AGCO Corporation (AGCO)
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Citi’s 2025 Global Technology, Media and Telecommunications Conference

Sep 4, 2025

Moderator

... and I'm joined by AGCO. Thanks for being here at our tech conference. I think this is the third year in a row now.

Eric Hansotia
CEO, AGCO Corporation

Yeah.

Moderator

Joined by CEO Eric Hansotia, CFO Damon Audia. Eric, I think you wanted to go through the slide first, a quick overview, and then we'll jump into Q&A.

Eric Hansotia
CEO, AGCO Corporation

Yeah, you bet. So just briefly, you know, to let everybody have a common foundation, AGCO's the largest pure play farm equipment company in the world. That means all we do every day is to figure out how we can serve farmers better. We have a machinery business with multiple brands going after different segments of the market. But for this conference, we also are focusing on our tech business. We call that PTx, Precision Technologies Multiplied. The combination of those two last year was about $11.5 billion in sales, about half our sales are in Europe, 25% in North America, and the balance between South America and Asia, Africa. So that's kind of what we are.

There's a number of strategic moves that we've made over the last couple of years that are really coming together now, and those are shown on this slide. I'll just walk through them. This PTx business is something that has been in the making for a few years. We started with buying Precision Planting. We bought six other small tech companies, doubled our engineering budget, but then it really got a boost about a year and a half ago when we bought the Trimble Precision Ag assets, and moved those into PTx. So now that's a business of about $900 million, growing to $2 billion by 2029. That was our first big move in really delivering on our vision to become the trusted partner for industry-leading smart farming solutions.

It also allowed us to then exit out of our lowest growth, lowest margin business, which was Grain and Protein solutions. We finished that last year. Third one was eliminating the entanglement we had with TAFE. We've changed our supplier source, but more importantly for investors, we now are allowed to do share buybacks. We've announced the biggest share buyback in our history, a $1 billion share buyback, because we no longer are worried about TAFE's share concentration. They were an owner and never wanted to do selling when we did share buybacks. Now they've agreed to do that as part of our exit agreement. And so those are the three portfolio moves. Last two is a restructuring program over the last year and a half, two years.

We've been looking at everything that we do, now that we have the portfolio we want, and say, "How do we offshore, outsource, or automate all of the work possible that we can?" We've committed a $200 million savings on a little over a $1 billion base. Significant overhead reduction by doing the work differently, and that's well on track. A whole lot of projects that has not only a cost savings, but something that has to get better, faster outcome, more features, something better for our customers, our dealers, or our employees. And finally, is Farmer Core. I'm really excited about this one, is it's a redesigning of the distribution strategy.

Instead of brick-and-mortar mindset, where the farmer has to come to a store, like much like customers going to the mall, we've flipped that on its ear and saying: "We want to come to the customer, have the business come to the customer." So we've invested in all the digital tools to make it like an Amazon experience instead of the mall experience, and working with our dealers to use service trucks instead of the stores to do all the work on-farm. So we can explore any or all of those as we get into our discussion, Kyle, in the Q&A.

Moderator

A lot to explore there. I mean, maybe we can segue into the Investor Day targets a little bit. You guys had an Investor Day in December 2024, and I think the biggest target was really the new mid-cycle margin targets going to 14%-15% target for 2029. Maybe if we could just level set where we are today, on that journey, where we're at in the cycle as well, and how do we get to those 2029 mid-cycle margin targets?

Eric Hansotia
CEO, AGCO Corporation

Yeah, great place to start.

Moderator

Yeah.

Eric Hansotia
CEO, AGCO Corporation

So if we look over, we're a cyclical business. If we look over our last cycle, we were 4% at the trough, about 8% at the peak. We were like a 6% company. And so we said, "Well, we got to do much better than that." That's what led to this strategy that what formed many of the changes on the slide here. So through all of those structural changes, this year, at the trough, our forecast is 7.5%. So we're delivering about double the margins of our last trough, and more closely to the last peak, as where we stand today. Now, we're not done there yet.

