Thanks, everyone, for coming. Appreciate you taking the time. Maybe just to get started, just a quick little disclaimer here. For important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley Research Disclosure website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. If you wish to, or I guess if you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley representative. With that, we can kind of get started.
Great.
Thank you, gentlemen, for joining me. For those that don't know me, my name is Andrew Castilla. I'm the Morgan Stanley Machinery and Construction Analyst here at Morgan Stanley. And, I'm joined here today by Eric Hansotia, Chairman, President, CEO of AGCO, and Damon Audia, CFO of AGCO. Again, thank you, gentlemen, for taking the time.
So maybe, you know, listen, I think you're one of the three kind of global oligopolies of ag equipment, but I think just describing you as part of this oligopoly kind of does a little bit of a disservice to, you know, the company and what you've been working on, particularly as it pertains to technology and how much that increasingly is a bigger part of your business. So maybe, you know, to kind of level set for those that are not as familiar with the company and maybe just think of an ag equipment and a tractor, you know, if you could quickly just kind of give us an overview of AGCO and how technology kind of fits and why it's so important to your business today.
Yeah, so what most people think about when they think about ag companies is, you know, we build tractors, combines, sprayers, planters, and so on. We serve the global farmer network. About half of our business is in Europe, 25% in North America, 10% in South America, and then the rest in Asia and Africa, so that's the part people recognize. We're the largest pure-play farm machinery company, meaning we don't have construction equipment or lawnmowers or anything else. We are totally focused on helping the farmer, but what's happening within the industry is a big, big focus on something called precision agriculture, making the machines intelligent with sensors on them that can understand the soil or the crop variation, do onboard calculations, and then have the machine optimize its own performance and go into autopilot mode. So that's a big part of our investment.
We've increased our engineering budget 60% over the last several years and so on. But one of the things that makes AGCO unique is in addition to just making our machines smarter, we've got this entire other division that's just a pure tech division. And that group is looking at ways to create technology modules that you can put on an existing machine and give them new capability. We call that retrofit. So once a farmer has a five-year-old machine or an eight-year-old machine, they can retrofit it with a technology that now gives it a new capability to automate one of its functions. The other element that's different is not only do we do retrofit, but we do this on all brands of equipment.
So we'll sell to the majority of that tech business is selling on competitive lines of equipment because essentially what we look at as the market is we want to serve all farmers, regardless of what they've purchased in the past. We want to serve them and allow them to grow. When you combine all of that, last year we were about $11.7 billion in sales, and, you know, have an aspiration to grow to about a 14-15% operating margin at mid-cycle, by 2029. That's a combination of our machinery business and our tech business. Our tech business, we expect to grow to about $2 billion in sales by then. So there's kind of a few framing comments about what we are.
No, that's very helpful, and I think, listen, you touched on it a little bit with the retrofit. I think that's an area that really differentiated you, again, that you're not just focused on your brands. You can go and retrofit older, you know, tractors from one of your competitors and get it to kind of the latest state of the art. If you could just maybe expand on that a little bit more in terms of, you know, talk about some of the specific products and technology that you're kind of delivering for the farmer, what solutions that you can retrofit, you know, on their kind of older equipment?
So essentially, if you want to think about a farmer's cycle through the year, there's activity to do before they do planting, then they plant, they take care of the crop during the summer with fertilizing, pesticide, herbicide, and then they harvest the crop. Our mission is to automate all of the activities that the farmer does throughout that cropping cycle. And there's about 600 tasks that a farmer still does with interaction with the machine. Every one of those is an opportunity for us to make the machine intelligent such that they can, that the machine can do that task. And our objective is that the machine can do it better than the operator can do it on its own. Our planters have, in our larger planters, we have over 100 computers on board, sensing many times a second, making many adjustments per second.
