in that market centered around land lease management and compliance reporting. And then finally, the area of the portfolio that I've been focused on for the last decade or so at PTx Trimble is our PTx Trimble platform, which spans farming operations to agronomic capabilities to record keeping.
So, serving a lot of strong value props for farmers in a lot of locations throughout the world, but we see a bigger and more compelling opportunity. We see an opportunity in the market or a need in the market that's not well served today, and that is in the area of mixed fleet farm operations management. So, we want to provide the farmer with the one platform for managing their farm operation, regardless of the make, model, or age of equipment that they have on their farm. This means enabling the farmer to manage all field work occurring across their farm with all equipment, not just their newest machine coming from a single brand. So, we feel that we as PTx and broader AGCO are uniquely positioned to deliver on this need for two reasons. One, we have the ingredients on the left side of the screen there.
We have the capabilities within our existing portfolio. But too, we also have our retrofit on machine technology. And in order to connect a machine and enable a farmer not to just collect data from a machine, but to deploy a plan to a machine, execute that plan, and get records back, you need to modernize that equipment. And so, if you look at our Precision Planting or PTx Trimble portfolio, we have the ability to take equipment that may be five, 10, 20 years old and bring it up into the modern era and enable it to be a part of a connected platform, such as we'll be targeting. So, you may be asking, how are we going to do this? So, this was our phased approach that we shared back in June. As you can see, we've been making great progress on this plan.
But first, I want to talk a little bit about why we're taking this approach. So, our approach is ultimately all around evolving and building on our existing technology. And we feel that this is the best approach for a few reasons. One, it allows us to get value to the market quicker. So, we don't have to wait until 2027 to release something. We have something today, and we can get that value to the market today. Two, we have a large number of existing customers on our platform, and we want to bring them along on our journey. We don't want to make them have to make a hard decision of jumping from our legacy solutions to new. We want to evolve the platform that they're on today. And then finally, we want to engage customers on our platform today.
We want to start that process now, which we are doing. So, this is why we're taking our phased approach. As you can see, we have three phases. Today, we're heavily focused on Phase 1. Phase one is all about connecting our existing applications. So, enabling the farmer to use the best of each one of our applications in one workflow, such as creating a work order in PTx Trimble, executing that job on a FendtONE machine, and then ultimately collecting records and using those records for compliance reporting and Next. We're doing this by aligning to a common PTx identity. This enables us to connect all of our accounts, and we're also integrating our APIs across each application.
So, even in Phase 1, the farmer will have the feel of being in one platform because when they create a field, when they create a material within one application, it will be present in the next. As you can see, we're making great progress. When we met last, we were just getting into the design phase. We're almost complete with design and are well into the development and have even started our planning around go-to-market. There we go. Phase 2. So, phase two, ultimately all about consolidating our IP. So, as mentioned, we're starting with the PTx Trimble platforms, and we need to be able to address the use cases of our broader portfolio within that platform. So, we'll be bringing the AGCO Connect, the FendtONE, the Next Farming functionality into our common platform.
This is the point in time when we will become not only a retrofit offering, but also a factory-integrated whole goods offering offered with all Fendt, Massey Ferguson, and Valtra machines, then finally, phase three, we have all capabilities in one platform, and we have the ability to deliver a first-in-class user experience from a farm operations management perspective, delivered both through web and mobile to enable the farmer to manage their farm, both from the office and while on the go. That was a bit about how we're building the solution, now a bit about how the farmer will experience it. Starting mid-next year, the farmer will have the ability to create a PTx identity. Once they create that identity, they can use it to access all applications. When they do that, they'll have the ability to sync data across all applications.
Step two will be leveraging our connectivity center. Our connectivity center enables the farmer to connect their entire fleet, so not just their AGCO machines or PTx Trimble machines, but also OEM machines that we're connected to via API. So, we'll be able to enable the farmer to configure the connectivity and data flow with all machines on their farm, and ultimately, once these two steps are complete, enable the farmer to go to work using all of the capabilities of our applications. One of the primary use cases of an operations platform is managing the machine and managing the fleet. Again, we want to do this in a way that enables the farmer to manage their entire fleet and all of their machines, not just their latest and greatest from a single brand.
Some of the use cases that we'll be able to address in this area with all machines on the farm, including tracking location and status of machines, so farm managers can stay up to date on the status of jobs being completed across the farm, monitoring tank levels and being alerted of need for refill, ultimately to get the tender to the field at the right location and right time to avoid downtime, and even tracking machine diagnostics, partnering with the dealer to enable the farmer to ensure that the machine is performing at the optimum level and that issues can be addressed in a timely manner. Again, for all machines on the farm, not just AGCO fleet. The second part of managing a farm operation is managing field work.
On any given farm, any given season, a farmer typically has tens to hundreds of jobs that have to happen in different fields with different equipment, different operators, and different materials. We'll provide that platform for the farmer to manage that work in a seamless manner. One common misconception, though, about farming is that farmers do this in isolation. That's not the case. Farmers have to collaborate. They have to collaborate with hired hands on their farm, such as employees operating machines, driving tender trucks, et cetera. They also need to collaborate with folks beyond the farm gate. Examples of collaboration beyond the farm gate include agronomic advisors, so folks that are providing recommendations around soil health, crop health, seed varieties. Another example is custom applicators.
In many cases, a farmer may not have the machine or the capacity to operate or execute a specific task, so they'll hire a custom applicator. A huge differentiator with our platform is we enable the farmer to do this electronically and digitally through the platform. The farmer can connect with their agronomic advisor and receive recommendations through the platform, create work orders within our platform, and deploy those work orders to their machines, but also to their custom applicators' machines. They can track what's happening on their machines, also the custom applicator machine that they're hiring, and collect records from all machines doing jobs on their farm, and whether it be their machines or others. This is an example of how we're looking to change the way the farmer interacts, not just with the machine, but also with their partners.
And this is a differentiated way that we can streamline the operation that you can only do if you're truly mixed fleet compatible. So, with that, I hope you can see we're well on our way to making our vision a reality. We have a differentiated end-state vision in that we're focused on not just AGCO equipment, but all makes and models and ages of machines. We have an expedited execution plan in that we have the IP today. We're simply evolving it and building on top of it. And finally, we have an aligned organization who's on track to deliver initial value in 2025 and our full vision by 2027. So, it's with all this in mind that we're confident that PTx will become the preferred platform for managing operations across the mixed fleet farm. All right, thank you. And with that, I will pass it to Damon.
Please welcome to the stage Damon Audia, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer.