With these changes come further improvements, and so to get from where we are today to the ultimate targets that we committed to last December, there's essentially a walk of three or four things. Let's use 2024 as the base. We're at about 90% of the average history of volume. We call that the mid-cycle. So 90% of mid-cycle was actual demand. If we take our 2024 results up to mid-cycle, that brings us to 10% as a starting point, without changing anything else. So now, from there, three things are structurally changing. Number one is the $200 million restructuring that's on this chart. That's worth about a point and a half. Number two is the portfolio change that's also on this chart. That's worth another point and a half, and that's already done.

And then number three is execution on the three high-margin businesses that we have today. We call them high-margin growth levers. One is growing PTx, second is growing Fendt in North America and South America, our premium brand, the best of the best products in the marketplace, and number three is growing our service and parts business. The combination of those three high-growth levers continuing to be a larger and larger portion of AGCO is another 1.5-2 points. So that gets us to that 14-15.

Moderator

... And then maybe double-clicking on the cost savings. So you've got $200 million. I think there's a certain number of projects you have identified. Maybe talk a little bit about those projects, where you're at in the cost savings realization, and then is there anything incremental that you guys see on top of that $200 million that you've identified?

Eric Hansotia
CEO, AGCO Corporation

Yeah. So it's largely a focus on overhead costs, and it's broken into three categories: outsourcing to our lower cost support centers in Hungary, India, and Brazil. I'm sorry, offshoring to those three locations. Outsourcing to service providers for things like payroll or IT support that we just feel are non-core. Have somebody else do those for us, not only at a lower cost, but areas where oftentimes they've already automated.

They're using AI to a heavy extent. And then the third one is automating ourselves. We've built essentially an automation factory, where there's a group of cross-functional people that takes projects in, prioritizes them, make sure that we're handling data properly, cybersecurity properly, and then executing them. So that's the how we're doing it. We've got 700 projects that are being managed. There's a team that supports that full-time. We review it weekly.

About half of them are already implemented, the other half will be implemented between now and mid-2026, so that the results all show up by the end of 2026. Damon's talked about the, you know, what's already hit a little bit last year, a fair bit this year, and then a little bit next year, so that we end up with a $200 million total reset on the cost productions. We feel very confident in all of that. Every one of those projects, two comments, every one of those projects has a cost saving, so you've got to do the thing at a lower cost, but we've also got to do that thing better. So there's got to be we get a faster response, like a customer support response time.

By using AI and serving up all that information to the customer support representative, we can respond faster to customers when they call in. You know, instead of 30 minutes, it's down to, like, 3 to 5 minutes. That's an example. Instead of being 5 days a week, now we're 7 days, 24, for some of these solutions. So something's got to get better as well. So that's what reimagine is all about. Your other part of your question is, well, what's behind that? What's after that? We haven't committed to any more numbers beyond that, but we're already looking into what can we do with our components. We think we've got more opportunity in low-cost country sourcing. We've got more opportunity behind that in the use of AI. I think we're early days in that whole transition.

So, you know, as those mature, we'll be able to quantify those a little more clearly.

Moderator

Gotcha. And then, just I guess one last question on some of the Investor Day targets. I think one of the key drivers as well to hit the targets is 4%-5% industry outgrowth. So what are gonna be the biggest contributors to that 4%-5%?

Eric Hansotia
CEO, AGCO Corporation

Yeah, if you go back to the things that drive margin, it's many of those same things are driving growth. So the PTx business, as a reminder, that's our tech business. It's running in a separate channel from our machinery channel. So it's a set of dealers that all they do they don't sell tractors or combines or planters, they just sell technology. And they are selling it in a retrofit mode, meaning they're gonna apply that module onto a machine the farmer already owns, and it could be anybody's brand. Could be John Deere, Case New Holland, or multiple other brands. And so that whole channel is upgrading machinery in the field, and it will grow. It's $900 million-$2 billion. It's a much faster growth rate than the rest of the industry. So that's one growth driver.