Our new sprayer that's coming out is, has a feature called targeted spraying. It's got vision systems that look down into the crop as the sprayer's going through the field. Let me back up. Traditionally, the way spraying has always been done is that you spray the entire field, every square inch, regardless of where the weeds are, where the pests are. You're spraying areas that don't need to be sprayed. This new targeted spraying feature has cameras on it that look down into the field in real time using AI libraries, identify the difference between the weed and the plant, and spray only the weed, saving like 70% of the chemical. These are just a couple of examples, but the mission is to dig all the way through the cropping cycle. We've automated the soil sampling step, heavily automated the planting step.
have a lot of focus now on spraying and harvesting. And the mission is to keep automating more of those tasks so that the farmer can not only get the benefit from that task being done better, but then as you group them, you can make the machine autonomous, take the operator right out of the cab. So we're selling autonomous kits today. We make an existing tractor an autonomous tractor. You can pull the operator out for certain tasks. The first one we've automated is grain cart operating with a combine. Combine's harvesting through the field, taking the grain off the crop. As its bin fills up, it summons the tractor. The tractor comes around, connects, runs right alongside the combine. No operator in the tractor. It's running a parallel path. The combine unloads into the bin behind the tractor.
When it's empty, it releases the tractor, and the tractor can either go pull off to the side or drive to the side of the road if it's full and unload. The next one will be tillage. So one after another, as we automate a grouping of tasks, we can make the machine autonomous. And we do this for mixed fleet. We automate tasks on other brands of equipment, and even our autonomous kit, we can sell that on other brands of equipment, John Deere, our own, and others. So that's the mindset of what we're working on and how we go to market.
That's very helpful and pretty exciting. I guess as you think about some of those products like the grain cart that you talk about, what is ultimately, the kind of savings? I think it's easy to understand maybe that conceptually the labor that you're saving the farmer, but is there a way to kind of quantify some of those for whether it's planters or sprayers, or the grain cart?
Yeah, and I would encourage us to think about profit improvement. So there's a savings element. I talked about savings on spray chemical, but we also look at the other side too of can we do the job better? So on this grain cart operation, that's part of the deal is that by having an autonomous operator next to you, you can run the harvesting operation longer because one of the big things is unskilled labor and the access to labor. So either the combine has to stop waiting for someone to come unload it, or they have to stop at the end of the day earlier than they would have liked to, or earlier than that. So that elongates the harvest window. And the harvest window has essentially a bell-shaped curve to it. There's a period during that window that's optimal.
That's when the grain is ready to be harvested and it's not too dry. If you wait too long into that harvest window, animals continue to eat the grain and you get losses from the grain being too dry. So you really want to stay within that optimal window. These types of technologies help you do that. So big picture between doing a better job and saving on inputs or labor, our mission is to make the farmer 20% more profitable, through each step that we do.
I'm assuming that's pretty attractive right now given the market that we're in. So maybe let's talk about it from that perspective. What's kind of the adoption rate that you're seeing from farmers? What's kind of the conversations, you know, on some of these retrofit products that you're kind of hearing when you talk to them?
So one of the other elements of retrofit is that they're often replacing the need to buy a new machine. So the farmer's planter may be still physically fine, but it just can't do some of the things that are now available on the marketplace because the life cycle of a mechanical planter is maybe 17 years, whereas the technology cycle is much faster. So it allows the customer to get in and instead of spending $500,000 on the new planter, they can spend maybe $150,000 and just upfit with new technology. So the adoption in retrofit is growing steadily. That's why we've been investing so heavily in it. We closed the biggest ag tech deal in the history of the industry last year with a $2 billion investment to move over the ag assets from Trimble into our overall tech division, which we now call PTx.
We're investing so heavily in this because we see the advantage to the farmer in their profitability. We see the uptake being strong. We're sold out of both our autonomy kits and our targeted spraying for this year already, in our first year of being in the market.
That's great. And maybe could you talk about just the competitive dynamic? Because as you mentioned at the beginning, you know, one of the differentiators to AGCO was that you had this retrofit opportunity. And I think since some of your competitors have started to launch some of their own kind of retrofit products, are you seeing that impact, you know, I guess the demand for the product, the level of kind of, differentiation or just the overall competitive dynamic if you could talk to us?