All right, well, good morning. Thanks, Corey. I'll sort of wrap up the day here and bring it all together with what you heard from Seth and Corey and Eric so you heard from Eric. We're very happy to roll out our new mid-cycle operating margin targets of 14% to 15%. We're excited and we're confident that we can achieve this new target. In a moment, I'll walk through the performance over the last several years to explain our confidence level and how we're going to go about achieving that. I think when you look at the information here, there's two key metrics that are critical for helping us achieve these margin targets.
One is we have to continue to outgrow the industry in these high-margin, high-growth businesses like Fendt, Precision Ag, and Parts that you heard Eric talk about. Second, our plan is to consistently generate cash across the cycle, and that'll allow us to continue to fund the internal investments as well as our external investments and simultaneously returning cash to our shareholders. For our investors, I guess there's two basic ways for you to track our progress annually. One, as I said, we're planning to outgrow the industry by 4% to 5% annually. Two, we plan to generate annual free cash flow conversion in the range of 75% to 100% annually. I was thinking about this event and talking about the new next-stage margins and what we wanted to convey to investors.
I thought it was important to step back and reflect a little bit on the history and look at the evidence of how well we've executed in the past and, more importantly, how we've structurally changed the business, and as you see on the slide, you can see how our operating margin has performed over time over the last 12 years, and if you go back to the peak of the last cycle in 2013, you see us at around 8.4%, troughing in 2016 at around 4%, and then, as we've come out into this new cycle at the peak last year, delivering the record adjusted operating margin of 12%. As Eric talked about in his section, our strategy continues to be able to raise the bar.
We want to continue to increase the operating margin cycle or mid-cycle margin, not only there, but also at the trough. Higher margins in the trough, higher margins at the mid-cycle, and equally important, higher margins at the peak as well. To accomplish this, I would say we're heavily focused in two key areas. One is we're aggressively managing our cost structure. And I think everyone in the industry knows that's been our top priority this year. And we're doing that through three key levers. We're adjusting our production cost. We're focused on our global workforce reductions, and we're focused heavily on reducing our SG&A spend. You've seen some of our prior communications on our earnings calls. We're reducing our production hours this year by around 25%. So, that's significant. But I think incremental to that is we've also taken out around 2,000 workers in the hourly workforce.
That's around 15% of our population of the hourly workforce that we've eliminated. We're not just flexing the manufacturing, leveraging shorter-time work, but we're actually making structural changes given the environment that we're in. You heard us announce in June about our restructuring actions, and I'll go into a little bit more detail, but that's reducing our salary workforce population by around 6% as well. The second area of focus is our high-margin, high-growth businesses. Again, Fendt, Parts, and Precision Ag. I'll go into more details on those in a minute. Although I think this slide does a really nice job in showing how we've improved the profitability of the business from the last cycle to the current cycle, I don't think it fully conveys how we structurally have changed the business.
For those of you who were with us in December of 2022, you heard me talk about the AGCO value creation line. What this line or what this slope shows you is our adjusted operating margins from 2013 through 2018 and where we were in the industry relative to the 10-year average. What you see here is the old AGCO. You saw in AGCO, and you heard this from Eric, that at the trough, we were at around 4%. At our peak in 2013, we were just over 8%. I think the thing that is so important to recognize is that when you look at this and you bring all of this back to mid-cycle, it was around a 6% business. We were your typical cyclical industrial company that when the industry was strong, we delivered a little bit better margin.
When the industry was weak, we dropped down and delivered something in the 4%-5% range. But at the mid-cycle, we were at around 6%. So, we really weren't adding any long-term value annually because we kept coming back to around 6% at the mid-cycle. If we think about the new strategy that Eric talked about and how we've improved the business, our results have improved, as you see, not only when the markets have been strong, but also when the markets are weak. So, we have structurally changed the profit profile of this business. We're creating a more profitable business, and I think, more importantly, we're creating a more resilient business. If you look at the strong years, we've delivered record Adjusted Operating Margins in 2022, but then again in 2023.
And if you look at our current outlook for 2024 at around 9%, even with the massive adjustment that Eric talked about, with the industry going from about 105% of mid-cycle down to around 90%, and with all the underproduction that I've talked about that we're doing, we are still on track to deliver the third or fourth best Adjusted Operating Margin in AGCO's history. That's structurally changing the business. We're well above where we've been. And if you look at the prior history, we're well above where we were in those prior downturns. So, you have a much stronger company that has delivered higher highs at the low point, higher highs at the mid-cycle, and higher highs above mid-cycle, and we'll continue to do that. And it's through the disciplined execution of our strategy that we're making that type of progress.
Hopefully, you understand where we are when we look at this. I hope you can appreciate our confidence on how we're going to get to the new mid-cycle adjusted operating margin target of 14% to 15%. On this slide, it walks you from our current 2024 mid-cycle outlook of around 9% and growing to that next-stage target of 14% to 15%. I'll walk you through a couple of the key components here. I think the first thing that we have to do is normalize the current 9% to the mid-cycle. So, going, looking at where we sit today at around 90% of mid-cycle, moving that up to the 100% or mid-cycle, using our normal high 20s incrementals, it would add about 1% to the adjusted operating margin target.
I'll expand on these a little bit further, but in the portfolio optimization and the cost efficiency plans, each of those individually will also contribute about 150 bp s of incremental margin as we think about our plan to 2029, and then finally, I'll go a little bit deeper on our growth drivers, but as we look at those three high-margin, high-growth engines, we expect those to deliver somewhere in the range of 150 bps-200 bp s of margin improvement on a net basis, so, let's go into those three levers a little bit deeper here. Eric touched on the transformational nature of the PTx Trimble Joint Venture that we closed on this year, as well as the recent divestiture of our Grain & Protein business. I think in addition to those strategic benefits that Eric touched on, those two transactions will also help transform our profitability.
At mid-cycle, we expect these two completed transactions to increase our mid-cycle adjusted operating margin by about 150 bp s. I talked about how we're also laser-focused on our cost structure, and that's important to help deliver the long-term improved profitability, especially as we sit here now below mid-cycle. It's no surprise to anyone in the room here that the ag industry is continuing to get weaker, and we look to address that. At the same time, we continue to look to structurally change our business. In June, we announced a multi-phase program to really transform our underlying business that Eric talked about. It's about reducing our structural cost. It's about streamlining our workforce. It's also about enhancing our global efficiency, leveraging technology better, as Eric talked about, leveraging more centers of excellence. It's about looking at alternative ways to drive productivity.