Fendt growing into North and South America is a second growth driver, where we have been steadily increasing market share. We expect that to continue. It's a brand that didn't exist in those two markets before. It's actually market position that didn't exist. The very best of the best in the market is now a new position in the market, and it's serving customers in a different way. So that's a growth driver. And then the third is a larger share of wallet in service and parts by moving from reactive to proactive. We were actually not that good at something we call parts fill rate, like five to ten years ago.

A customer would come to the service store, say, "I need this, this item." We didn't have the item, and so then they'd walk away, and they'd lost confidence in us as a service provider, so we've got to get that foundation right. We invested heavily in getting our parts fill rate up, and we're now industry-leading, significantly industry leading ahead of anybody else, not measured by us, but measured by Carlisle, both in Europe and North America. And even during COVID, that gap extended, so now the market has high confidence that we're a very reliable partner that is gonna have their part there for them. And we're moving. So that was the foundation, but now we're moving into e-commerce and AI. E-commerce, we're, that's growing so rapidly with online recommendation tools.

We find that the purchase item that they make on the online tool is about 25% larger than what they would have bought in the store because they see other things that naturally go with the item that they were originally gonna buy. And then recommendations, we're using AI to look at the population in the field around a dealer and say, "Here's the amount of machines you have in your area of these certain ages. Here's what we'd recommend you stock." The dealers that have signed up for that, which is almost all of them now, have seen their inventory level go down, they're not ordering the wrong parts, and their sales go up because they're ordering all the right parts. So they're a much more efficient operator. So it's a shift.

Those, combined with remotely monitoring all of our connected fleet now, which is all of our large ag is connected, we can anticipate maintenance intervals, and so we can say, "Hey, we see your 500-hour service interval is coming up. Would you like the kit of filters and oil and everything else you need for that maintenance interval?" If you make it easy for the customer, the customer will often buy. So those are examples of what, how we have confidence in our service business growing. It's been steadily growing on that path already.

Moderator

Good to hear. I mean, since we are at a tech conference, it would be good to dive into the PTx business a little bit more, and maybe just to, you know, as people are thinking about how much PTx could be of the business, what percentage, roughly, of revenue would it be today? And then at that $2 billion target, what would that imply for the % of revenue?

Eric Hansotia
CEO, AGCO Corporation

Yeah, round numbers, it's around 10% or just shy of 10% today, and we expect when we get up to $2 billion, it'll be almost 20% of the sales, much more than that of the margin, 'cause it's a high-margin business, so PTx goes to market, you know, just to remind the folks, it actually goes to market three different ways. PTx is a technology innovation developer, and that technology can go on our own machines, which is kind of similar to all of our competitors, where it makes our tractors and our combines more intelligent. But the other two are unique. The second one is this retrofit business I've talked about, where we've got this entire separate dealer network that all they do is sell retrofit technology modules onto existing machines, and they do that for all brands.

Which is not only unique in our industry, but it's unique in most industries. You don't see BMW making technology for a Mercedes or something like that. So we think this is a great way to serve all farmers, regardless of what they've done in the past, and give them new capabilities. So that's the second area, and it's very unique. The third one is also unique, where we serve other OEMs in the marketplace by selling them technology that they put out in their factory, and then they sell to their customers. We have well over 100 tech customer partners. Almost everybody who's in ag, except for Deere, is a customer of ours.

We provide them various solutions, and our aim is to continue to earn their business and grow that business by doing a good job. We're gonna have a field tech days for them here in about four weeks, where we're gonna show them all of the portfolio, because many of them came to us through one of the companies that we bought. They don't realize the breadth of the solutions that we have, so we're gonna give them a view of all of the offerings and see if we can continue to grow that business.

Moderator

That's great additional color. Maybe we could talk a little bit more about the Trimble deal, the largest precision ag deal in history. For you guys, why did it make sense? What are the main synergies, and just kind of where do we go from here?