Yeah, this is an important one to talk about the details around retrofit. So we are the pioneers of it. We said we're going to serve all farmers. We want to do this with technology they can upgrade on their machine. We want to give them a one-year payback as a target. So if they buy the technology, they can get savings and better outcomes or savings and costs in one year, maximum two. So we kind of built that model. It was so successful that some of our competitors say, "Hey, we need to get into that as well." But it's a very different approach they have versus ours. So I talked about what makes, what's the secret sauce in AGCO's approach. Number one, we serve all brands. Nobody else does. Number two, we do that through a dedicated tech channel.
This group of dealers, all they sell is technology upgrades. They don't sell planters or sprayers or combines or tractors. Whereas our competitors retrofit not all brands, just their own brand, and they don't have a separate channel. They're selling it through their OEM channel. You can imagine how that works. A typical salesperson, whether it's our OEM channel or theirs, is trained and focused on selling a new machine, a $500,000 planter, a million-dollar combine. It's only when that customer is going to walk off the lot, they say, "Okay, hang on. Why don't we upgrade your existing machine?" It's a bit of a stopgap for our competitors in the way they're doing it. We don't see them getting anywhere near the same kind of traction that we are because they're serving the market.
They're serving a different set of customers, and they're coming to the market through a fundamentally different channel. Our channel, not only do they not sell machinery, way lower, they're trained on agronomy, technology, and farmer economics. Instead of talking about horsepower and lift capacity and hydraulics in a machinery dealer, they're talking about agronomy. They can go out to the farmer's crop and say, "I see you've got an issue with your crop. Let's get to the bottom of what's going on there and let's talk about what technology can fix that." That's an entirely different skill set than the typical machinery salesperson. So that's why the models are very different and why we continue to have such strong success.
No, that's very helpful. And I do want to remind the audience, if anyone has any questions, feel free to just raise your hand and we'll get to you. But maybe just, you know, to tie into that, we'd love to understand, I guess, the customer base. You go to market, as you mentioned, in a different manner. The retrofit customer, is that generally a second or third owner who is more value-oriented, or are you seeing new owners who, particularly in this market, right, where we've seen price be such a, or I guess inflation be such a challenge, are you seeing more kind of new owners be willing to, you know, perhaps buy older technology and retrofit, or what are you seeing from an owner perspective?
So we have an event every year that's essentially our product launch event. It's called Winter Conference, and it attracts something like 5,000 of the most progressive farmers in the world because there's people from coming off from all different countries to Europe and so on. I go to that every year myself, and I sit shoulder to shoulder with these customers, and so I get a sense for who are the folks that are buying our products. It's those that want to be on the front edge of technology, the front end of productivity. Now, they may be retrofitting onto an older machine, because they get at a lower cost, but they're all interested in doing farming in the most precise way possible, given today's technology.
What you see is sometimes they're updating an older machine. That's often the case, but sometimes they're actually buying some of our competitors' machines, taking their components off and putting our components on right out of it. So it's brand new, never been in the field yet. So it's really access to the best technology in the market is what these customers are thirsty for.
And what would you say, I guess, differentiates, you know, your technology specifically, like kind of apples to apples, you know, why would they want to take out something that's kind of brand new from a dealer or a CNH and put on AGCO? Like what differentiates it?
I talked about the secret sauce of our PTx business. I highlighted one of them, and that is the channel difference, but then the other one is what you're asking about. It's our development mindset. We develop, our engineers work shoulder to shoulder farmer. We say we want to be the most farmer-focused company in the industry, spending time in the field with farmers, understanding their pain points and being fast at solving them in a way that's got a really fast ROI. The way we phrase that is retrofit-first innovation. When we come up with a new module that can solve a problem, we go to market first through retrofit, meaning we're going to sell it to all farmers of all brands first.