In June, in that first phase, I basically talked about a restructuring plan that was going to reduce our global salary workforce by about 6%. And at that point in time, we said there was a restructuring that would drive about $100 million to $125 million of run rate savings by the end of 2025. And if you remember what I've said is in 2025, that's going to be about $60 million of incremental savings to our bottom line in 2025, with the run rate savings coming out at the back of the year because we have to work through some workers' council conversations in Europe, and some of the timing of this will not get the full effect in 2025. So, about $60 million of that will hit in 2025, and then exiting the year at around $100 million to $125 million run rate.
As we started to go through this in detail and better understand the opportunities, as Eric said, rewiring the company, reimagining how we can make AGCO a more efficient company, we've uncovered some other opportunities. And we think there's opportunities to deliver even better on the technology, leveraging more low-cost country alternatives for us, and leveraging third parties better than what we have in the past. And as we think about those things layering on what we already know we were going to do with the restructuring, we see another $75 million or so of savings that we can drop to the bottom line. Now, again, the timing of that, we expect that savings to deliver into the run rate by the end of 2026.
But when you think about these two restructuring actions coming together, that's about $175 million to $200 million of net savings to the bottom line, or about $150 million of improved adjusted operating margin income. The third step in our bridge there was to deliver on our new adjusted operating margin target is our three high-margin, high-growth engines. You saw in the farmer testimonials, the momentum and the excitement for Fendt continues as dealers and farmers recognize the value of Fendt. You've heard me talk about it. The Fendt experience is unmatched by any other product in the marketplace. And hopefully, the videos you saw gave you a brief snapshot of what farmers and dealers feel about that.
As we've talked about introducing Fendt in North America and South America, the brand as well is starting to become more and more aware, and we're seeing good progress on that. We'll continue the successful role of the Fendt brand here and really focus on two primary areas that continue to drive the growth. One is the remaining white space opportunities. So, here in North America and South America, we still see opportunities to further the white space growth of our Fendt dealerships. In addition, our existing dealers, we know that there is tremendous opportunity for them to continue to gain their market share, improve their profitability, and better leverage technology and things like FarmerCore to improve their profitability. So, we see those things really driving significant value. In addition, you would expect nothing less from Fendt.
They are the industry leader in new products, industry leader in technology, and the portfolio of products that that team has planning to come out not only for North America and South America, but also for our farmers in Europe and Asia is phenomenal, and so we look at those new products coming out, we see significant opportunities to continue to improve the profitability as well as continue to gain market share, so we're very excited about the products that Fendt's bringing to the table. Eric touched on this, but if you look at the market share or the revenue for these two regions for North America and South America from Fendt, remember in 2020, it was a $300 million business. This year will be about $1 billion, and as we look forward now to 2029, we see that reaching about $1.7 billion.
The second part of our three growth engines is our Precision Ag business, and Seth and Corey did a phenomenal job covering that, and so I won't go into a lot of details on that, but I think it's worth repeating, and you heard this from them, but AGCO is the only one that can support the factory fit technology, but also significantly focused on the mixed fleet retrofit solutions in a separate channel, and it's unique. We're the only OEM that does that.
And when you think about things like the new products that you saw in the room, for those of you that were here in the room across the side there with Radicle Agronomics, the Outrun, excuse me, and you layer that with our geographic expansion that we have with our PTx business, and you layer on the incremental market penetration that we have, we see a significant opportunity to raise those, to hit those revenue targets of $2 billion by 2029. And then finally, our parts business, our high-margin, stable-growth business, Eric touched on with the industry-leading fill rates.
As we begin to leverage more of the connected machines, as we increase our online business and we take advantage of things like FarmerCore, we see strong growth in that business at around a 5% CAGR that will get us from around $1.8 billion this year growing to about $2.3 billion by 2029. When you put these three high margin growth businesses together, you're seeing over $2 billion of incremental revenue relative to 2024 sales. And all of those together will deliver somewhere in the range of 150 bps to 200 bp s of net margin improvement for us. We remain committed to a balanced capital allocation plan, which includes retaining our investment grade credit ratings while simultaneously reinvesting back into our business.
We'll also continue to be prudent in assessing new business opportunities, looking for ways to accelerate our technology, add new products, or enhance our overall business while simultaneously returning cash to our shareholders. So, in addition to maintaining our strong balance sheet, we will continue to reinvest in the business to drive that durable organic growth that I talked about. We do see many growth opportunities inside our business, as you heard from Eric, you heard from Corey, and you heard from Seth. So, we will continue to focus our investment and R&D to drive new innovation for AGCO and ultimately improve our overall market share. Following the Trimble Joint Venture that Seth talked about, we will still be prudent in looking at acquisitions.
We will still be inquisitive, but I think most of our time will be focused more on bolt-on type acquisitions, where there may be a specific product that fills in our technology stack or areas that we can accelerate our farmer-first mindset or enhance our competitive positioning. And finally, we'll continue to return cash to our shareholders. We've demonstrated significantly strong free cash flow over the past several years, which really underscores, excuse me, the resilience of our business. Since 2019, we've returned over $1.5 billion in capital back to our shareholders. Most of this primarily has been done through our quarterly dividends and our special variable dividends, but we also do periodic share repurchases as well. And all of this has been done, what I would say is, in a very disciplined manner back to the shareholders. You saw this slide from Eric's presentation.
I think it does a good job overall of summarizing the progress we've made and, more importantly, highlighting where we're headed. As I said, the old AGCO, as you see, 4% at the trough margins in 2016, getting to 18%, but even under the new AGCO, delivering the record margins that we saw in 2023 of 12%. The structural changes we've made, and I think more importantly that we'll continue to make to this business, help us improve our mid-cycle operating margins now to 14% to 15%, and when you look at that, remember that's 200 bps to 300 bp s of an increase from what we told you we were going to do in December of 2022.
So, two years ago, I was up on a stage telling you we were going to go from 10 to 12, and now we're telling you we're going to go from 14 to 15. In addition, again, this is another 2 bps to 300 bp s above what our all-time record profit was last year. So, not only are we going to redefine the mid-cycle, but we're going to set new records as the industry recovers, and you see the value of those three high margin growth engines really dropping to the bottom line. All right. Now, I know nobody in this room came here to hear about 2025. All of you came here to talk about the long term, the strategy, but there are some people online who I know want to hear about 2025.
So, I'm going to go a little bit deeper and give you our, at least our preliminary outlooks on 2025. So, our 2025 market forecast for our three major regions. I think if we step back and we look at a high level, you know, we're forecasting moderately lower farmer income in 2025, and obviously the lower levels of farmer sentiment are expected to result in softer demand across our major regions. For North America, we expect the demand to be meaningfully lower in 2025 compared to 2024. The record U.S. corn yields created an oversupply, driving the price of corn down, as we've seen, and it's also challenging farmers' profits amid the lingering input costs that have remained elevated. You couple that with the recent strong dollar, putting more challenges for our farmers here in North America.