Eric Hansotia
CEO, AGCO Corporation

Yeah. Well, there's a lot of tech out there, but it's really careful to find the right tech with the right culture fit and the mindset and all that, so that it matches up together. And we felt the Trimble ag asset or team was exactly that. First of all, you've heard me mention many times this mixed fleet and retrofit mindset that we're building. Well, Trimble was one of the only companies that also had that. They were a mixed fleet provider of what they delivered to the marketplace in terms of mixed fleet, guidance solutions. They had kits out there that served 10,000 different models of machines, makes and models, all different ages, all different brands of guidance equipment.

They were heavy into the water management system, so now we're a market leader in water management, above ground and below ground, so with land leveling and tiling. There was elements that we just weren't in, and they had the right DNA mindset of: Let's serve all farmers in a mixed fleet way. It was the biggest group of ag technologists in the world that we could invite into the business. You know, we had these small bolt-ons, and those were great, but it's a complicated way to grow your business. Each of them has a different set of culture, and norms, and systems, and tools, and so, having one big group to bring in was a bit more efficient. And then the last one is distribution.

You know, we were heavy in North America with our Precision Planting retrofit technology business. Trimble was strong in Europe and South America. So from a geography standpoint, it was a nice mix with very little overlap. Technology, very little overlap. DNA match, big group of folks that were focused on agriculture. So for all those reasons, we were very excited about it. And probably one of the big ones that doesn't get a lot of press is the data platform. The data platform is. So if you think about farming, one thing is making the machine more intelligent, but as you keep doing that, that machine is generating data, and it has the ability to send that data back to a farm office and the farmer to be able to make analyses to make their farm run better.

More and more farmers are saying: "Hey, I really like your Fendt tractor or combine or whatever, but you're behind on your data platform." They were right. We were behind. Another big turbocharger that the Trimble asset brought to us was a data platform. We combined the Trimble team's data platform with ours, and then we bought another company just for their data platform, Farm Facts, put all of them together into one team, and now we just launched last week what we call FarmEngage. Our mission there is it's going to be the best on the planet, mixed fleet data platform.

It's gonna ingest data from any brand, let the farmer do the analysis, and then send data to any brand, and also interoperate with other data platforms, so whether it's Op Center or others, agronomists or seed salesmen. It's a very open data platform. So that's kind of a lot of reasons, and they all point in the same direction for us.

Moderator

Yeah. A lot of jumping-off points there. Maybe we just continue that, on that thread with the data platform, the FarmEngage platform, which I got to see and hear about at Farm Progress recently. Sounds like this is gonna be available on all model year '26 machines. I mean, talk about how important that is, and then just how differentiated is this data platform versus some of the leading platforms out there, platforms from other OEMs? And then just help us understand what elements of this are free for the farmer versus some that they might have to, some features they might have to pay to unlock.

Eric Hansotia
CEO, AGCO Corporation

Okay.

Moderator

Yeah.

Eric Hansotia
CEO, AGCO Corporation

So the data platform, its importance keeps going up, up, up, and I think that's gonna continue. Farms are continuing to consolidate and get larger. Machines are continuing to get smarter, and so there's just bigger fleets with more data, and more and more often, the farmer's not in the machine. So they need to be able to remotely operate their operation and optimize it. And they've got more data to be able to do that, but they've got to have a tool to be able to do that simply, 'cause it's a pretty complicated set of tasks. So that's the first part was: Why is it important? It's becoming a bigger and bigger part of the buying decision. Secondly, where is it differentiated? Fundamentally, it's the open platform with the mixed fleet.

Our mission is that it can do the same tasks as others, but with a different... It's designed from the ground up to be agnostic to brand, and so that's our differentiator. Very much like our PTx technology businesses, we're brand agnostic, we're a retrofit mindset. Same thing with our data platform. And then the third element is on the commercial terms. With all Fendt equipment, it'll come baked into base equipment, no extra charge for the first three years. That matches up with what we call our Gold Star program, where it's already industry-leading protection for the customer. Everything is handled, all the maintenance, all the repairs. If you're down for more than a day, we bring you a loaner machine, and now you get FarmEngage all included in that package.