So that allows us to be way faster, like two to three years faster oftentimes than a typical OEM that's going to wait until they can be ready for the masses on a global scale. So we'll go retrofit oftentimes in one geography, sometimes in limited release in terms of volumes, and we can co-develop with the marketplace for the first year or two and fine-tune it as it goes. Because those early adopters, that's what they want. They want to be right on the front edge, and they're willing to work with you on giving some feedback on user interfaces and things like that. So that's this retrofit approach development and the tech channel are the two big differentiators on how we've developed our model.
And maybe to that point, because when I think of farmers, I think of people that maybe want to stick to what they know works, right? You don't want to mess with the way your field is run. Have you seen that evolve over the years, you know, as they've been more exposed to this technology and just technology in general, right? Of farmers being willing to be on the leading edge of technology and trialing, you know, new products to improve their yield?
Yeah, I mean, there's a bit of both in that farmers, I would grant, are a bit of a conservative group. And why is that? It's because a typical farmer only has 40 chances to plant and harvest a crop, you know, over their lifetime. So they don't want to get a couple of those wrong. The penalty of getting it wrong is high. Having said that, the pressures thereunder can only be solved with precision ag technology. What am I talking about? Well, the market needs them to have much higher yields. We have eight billion people today. We're going to 10 billion between now and 2025. Diets are maturing. People are eating more and more meat around the world, and that's a multiplier in the demand for grain as well. That's a second driver. Beef is a 12 to 1, chicken is a 2 to 1.
And then the third one is biofuels. Ethanol consumes 40% of the U.S. corn crop. Now we're getting into sustainable aviation fuel and renewable diesel. You add all three of those together, and we got to grow a lot more grain, and yet there's no more land. And at the same time, society is saying, "I don't want you to use so much fertilizer. Anything that's not absorbed by the plant is a problem. Don't want you to use as much as pesticide or herbicide." So the farmer's got to do a lot more output with a lot less input. The only way to make that equation work is through precision agriculture. And so they recognize that, and they also recognize that fundamentally they're selling a commodity output. Corn, wheat, soybeans are a commodity output.
So if someone somewhere in the world is more efficient than they are, they're now at a disadvantage. See, there's this constant race to be the most efficient farming operation in the world because you're competing against all the farmers in the world. So they know that. They know that there's a competitive pace that they need to stay with.
Maybe just, I don't know if you have this kind of for just the retrofit market, but do you have a TAM specifically for just retrofit versus kind of broader precision ag, or how do you think about those separately or maybe don't?
If you're thinking about the pie chart, the answer is yes, and I'll describe what that is. We think about the pie chart of a farmer's spend during the course of the year. Machinery is actually a fairly small slice. It's maybe like 17% of their total spend. But with precision ag, I talked about, well, this targeted spraying technology can save them a lot on chemical. You know, typical farmer, average size in the U.S. spends about $200,000 on herbicide. Well, if we can save 70% of that, that's a big part of their wallet that we can now access by asking them to spend a little bit more on technology. If you look at their entire wallet on seed management, fertilizer, pesticide, herbicide, water management, a number of things, we have about $150 billion total addressable market. Now, we're not going to address all of that.
We can address pieces of each of those slices, but our objective is to optimize all the costs for the farmer outside of their land cost to be able to make them more efficient. Technology can help them not only on saving fuel on the machine, that was the historical view, but now our primary focus is on saving all the other inputs.
That's very helpful. And maybe just to help us understand, I guess, how this ultimately looks, because there's different aspects, right? You have the retrofit, you have the new solutions. Ultimately, we didn't maybe get in too much into PTx Trimble, but this is really where the data, the technology, digital meets the physical, right? So I want to talk about maybe how you go to market, how you monetize it in terms of it makes sense with the retrofit, you're just selling that kit.
But in terms of, again, PTx Trimble or where you're selling really more the technology or the software and the IP of, you know, how they can improve their yield ultimately through that display and everything and those sensors, I guess, can you help us understand that go to market monetization, where will you use just kind of selling one-time, you know, hardware versus where it might make sense to have a subscription or per acre or per use?