For the high horsepower row crop equipment segment, we expect to see the most weakness in all of our major markets or our segments, and we expect that market to be down around 25% versus the 2024 level. If we think about the declines in the small tractor segment, we expect that to moderate with retail and be down somewhere in the range of 0%-5% after several strong years of significant declines. For Western Europe, we expect the industry to be down somewhere in the range of 0%-5%. Farm income in that region is nearing its long-term average, and we're seeing a little bit of a better balance or more resilience with the dairy and livestock farmers there.
For South America, after the significant decline that we're seeing this year with that industry being down around 25%, we expect it to be relatively flat next year. The Brazilian farmers have recently become a little bit more optimistic if you think about things about the more favorable political environment that they're seeing, easing interest rates, stabilizing inflation, and then you layer on some of the potential positives for them, given the U.S.-China dynamics and how that could influence grain trade. If we take those market assumptions and we look at our preliminary outlook, now I would remind everyone that these numbers do exclude our Grain & Protein business, which we sold on November 1st, but from a revenue perspective, our sales plans include market share gains, and right now we assume pricing to be somewhere in the range of flat to up 1%.
Foreign currency has been a negative for us, and at this point, we expect that to be around a 3% headwind year over year. I would also mention to the group that given the lack of clarity on specific tariff-related actions, potential retaliatory tariffs, and the influence that those could have in other parts of the world, our outlook does not contemplate any financial effects from tariffs, but as those become clearer and to the extent they do have an effect on us, we'll update our outlook accordingly. If we think about the operating margin, the earnings per share, and the free cash flow perspective, we expect engineering expense to be down around 5% in 2025.
With our industry declining from around 90% of mid-cycle this year to around 85% of mid-cycle next year, and as you've heard me talk about the need to do further dealer destocking, we expect our production hours to be down somewhere in the range of 15%-20% next year. And I would tell the group that that will be heavily focused in the first half of 2025. And when I look at that destocking and those production hours, that has about over 100 bp effect on my operating margin in 2025 relative to 2024. When I look at that, coupled with the industry decline, we now expect our adjusted operating margin to be in the range of 7%-7.5% for 2025. Our effective tax rate is anticipated to be in the range of 35%-38%.
Now, that is up versus our 2024 number. That's due mainly to the lower levels of profitability that we're going to be experiencing here in North America and what we expect to be experiencing in Europe as well. So, if I look at our 2025 outlook from a sales standpoint, if I adjust for the elimination of Grain & Protein, which is just under $850 million, if I adjust for that 3% of FX headwinds, which is about another $300 million, coupled with the softer industry outlook, as well as the dealer destocking that I talked about, we expect our sales next year to be around $9.6 billion. Given the industry, given the lost earnings from Grain & Protein, given the adverse FX rates, and the higher tax rate, we now expect our adjusted earnings per share to be in the range of $4-$4.50.
I would highlight to the group, though, when you look at that earnings per share, if I just think about the lost earnings from Grain & Protein, I think about the change for foreign currency, and I look at the increased tax rate, those three, call it non-operational issues, will reduce or have over a $1 effect on my EPS this year versus last year. If I look at CapEx, we're targeting around $375 million next year, which is lower than what we're currently planning here in 2024. And finally, we expect our free cash flow conversion to be in the range of 75%-100%. As we sit here and you heard from Eric, we know that this is a very dynamic environment right now.
The ag industry has a lot going on, and then you layer on the political situation, tariff-related activities. We know that's a very dynamic environment. But as we look at these numbers, I think Eric and I would tell you that we are both very confident, and we think that this is very achievable and executable. The industry downturn is normal. We know that. But as you heard me and you heard Eric talk about, we will weather it with better profitability than the old AGCO. The strategy is unchanged, and even in 2025, in a down environment, it remains focused on building a resilient business. It's positioning us for long-term growth, positioning us for higher operating margins at all steps or all stages in the cycle, and ultimately driving long-term shareholder value. Let me wrap up where we started with Eric's message this morning.
I think first, AGCO is the only farmer-focused pure-play ag and precision ag company in the world. We're well positioned to take advantage of the extremely strong secular tailwinds that Eric talked about that will drive long-term growth for our industry. We believe our farmer-focused strategy is perfect for the market. It delivers great value for our farmers, and we think that it will ultimately generate for higher returns for our investors. You heard from Seth and Corey. Technology is revolutionizing the ag industry. It's enabling farmers to be more productive than they ever have before, and these farmers and the industry, they're just starting to tap into this transformative potential, and the good news is AGCO, we're at the center of it, and we're driving it with that retrofit mindset and that farmer-first mindset that you heard from Seth.
So, if I bring it all together, again, I say we're confident in achieving our business here, our business that we've outlined to you. We've enhanced the durability of the company, and we've enhanced the sustainability of AGCO, ensuring the long-term value creation. We've rolled out our new mid-cycle adjusted operating margin targets of 14% to 15%. Focused on the three high margin growth drivers that you heard Eric talk about, we're comfortable delivering that 4% to 5% above industry growth. And finally, we'll continue our strong free cash flow generation and our strong free cash flow conversion, delivering in the range of 75%-100% of adjusted net income annually. So, with that, I'm going to ask Eric and Seth, Corey and Greg to join me back up on stage here, and we'll get ready to open this up for Q&A in a minute.
Please welcome our speakers back to the stage for a quick Q&A session.
So, as we get the stage set up, logistically, we have a lot of folks listening on the internet, so let's wait until we have a mic. Bring the microphone, and when he brings it to you, please tell everybody your name and your firm, and we'd like to limit to one question and one follow-up. So, as we do that, we'll get set up here and we'll get started here in just a minute. Who wants to go first?
Hi, good morning, Jamie Cook, Truist Securities. So, Damon, I'm not going to touch the fourth quarter or the 2025 guide, believe it or not. I guess my question is, you know, you laid out your new precision ag revenues of $2 billion by 2029.
I think when you initially laid out your Precision Ag revenues, it was north of $2 billion, so are we cutting even though we're a year further out? And then your assumptions too, I think when you initially announced Trimble, you talked about PTx EBITDA doubling from $170 to, you know, double that in, was it 2028? So, just any assumptions, the new assumptions around PTx profitability. Thank you.