So, after that, there'll be a subscription payment, and if you're not part of a new machine, you can also take advantage of the platform, and there's a subscription fee for it.

Moderator

There are some upgrades, right? I think Panorama was one of them. Like, maybe talk about that a little bit. With FarmEngage-

Eric Hansotia
CEO, AGCO Corporation

Yeah

Moderator

... what are some of the upgrades that people can pay for to unlock?

Eric Hansotia
CEO, AGCO Corporation

So over time, people don't want what we want to offer is a easy one-stop shop, and today, farmers have to go a lot of different places to manage different parts of their farm. Panorama is the name of our soil sampling automation platform, where it automates taking the sample, it geo-stamps them, puts them in an automated lab, automatically does all the twenty-seven manual steps and gives you out a report. Well, there's an app that is the user interface for that. Over time, we're going to merge all of those onto the common data platform of, I'm sorry. Panorama, I think I interchanged two words there by accident. So Panorama is our other platform that does agronomy diagnostics.

One is going to be for your farm operation, to send tasks to the machine, pull them off. Panorama is really a deep insight into agronomy. Taking a look at what I did with my planting, and spraying, and how does that compare to yield examples. It's an agronomy analytics tool that will run side by side with FarmEngage as a farm management tool. Radicle Agronomics is the one I started talking about, that I accidentally interchanged the wording. That's the soil sampling tool. But we see both of those working in harmony and converging over time. There's a separate subscription for Panorama.

Moderator

So it sounds like there's gonna be further iterations on this FarmEngage platform to... You're gonna make it more cohesive over time. Maybe talk about where you're at today versus where it's going.

Eric Hansotia
CEO, AGCO Corporation

Yeah, we see kind of three waves. Today, if you remember, I talked about all those groups that we brought together. We've brought all that functionality that each of them brought into one landscape, and we have a single sign-on so people can navigate that entire scope. Wave two will be to harmonize more of the user interface and make it look like they didn't come from different places and add more features. And wave three is to bring final set of features and really have it become industry-leading.

Moderator

So you've just finished wave one?

Eric Hansotia
CEO, AGCO Corporation

We've finished wave one.

Moderator

When does wave two, when does wave three?

Eric Hansotia
CEO, AGCO Corporation

We haven't committed to timing on that, but roughly a year each.

Moderator

Okay. That's helpful. And then, on the PTx synergy side, I know the distribution synergy is, like, a key element of the deal. And you've talked about goals for growing your number of elite dealers, which is different than a traditional machinery dealer. So maybe just, help us understand, what an elite dealer looks like. How many of those dealers have you added since completing the Trimble deal? What are the near-term and long-term goals for number of those elite dealers you wanna bring on?

Eric Hansotia
CEO, AGCO Corporation

Yeah, so PTx has a few elements. I talked about. I'm gonna come to the dealers in a second, but I'll just kind of set the stage. What did we need to change as we brought these businesses together? One is we need to remember I said one avenue to market was our own product. We've gone from 20% use of Trimble to over 90%, so that one's done. That channel is essentially implemented. Then I said there's this OEM channel, and I'll finalize on the one you're asking about. OEM channel, we've retained all our OEM customers, and our mission is to grow them. So now it really is the secret sauce is on this retrofit channel, and we're establishing these separate tech dealers.

You can say: "Well, where are they coming from?" We already had a coverage of Precision Planting dealers, and we had a coverage of Trimble Ag dealers, and so we've done a lot of analytics on that and saying: "Where do we want to end up?" We ideally like to have them cross-selling and selling the entire portfolio. That's what we call a PTx elite dealer. I've just kind of given the definition of what that means. Today, the market is over 90% coverage in North America and Europe, and about 80% coverage with one or the other, either a Precision Planting dealer or a PTx Trimble dealer. A farmer can get the products; they just have to go to two different places still.

As we harmonize that and usually it's one buying out the one dealer buying out the other dealer and creating a combined portfolio. We've established about 44 of those so far. Our target is to get to about 75 of them by the end of the year, and we're on track to being able to do that. These are not entirely in our control because you need two independent parties to kind of come to an agreement on making that work out, but they all like the idea. It's just working out the details, and each one of them is a little bespoke because they're coming from a different place, they have different territories. There's a bit of a complex thing to sort through.