Yeah. So we've talked a lot about smarter machines. Well, all these machines are generating a lot of data. So there's this whole other element of the business that's offboard data. So having the machine communicate with the outside world, with the customer, so that they can manage their machine, but they can also manage their farm. So there's a data platform element of the industry that's really important. By doing the investment with Trimble, that gave us a big accelerator on a robust data platform. We aim to have the best open data platform in the marketplace. Today, there's a couple of them that are in the market, but they're closed, really operating for that brand of equipment. Our mission is to be the best mixed fleet open data platform.
We'll ingest data from all brands, help the farmer manage that, and then send back to either those machines or to the trusted advisors. So data platform is a big thing. We already have something we call Panorama. It's already a subscription-based tool through Precision Planting. That's a data management tool that helps farmers take their data off of any, whether it's the sprayer or the planter planting machine and help manage where that goes and how it's optimized. So it's a big part of our business, and we see that being more and more of a subscription-based type tool. Also, as we have more and more software features on the machine, we can do remote unlocks of a new feature. So the software is sitting on the machine, but the customer may even pay for it in the beginning. Later on, they choose that they want that feature.
So we can remotely say, you now have access to that feature and you pay a subscription to use that feature. So remote unlocks and data platform are two of the big kind of non-traditional pricing models. And then maybe a third one is on our autonomy kit. Because it's new and people want to experiment with how that may fit that with for them financially, we offer a couple of different models that they can purchase that. They can buy the hardware and then they can pay for essentially an ongoing subscription in a few different ways. They can either buy a bundle of hours or they can have an unlimited batch. And that's essentially to be able to let them say, I'm not paying for this item when I'm not using it.
So if I'm using the tractor just in regular mode, I'm not paying for it. I bought the technology, but I'm not paying anything extra. When I put it into autonomous mode and the features I talked about, then I pay an hourly rate after that. And it allows people to kind of experiment and see the value as they go.
Got it.
So those are some examples of non-traditional pricing models.
Yeah, no, that's very helpful. And I think historically there was a perception that the farmer was going to be very anti any kind of subscription models, just given how, again, they might be very dependent on the yield that particular year on how much they're making. But are you seeing any evolution of that, particularly for this new technology where it makes a lot of sense in what you're offering, more receptivity to that kind of more per hour or per licensing fees or subscription?
Yeah. I think that on traditional hard iron machines, there's still an interest on when I have good profitability year, I want to buy it and get that cost handled and not have ongoing high variable costs. I want my variable costs to be low. So historically, they've not liked subscriptions. But on new things, on new AI models, on autonomy kits, on things like that, where they're like, I need to figure out where the value is and how this works, how often I'm going to use it, those types of things, they like the subscription model because it gives them more flexibility. I'm only paying for it when I use it. If I use it a lot and I'm getting a lot of value out of it, I don't mind paying more.
So, I think that's what we're going to see is these new features that have more new content that will probably be more flexible pricing models.
Got it. And I think you talked about, and you laid out the investor today, right? $2 billion from precision ag over kind of the time, I guess, 2029, your long-term target. Can you talk about the kind of bridge to getting that from an adoption rate perspective in terms of what you need to see? Do you need to see an ag cycle or is it just continued penetration in our new technology? Just kind of what are the key steps that get you to.
For PTx in particular?
Yes, sorry.
For PTx, so we're about $850 million in sales this year, and our ambition is to get to $2 billion by 2029. There's a few things we need to do. One is about the channel, the dealer network. We've got a few different go-to-market channels, and these are all kind of unique to AGCO. One is that we sell to about 150 other companies from our company to their company, other ag machinery companies. They put it on their machines in the factory, and then they sell it to their customers. We call that an OEM relationship. Nobody else does that other than us. We have an extremely robust, we essentially any company that's in ag other than maybe the number one company, but everybody else is pretty much a customer of ours. So that's one aspect, and we want to maintain that and grow it.