I'll start, Jamie, and then I'll let Damon get specific about the EBITDA numbers. From the numbers, you're absolutely right. The original projection that we laid out at announcement was $2 billion by 2028. I don't believe we ever guided $2 billion, right? We'd have to check the transcript, but I remember the $2 billion with you.
And so, where we are today, as we look at it, we have stretched it out a year, primarily because of the industry downturn we're in. A good portion of the business is dependent on underlying machines. There's no doubt the economy and the farmer's ability to spend impacts that. But overall, we don't expect the trajectory to change, and we believe that the hill does get steeper from where we were thinking when we announced on, I believe, September 28th, 2023. Yeah, I think, Jamie, just to, again, when we announced the transaction here, again, the industry was, I think, in a much stronger environment than what we are living in right now. And so, we're lowering the water level.
I think, as you heard from Eric and Seth, the long-term strategic and the financials that we see in this business delivering, we're still very confident in getting to them. I think the timing, though, as the water level has dropped significantly this year, you know, it may, as you saw with the $2 billion target, we've sort of pushed it out a year. But again, as you know this industry as well as we do, the slope of recovery can change fairly quickly. Again, we look at some of these numbers, we've seen a massive decline, and again, to the extent something peaks, we could see that ramp up faster. But I would say, at least right now, given the industry, we're probably shifting things out, you know, around a year, give or take.
And anything on PTx EBITDA profitability relative to the guys we just talked about, you addressed earlier.
Yeah, again, if we look at the gross margins, again, I think the two important points, two important points to think about when we think about PTx Trimble or PTx as a whole, the profitability, the gross margin of that business continues to be very strong. And we talked a little bit about that when we announced the transaction with Trimble. So, when we think about what we're ultimately selling to the dealers and to the farmers, that profitability has not really eroded. But because it's a high-margin business and there's a lot of fixed costs, sales-related costs embedded in there, as those sales come down, the decrementals are quite large. And so, you're seeing the profitability really be depressed this year.
We know it'll be a little bit challenged given my industry outlooks next year. But we think about the incremental and the profitability of the business itself, you know, we continue to see that staying strong. And that's part of the reason why we're very comfortable with the, as we layer that into the total business of getting to that $150 to $200 with those three growth engines that we've talked about. And PTx Trimble is really part of that.
Okay, thank you. Hi, Kristen Owen from Oppenheimer. I am going to touch on the 2025 guidance. So, if I look at just the top line down about mid-teens when we adjust for the Grain & Protein sale on a year-over-year basis. So, help us understand, we can kind of look at your end market assumptions for retail, but speak to some of your expectations for your own sales.
With respect to the long-term targets, one of the things that you've talked about before is really balancing the margin profile globally. How does that play into your now 14%-15% range? Those are my two questions.
Yeah, so if I think about the decline in revenue, you're right, we have about 7% or 8% coming out of the Grain & Protein. I think that puts our decline somewhere around 12%, give or take. Just 3% of that is also for currency. So, that puts me calling around 9% to 10% is the decline. You know, I think if you look at our market outlooks there, you see the largest declines we're expecting in North America.
I would also say, if you think about where we plan to finish the year from a dealer inventory level, you heard us talk about this on the third quarter call. You know, the area that we have the most dealer destocking to do is in North America. So, again, I would say the outsized decline is going to come from North America. South America, with the industry being flat, if you look at where we plan to finish the year, what we said in the third quarter, you know, those dealer inventories were a couple months over where they needed to be. So, we have some further destocking to do there. So, I would sort of put those two in perspective. And then Europe, which is our biggest market, if you look at that, we see that down sort of that 0% to 5% in Western Europe.
The dealer inventories at the end of the third quarter were slightly above our four-month target. We were right around five months. And so, we'll continue to do a little bit of work there. But I think overall, that market is probably the best one as we go into the end of the year. If I look at the long-term targets, I mean, Kristen, you hit on the key point, right? We're diversifying our revenue base. As you think about the precision ag business and its penetration in North America and South America, you look at that Fendt market share rollout going from $1 billion this year to $1.7 billion, all of that sitting in North America and South America. We see a much better diversity of our revenue and, more importantly, our profitability as those two engines really start to generate more profitability in North and South America.
So, today, as you expect, we're heavily weighted in Europe from a profitability standpoint. I think if you look back last year, when the industry as a whole was performing much better, you saw a better diversity of profitability. South America, obviously, performing quite well given the environment. But if we just look at the more normalized environment, you know, we expect all of our businesses to sort of be in that, you know, double-digit, mid-teens sort of operating margin perspective.
Hi, Angel Castillo from Morgan Stanley. Thanks for taking my question. Just wanted to touch first on the 2025. I think it embedded market share gains in the year. I was wondering if you could quantify how much is embedded and just kind of think about where is that coming? Is it in any one of the particular regions?
Is it still kind of Europe, just what you're seeing there?
Yeah, so, you know, Andrew, we don't give specifics, obviously, from a competitive standpoint. We don't reveal the specific areas. But again, if you look at some of the areas, we've been doing quite well in gaining market share, specifically in areas like South America and different parts of Europe. You've heard me talk about this on a couple of calls. Fendt has done exceptionally well as we've introduced the new Gen 7 Fendt 700. We have the new 600. So, I think, generally speaking, we see good share capture opportunities in many parts of the world. I would say that these are more concentrated in the higher horsepower, more in the premium segments of the market.
We're not seeing, we're not planning, at least today, a lot of market share growth in the lower horsepower segments of the market. So, I would sort of give you a view that the mix of what we're generating in share is a little bit of a richer mix for us as well.
Hi, Jerry Revich, Goldman Sachs. Good morning. Thank you for doing this in New York. Can I ask, in terms of the 2029 margin targets, obviously, it's going to be market dependent and how mid-cycle plays out. But how back-end loaded is the margin improvement from the run rate we're at today on a mid-cycle adjusted basis versus 2029?
Yeah, you know what? So, Jerry, I think, again, we'll see how the market recovers. Those are, as I said, those are the mid-cycle market numbers.
If you look at the three different growth drivers, one is the portfolio actions that we've already done. So, Grain & Protein, we've sold that business. PTx Trimble, we've already integrated that. Now, we have to see those start to, we have to see the PTx Trimble business start to recover, as we know this has been a challenging year. So, I would tell you those are, that's front-loaded, assuming the markets recover. If you look at the cost actions that I talked about, you know, that $175 to $200 million of cost actions, I said that should be achievable by the year end of 2026. So, that run rate, so think of 2027, that $200 million running through the P&L. The one variable is the growth rate for the three growth drivers.
And again, if you look at parts growing 5% per annum, you know, I wouldn't see any material differences on a regular basis. If you look at the Fendt market share that we're talking about going from $1 billion to $1.7 billion, I think you probably got a, for better, for lack of a better term, assume a linear sort of progression there. And then the PTx business, again, depending on the cycle recovery, but I would assume that those three sort of assume more of a linear progression subject to changes in the market. I think two of them are going to be in the shorter term and then the revenue growing more sort of over the course of the five years.
Can we talk about the expectations for precision ag in 2025? The planter product, obviously, really strong marketplace acceptance.
Do you think it could be more resilient than the outlook for a large ag that you folks laid out? And can you touch on, you know, when do you expect the excess inventory of the Trimble product to play out? What's that cadence of demand look like?
Yeah, Jerry, I can start on that and let Damon or others fill in the blanks. I think what we've seen so far, as we've looked at 2024, is those products that we've introduced the last few years, the new products in the market, those innovations that aren't available on your equipment options coming out of a factory. They are not feeling the same downward pressure as the overall market.
When I say that, it's specifically around tractors and planters, because when you look at our revenue makeup today, it's heavily weighted towards the precision planting portfolio, which was planter-related products, and the Trimble portfolio, which was heavily weighted towards guidance, which the best proxy there is tractors. We expect that relationship to continue. So, when the market's up, we expect to be up more than the market. When the market's down, we expect to perform better than the market. And we don't expect that to change. So, when we show the numbers on the screen, I think you can rest assured that for those new innovative products, and hopefully you got to see those as you did your walk around, those we believe offer a lot of upside growth for us.
As far as the current inventory situation, that one we track, we don't have as good of tracking as we do on the whole good side. But we do believe that we're working through that. We are seeing good order activity. When we do our channel checks on the current inventory, you know, there was a fair bit of inventory that had been built up during the supply chain challenges that was worked through. There was some inventory that was built up during some last-time buys that were available to one of the larger OEM customers, pre-acquisition or pre-joint venture that is being worked through the system as well.
So, Jerry, I would add a couple of pieces for you to think about when you think about 2025.
When I look at the precision ag business as a whole, directionally, about half of that is correlated or tied to the OE business. So, again, you know, half of that is going to be influenced by the market assumptions. The other half is more retrofit oriented. And if I look at 2024, as an example, the retrofit portion of the business is declining less than the OE portion of the business. So, creating a little bit more of a better stability. Still down, but not down nearly as much as what we're seeing in the OE part of the business. And so, again, I think we're confident that, again, as farmers are trying to invest more smartly, there's still opportunities for that business to perform slightly better. And I think, so keep that in perspective as you think about how the business is performing.
I think the other point, when I look at the overall, and again, I think most of you know that, but we acquired the Trimble business in April. So, if I just look at revenues year over year, I'm going to get the first quarter of PTx Trimble flowing through my P&L that I did not have this year. So, if I just think about sales of that business, I'm getting that lift, which is, you know, minimizing or dampening a little bit of the decline that we're seeing in the OE in the business.
Hi, Steve Volkmann with Jefferies. Question for Seth, actually. In your presentation, Seth, you mentioned that you were seeing strong take rates in a number of these areas. And I'm curious if you could just put a sharper point on that for us.
Yeah, so on that one, I think, Steve, what you're referring to is a slide that was very specific to what we're seeing for our internal equipment brands. So, essentially, sales from PTx and features that are enabled on the Fendt platform, to be most specific. What we have are, these are features that it could be additional features as far as your guidance system that you would have bought it on the tractor. You can buy turn automation. You can buy wayline sharing. You can buy additional features. Each one of those comes with an unlock. It's additional value to the farmer. It's additional margin to us. And in many cases, it's an unlock. So, it's resident on the tractor. It just needs to be unlocked for that farmer to realize it.
That's something that we're pushing quite hard with the precision ag specialists in Fendt dealerships to help a farmer see all the capabilities. It also allows a lower entry point. You know, the Fendt is generally priced at the top of the market to begin with. But as they enter and they expand their capabilities in precision ag, they're able to step up each and every year with the same machine, but realizing more value, we realize more margin. Okay. And then maybe you want some numbers. I think you want some numbers.
So, I'll always take numbers.
Exactly. This world operates in numbers. So, Fendt tractors, we've gone from about three unlocks per machine to about lower five unlocks per machine over this time horizon. For the guidance system, we used to have about, you know, a little under 20% of our sales went out with Trimble.
Now we're about 70%. Even though we've got a down market in the formation of PTx, we're controlling the things we can control. We're heavily swung. That's why Seth said it's more than we expected in a short amount of time. It's because we really focus on, hey, down market, we've got to make the most out of what we can control. We've got 70% take rate already now at this stage, just a few months in. We expect that to go from 70% to closer to 90%.
As we think about 2029 and the big picture, how do we think about how much might be sort of SaaS revenue or subscription revenue or that type of something that's software related? Thanks.
Seth, you want to start with that?
Steve, we have not given a specific target. What we are doing, and I'd be happy to walk you around solution by solution, you know, when we bring Outrun to market, there's an annual fee tied to that and a per acre or per hour, sorry, annual fee and a per hour that's tied to that. When we talk about Radicle Agronomics , it's a per sample fee. And we lease the unit. We don't sell the unit. So, that's recurring revenue for us. When we talk about our Panorama application, when we talk about our connected cloud, those are recurring revenue. So, you're seeing more and more that we're introducing recurring revenue and the feature unlocks that we talked about with Fendt. So, that's not necessarily recurring revenue, but it is additional revenue after the machine's gone out of a factory from the whole good side.
So, again, we don't have a specific percentage that we've established, but every time we can move forward with it, we do. And the interesting thing for us is if you would have talked to farmers a year or so ago, they were pretty adamant that they did not like that model. In a recent focus group that we had, they actually came to us and emphasized, you know what, give us both options and then let us choose what's best for our farm. And I think you'll see us move more and more in that direction. And obviously, if they want to enhance the features, there's going to be an unlock for that. So, that gives us more opportunity to deliver value and earn the margin.
Hi, good morning, guys. Chad Dillard from Bernstein.
I want to go back to the Fendt growth from about $1 billion this year to, I think, about $1.7 billion in 2029. To what extent is some of that just pure volume growth versus market share growth? And if you can comment on just the product roadmap and then also the strategy for, you know, building out your dealer network to achieve that.
Yeah. It's really market share growth. I mean, getting back to mid-cycle is one element, but then it's market share growth. And it's predominantly in North and South America. I feel really great about our product. But if you look at the product portfolio, which we're not able to share publicly, but I see it and our team sees it, the next three to five years is loaded with upgrades to the best machines in the marketplace.