Then there's the other channels selling through our dealers. That's kind of traditional, our AGCO machinery dealers. We'll have all those dealers signed up this year. And then a full-line tech channel. And I talked about that before. That's one of the secret sauces of PTx is these not selling machinery, only selling tech and having the full portfolio of Precision Planting and Trimble. So we're building out those channels, filling up, we'll finish our AGCO channel this year, probably another year for the tech channel. Those are growth engines. Number two is innovation. We are coming to the market, you know, historically we're kind of like one to two new features a year, new modules, new releases. Now we're in this three to four range. Our aspiration is to get up to 10 plus per year. And what is a new feature?
One of them is like the Autonomy kit that we just came to market with this year. It got named as the Davidson Prize winner for those in the industry who knows it. That is the highest award for the most innovative. It's seen as the most innovative thing that came out of agriculture. That was it for this year. Over the last five years, we've gotten more awards than any of our two other major, of anybody, including the two companies that are a little larger than us. We feel like we've got a great flywheel to generate innovation. We come out with more features that have more recognition by the industry than anybody else. Now we've got more engineers to develop them. We want to really cultivate that spirit of farmer-focused innovation that has very fast payback, automating these 600 things.
So that's kind of the second big engine.
That's very helpful, and I want to go back to the data platform aspect that you mentioned. I think that's very important and an area that I think is maybe starts to get you really even further beyond just the tractor, right? When you start to kind of connect all of these different devices. Can you just help us understand, I guess, who are the key partners here? What do you kind of own in terms of either the IP or the software versus where do you need to kind of partner and how does that ultimately end up at, you know, products like Panorama and others?
So we've got some partners on things that we don't need to be good at. So cloud data management and storage, you know, AWS, Microsoft, Azure, you know, so we use those major providers to help us manage data. But the software itself to ingest data coming off the machine, display it, analyze it, manage it, and then send it somewhere, we're writing most of that code. Now it's a collection of people that came from either Trimble Ag software, our own team, we called it FendtONE. We bought another company that was just a data platform company in Germany, and then our Precision Planting team. We've melted them all together and they're on one team and they're developing a lot of that work. Like I said, our whole scope of the mindset is that we'll ingest data from any brand of equipment, so it's a little more challenging task.
We'll send it to any brand of equipment, and then we want to also be sending through data pipes to all kinds of providers. So we'll send it to the John Deere Ops Center or Bayer FieldView or Climate FieldView. So it's interfacing with lots of machines and interfacing with lots of companies.
And you talked about, you know, growing your engineering spend by 60% over the years, right? And I think we've been in that kind of innovation R&D kind of phase. How do you see that progressing both internally, the investments you feel you need to make incrementally, you know, in areas like this, as well as any kind of areas, white space that you still feel kind of that you can go to, whether through bolt-ons to acquire, you know, more of these capabilities, or are we kind of further along now it's just deploying?
Yeah, to a large degree, we've ingested so much talent in the last 18 months that we're working hard to have that all fit together really nicely and make it productive. Like I talked about this innovation engine flywheel going at max speed, moving from three to four innovations a year to 10 plus. Where our focus is, we've talked a fair bit about the machine onboard technology, the offboard technology, maybe the third one that I would talk about. We hired a chief digital and information officer who reports directly to me to create all the digital tools. So data platform is one, but then the other innovation that we have within the company is something we call FarmerCore, and it's a fundamental rethinking of distribution.
The historical model has been that the farmer has to go to a brick-and-mortar dealership, like you think of a car dealership, to research a machine, buy a machine, get their parts, get their service, do everything. That's the customer coming to the business. It's like going to the mall. We wanted to flip that 180 degrees and say, customers of all walks like to have things come to them, like an Amazon experience. We've created that, created all these digital tools that say you can research and configure your machine online, you can order parts online, have them shipped directly to you, schedule service online. We remotely monitor your machines on behalf of you. We can move them from reactive to proactive. We can say there's a maintenance interval coming up.