We've been investing steadily on making sure that we're staying out in front, keeping Fendt being the best of the best for the most demanding customers. So, product feels super strong. The focus is about channel. And it's about taking these dealers, you know, farmers are a conservative customer base. They don't all jump at once. And so, what we're seeing and trying to accelerate is when the first innovator customer selects Fendt, grows it out, like you saw in the videos, then we work on those around them and build the confidence in the brand, build the confidence in. And so, ride and drives, where we bring a lot of customers to the machine, doing demos, things like that, growing the confidence in the Fendt brand. So, that's the focus. And it's been working for us up to this point. We expect it to continue.
Then second question on 2025. Can you just comment on the tax rate? Why so high? 35% to 38%. And then on the pricing side, flat to +1 one, how should we think about the cadence as we go through the year next year?
Yeah, I think if we look at the tax rates, it happens to be that we're seeing lower levels of profitability in both the U.S. and Europe. And I think, Chad, if you think about Europe, we have a Swiss operating model where, you know, there's a certain base level of taxes that we pay in our Western European countries. And then above that, it usually shows up in a lower tax jurisdiction. So, as profitability is dropping, you're dropping it off at a much lower tax rate in Europe, which is effectively increasing the effective rate there.
And then here in North America, as we're seeing lower levels of profitability, we're losing some deductibility of certain benefits here. And so, again, it's increasing the effective rate in this region as well and driving that rate into the 35% to 38%. If I look at the pricing, the 0% to 1%, I would expect, if you think about what we've been experiencing this year, we've been talking about negative pricing in South America. Our numbers do include negative pricing again in South America next year. So, we see that as we continue to focus on the retail sell-out there, we see some negative pricing. So, I'd expect to see a continued negative cadence across the year.
Europe, we are slightly positive in our numbers, but given some of the model year changeovers we've been talking about this year, specifically that Fendt 700 Gen 6, you know, as we have the Gen 7 out, we're seeing some negative pricing there. I would say that'll be more hopefully first half weighted because we're lapping some of those new products, you know, the old products getting through the market. North America, we expect to be positive for the full year, and I would expect, you know, likely to stay that, you know, see that, you know, year or each quarter.
Thank you. Steve Fisher, UBS. First, a question for Corey. You talked a little about the progression over 2025, 2026, 2027 on the data angle and in terms of the data platform and the operation center that you have.
Just to clarify that point, are you anticipating that farmers will be moving away from the farm management systems that they're using today gradually over that time period to, you know, make your system their primary development? And have you gotten any feedback on, you know, how confident you can be that people are going to kind of move away from those systems?
Yeah. I don't think in all cases it's really an either/or. I think in many cases, if you look at the ag software space, we're very focused in the operation space that surrounds the machine. Farmers want to be able to manage all their entire fleet from one operations platform. So, I do think there's a decision point there. But we see our solution as complementary to the broader ecosystem of ag software companies.
And so, I think that there will be customers that make that decision point as we reach the feature set that we believe we need to be at. But I think in many cases, it's an and and not an or. And then we'll do one more.
Great. That's helpful. And then just more of a 2025 question. I know there's still a lot of uncertainties around policy from the government, future government, but how have you thought about impacts of tariffs incorporated into your guidance approach? And then maybe more broadly about the guidance approach this year relative to, you know, the last couple, have you taken any sort of different approach to kind of setting your targets and betting a little bit more, you know, buffer for anything like those types of things?
Yeah.
If we think about tariffs, Steve, it's definitely a question we're evaluating because it's a multifaceted event in theory. Depending on what is import-related tax or tariffs, are there any subsequent retaliatory tariffs that we may see in other parts of the world? And ultimately, how does that influence the flow of grain? Because we know that to the extent grain could be an offset. And how does that influence certain markets? So, as we think about, you know, the conversation about U.S. tariffs, we know that, again, there's different tariffs being talked about for different countries. And so, for us, it's looking through what does that mean for us if we're thinking about importing some of our wheeled tractors from Western Europe? And how does that compare relative to our competition who may have a better assembly operation here in North America?
But how about what about the suppliers that may be coming from other low-cost countries? And how does that influence them? And then what is our competitive price position relative to that? We'll obviously look to see where we can to mitigate that any cost in pushing price where we're capable. But again, it's also relative to the performance of what farmers are willing to pay for. We'll look for alternative suppliers if we can do things to dampen that. I don't see AGCO in the near term, you know, investing in increasing our capacity here to insource or to bring the wheeled tractors in a large volume into North America. That would take several years, a lot of investment. And again, I think at least today, we don't see that being something on the near-term horizon for us.
You know, we'll see how all of those things come together. We'll see what may happen retaliatory-wise. We'll see what, you know, what markets may be better. We'll try to put all that together, you know, if there is a change in our outlook. In regard to the second part of your question, I would say, you know, we, and I think the industry as a whole, were surprised by the speed of the trajectory down in the industry this year. I think all of us had continued to play catch-up in cutting production and reducing our outlooks. I think we've taken a much more pragmatic approach this year. I would say we've layered in a lot more data analytics, doing generative AI, trying to get better modeling.
We've taken a more conservative approach on what we think is going to be achievable market share-wise, given the state of the industry. And as Eric talked about, the conservative nature of the farmers. And so, I think we've taken a little bit more of a prudent approach there. So, as we've built up these numbers, and I've tried to walk through, you know, the different pieces for the group here, I feel very confident in what we're conveying that we can deliver, subject to, you know, some sort of a massive event related to those tariffs. And again, I don't know the effects yet, but if I think the industry does what we're showing you, you know, we're very comfortable delivering on that margin and on that EPS.
Thank you. Good morning. Tim Thein from Raymond James. First question is on South America.
Maybe we can spend a minute there just in terms of what you're hearing from the dealers. Obviously, a lot of volatility and fluctuations from a currency perspective, and that has, you know, mixed impacts for your farmers as well as AGCO. And then, I guess, part B of that was your comments on pricing. I would have thought that just, again, given the inflationary impacts and the costs related to imports, that that would probably bias pricing higher, so with that, if that plays out, I know you don't want to get too granular, but can that region be profitable if pricing is down in 2025? Thank you.
You want to talk to the farmers?
Yeah, I'll start with the farmers. You know, interestingly enough, I'll maybe broaden it for a second.