Why don't we come out and take care of that, change your oil, do your maintenance next Tuesday when it's raining? Great. We see that you've got an issue, your machine is throwing error codes. How about we come out and either fix it or repair it? Great. So we're moving from reactive to proactive and doing it on the farm. The dealers, instead of investing in brick and mortar, they're investing in these really nice service trucks. Now these service trucks can do all the work on the farm. They can pull an engine, they can do a transmission, they can do everything you would do in the shop, they can do it on the farm. So there's a whole lot of technology to make that model work. The reason I kind of went through explaining it is it's a fundamental rewiring.
It's 180 degrees different than the way the industry operates. There's a lot of digital technology to make that operate. So that's another avenue of heavy investment right now to be able to differentiate on behalf of something that's better for the farmer. Better for the farmer in terms of technology solutions on all brands of equipment, better in terms of distribution and serving them on their farm instead of having them come to us, all of which backed by tech and investments.
Maybe just on the data part, does the farmer ultimately own the data or do you own the data? How does that work once you collect all that information and, you know, what is kind of your ability to just take all of that and use it how you want in terms of further innovation?
farmer absolutely owns the data. No question about that. It's super clear. Now we'll invite them to authorize us to aggregate that data and use it for marketing purposes, analyzing how their machine is using, and most of them want you to do that. They want it, if you can say, I want your engineers to understand how I'm using the machine so I can design the next one for all of these use cases. They're good about that. We've just been in agreement, we won't resell their data. So it's fundamentally the farmer's data. We get access to it with their permission to do a lot of what we can do to do our job better, but it's their data.
Perfect. And I feel like I have to ask this and I feel like it's unfair that I've left you three minutes to do so, but just given everything that's happening today with tariffs, you know, geopolitical, how do you kind of see the state of affairs and maybe any impact on your ability to kind of deploy and the adoption rates on technology?
There's a little uncertainty in the air these days. That's a true deal. But at the end of the day, the world's got to eat. And so if tariffs move demand around a little bit, which is what they did last time, you know, there's certain farmers that are hurt, the demand moves to other farmers, you know, because what you used to buy in one pipe now moves to a different country. Last time, you know, purchases moved from, instead of China to the U.S., they went. China started buying from Brazil more and buying more from Europe. At the end of the day, we serve farmers in all of those territories. And so, you know, we're going to serve them wherever the demand moves, we'll help those farmers.
We would like stability, we'd like open markets, and we would like certainty, much like so our farmers can make decisions, but however it lands, you know, it should be okay. The tariffs that are on the books today, you know, are one thing, but it's unclear how long they're going to last, so right now we're just kind of hoping for some kind of continuity and stability to plan around. However they land, farmers can plan and we can plan. It's just having a window and a bit longer lasting platform would be good.
I believe you're one of the bigger players in Germany and have a good position there. I think that's an area that's gotten some attention just given some of the stimulus around infrastructure. Any kind of other implications to maybe larger farmer equipment or just more broadly to your business from what's happening in Germany?
Yeah, I mean, I think one of the hot topics in Germany right now is what may happen in Ukraine. You know, Ukraine has been battered over these last three years. About at least 30% of their cropland has been no longer useful, usable because of the war effort or war destruction. And so if for whatever reason peace were to be able to be had on a sustainable way, there's a very high likelihood of a big rebuild effort to go into Ukraine. And, you know, one of the things that occurred during the war was not only was land destroyed, but so was equipment. It was targeted by the enemy to try and take out the infrastructure of growing food. And so if there's a combine or tractor seen, it was often targeted.
So there's a big need for replacing that equipment and helping farmers get back to be productive. That could be a boost for our business.
That's very helpful. Thank you. And I think that brings us to the end of time. So again, I appreciate everyone's time. Thank you, gentlemen, for joining me today.
Thank you.