There's two barometers that we watch, one for Europe, one for North America, and then I'll come to the South American side. The CEMA index for Europe is turning positive. The Purdue index for North America is turning positive. And out of all of the, you know, intersect that with now with the tariff conversation, and maybe the biggest farmer benefit factors are going to be the South American farmer. So, there's reasons to believe there's green shoots coming in 2025, that it's likely the bottom of the market recovery and market behavior. And we're going to start seeing recovery after that. That's what we hear from the farmers. The sentiment in all three markets, when you talk directly to the farmers, is actually starting to turn more positive. The world's still going to consume the same amount of grain.
So, if there's more tariff activity happening in North America, very well, the grain demand could shift to South America as the primary winner and maybe a little bit to Europe. And that's what the Brazilian farmers feel, combined with a weak currency that helps with exports. So, I think they're feeling actually somewhat positive. Now, I'll let Damon speak to the pricing.
Yeah, I think, Tim, if we look at the pricing, you know, it's definitely potentially an opportunity. If we think about where we sit in what we've seen here in 2024, you've really seen a bifurcation in the South American market where the lower medium and lower horsepower segment of the market has been doing better. The larger high horsepower segment, especially that Cerrado region, has been really depressed. And that's created some challenges with dealer inventories.
You know, we've been working hard as the industry to really drive the retail sell-out to get those dealer inventory levels down. Again, when we look at the market in 2025, as I mentioned in my comments, we do see the overall market, the sentiment from the farmers and the dealers becoming more positive. There is still, as I said, there's a couple of months of surplus inventory out there that we're working through. You know, we see the negative pricing as we sit here today. As the currency, again, it's extremely volatile as we see what happens with the geopolitical issues. Fair point. You know, it may be a pricing opportunity. I think the other thing to remember, though, is in South America, you hear us talk a lot about Fendt, which is what we import from Western Europe.
But there is still a large percentage of our revenue in South America that's coming from Massey and Valtra, much of which we manufacture. So, our planters, our sprayers, our wheeled tractors with those two brands, a lot of those are manufactured in South America. So, you may not get necessarily the benefit the way you would think of the Fendt tractors coming in from Europe, though.
We have time probably for one more question. Anybody have a last one?
David, do you still have one?
Yep. Hi, David Raso from Evercore ISI. I just wanted to make sure I understood the math on the organic sales guide for 2025. So, the FX loss, it's not $850 million minus the $200 million loss in 2024. It's FX absent 850. Is that correct?
Just under $850 million is a reduction in year-over-year sales. Correct.
And then the currencies, roughly 300. 300.
And what's Trimble adding?
So, Trimble would add. It's about one quarter of sales. So, again, last year, Trimble reported around $80-plus million, I think, given the industry declines. And part of that includes AGCO sales. You're probably talking directionally around $50, give or take.
For the quarter, right?
Yeah, for the quarter .
So, you have your organic sales really only down about 10%.
That's correct.
And just given the production hours, I'm not trying to give quarterly guidance here, but your cadence for that organic down 10, I mean, is that, do we have any quarter next year baked in where organic is up?
For organic would be up. You know, directionally, I would say you're going to see more of a second-half weighted recovery.
But not necessarily up, but just diminishing declines year over year.
As we think about how the industry has declined around the world, you know, it has gotten sequentially worse as, you know, the industry in the course of 2024, and so, as we think about 2025, we see the industry continuing to decline more likely in the first half, and as Eric talked about, you know, some green shoots, some optimism. Again, we don't talk a lot about our Asia-Pacific group, but we do see growth in Asia coming in this year. If you remember, they were the first region of our four regions to go into the downturn in 2023. We're starting to see some growth, some positive pricing there. It's a small part of our business, so we don't focus on it.
But as we think about sort of the sequentials, I think Q1 production is heavily weighted in Q1 and the sales decline in Q1, a little bit less in Q2. And then, you know, we'll start to lap some of the things in Q3 and Q4.
And then trying to think about pricing. What's in the backlog right now?
If you had to say, what pricing do you have in the backlog year over year? And then also, like in the channel, you can tell guys are trying to clear out like Massey, the 8700s, to get ready for the 9Ss, right? The Fendt 700, the Gen6, they're trying to blow out. How much does that price drag when that inventory is finally eradicated from the channel for the new product? Could that lift pricing?
I'm just trying to get a sense of when do you think you could see your production levels maybe getting close to flat? And is there a little inflection in pricing?
Yeah, you know, I think, you know, we look at the order boards. And generally speaking, where we have a retail sale attached to the production, that pricing is effectively locked in. You know, those order boards have been declining as farmer sentiment has been weakening. You know, I think our third quarter call, we said we were out around three months, if I remember, in North America and in Europe for our tractors, sprayers, combines, and planters. We were at about 50%, if I remember the number, of our early orders. So, we have fairly good visibility on those.
The ones that we're selling to the dealer or not necessarily, you know, our production stock, you know, those are going to be much more subject to market conditions. So, I'd say we have better granularity, David, for the first quarter, a little bit into the second quarter based on those products. And then if you think about the specifics on the Massey, you know, a lot of that's baked in. But in the grand scheme of things, it's not going to influence the overall numbers that I'm reporting at a total company level.
Okay. Thank you.
Eric, do you want to?
Yeah. Well, hey, thanks. This is a lot of great information, great engagement. We sure appreciate all of you coming out on a cold December day to be able to have this discussion together about where the company's going.
We talked about it. It's a fundamentally different conversation this year than it was two years ago. The industry has changed, but it's changing very much like it has in the past, where we go down, we have a big correction year, it hovers down for a little while, and then it starts recovering. We think that same thing's going to happen. What's different about the cycle this time is how aggressively we're going after cost management and inventory management. Way more proactive, way faster movement. And I think we're positioning ourselves to be nicely strong when the recovery happens. That's the micro. At the macro level, we've been making really steady progress on all the three growth drivers that we selected in the beginning. We report on that every time we meet with you. All three of them are moving forward.
When you talk to the farmers about any of the three, they continue to gain confidence. They continue to gain energy about these are the right things. They're energized about the strategy. We added to that this turbocharger of taking operating efficiency and figuring out how we use some of these new technologies and make the company both higher performing, faster, better for our farmers, and leaner. And we turbocharge with FarmerCore. Those are two new topics that we brought into the mix this year. You add all that up, and it's given the management team confidence that even though things are soft in terms of demand now, if we think big picture, we have very strong confidence that our farmers like where we're heading, and we can take our margin targets up, which we've done.
We've taken them from 12 now to 14 to 15 in the mid-cycle, growing faster than the industry and generating lots of cash in the way. Thanks so much for your participation. We'll see many of you at winter conference in January. We're rolling out a whole new set of technology in the PTx business, and I hope you have a nice holiday. Thank you for your engagement.