But, that's what we're working on so that we can have a simpler interaction for our customers over time.

Moderator

Got it, and then I'll ask one more question, then open up to the audience. I think, you know, it's a bit hard at times for investors to wrap their head around just what are the current offerings in precision ag from some of the different OEMs. So maybe just touch on that a little bit. You know, what tech do you guys have that maybe others don't? What have been some of the latest innovations in the pipeline that farmers and you guys are most excited about?

Eric Hansotia
CEO, AGCO Corporation

All right.

Moderator

Yeah.

Eric Hansotia
CEO, AGCO Corporation

I'll talk about some of the unique ones first, and then some of those are the exciting ones, and I'll add a couple other exciting. Some of the unique ones, we're the leader in water management, where we help the farmer manage above ground on land leveling and below ground on tile management. Water is becoming a bigger and bigger issue. You don't have to read very deeply to understand that. Number two is autonomy. Outrun kit is what our brand is. We got named the top innovation in North America last year by AE50. It's for the application of the combine or the grain cart. The combine's harvesting through the crop, it summons the tractor, the tractor with no operator, and it comes around, finds the combine, drives alongside. The grain cart, it gets filled by the combine.

When the combine's empty, it releases the tractor. Tractor drives off to the side of the road and unloads into... It can unload into the semi. So that's the application we've got now. We demoed in Farm Progress Show the tillage application, where that same technology module goes on to a tractor that's doing tillage. So the farmer brings the tractor to the field, says: "Here's my field boundary," and it will calculate 200 different path plans and offer up the best three. The farmer will pick, kind of like when you're doing your travel on Google Maps, and you'll say: "Do I want the fastest?

Do I want the least use of toll roads?" This one will say: "Do I want to use the least fuel, fastest, whatever?" They get three, they'll pick one, they say, "Arm," they get off, and the tractor will till the entire field, going around all the obstacles that are there and so on. And then we've got several applications behind that. There'll be we can do them in autonomous mode. So that's one, that's very exciting. Soil that I was talking about earlier, soil automated soil sampling. Farmers put on twice as... You know, if you add it all up around the world, they put on more fertilizer than they should. It's one of their top costs. It would fill up a rail car that would go all the way around the planet.

And yet only half of it gets absorbed by the plant, so half of it's waste. The farmer just doesn't know which one because they don't have the right information. Soil sampling is the way to solve that. So we automated the soil sampling process through our Radicle Agronomics platform, and so that one, we're unique in the market. Nobody else has touched that area for decades. So those are some of the exciting ones. One that others are also working on is targeted spraying, that has cameras on the boom. It looks into the field, uses AI to differentiate between a weed and a plant, sends a signal to just the right nozzle, sprays just that weed, saves about 70% of the herbicide for the farmer, as opposed to spraying the whole field.

That one's got a lot of attention, taking a very imprecise tool, a sprayer that sprays the whole field, regardless of where the weeds are, and turns into a very precise tool. That's just an example of some of the highlights.

Moderator

Awesome. I'll open it up if there's any questions. I think you had a question down front here?

Eric Hansotia
CEO, AGCO Corporation

She's coming with a mic-

Moderator

Got it.

Eric Hansotia
CEO, AGCO Corporation

so those online can hear you.

Two separate questions. First is, with regard to PTx, who is the main competition?

Well, I would say that, there's very little competition in the retrofit market. There's pieces... No one has the portfolio we have, by far. There are elements of retrofit guidance from Topcon and, NovAtel. There's elements of retrofit, other tools. Ag Leader would be a small company. Raven, that's owned by CNH, would be still doing retrofit sprayer technology. Those would be the big ones. There are small pieces. No one has the same strategy of going as a full line tech provider. Very little. Yeah, very little. Well, so... Okay, let me take that back. The retrofit sales is enormous. The OEM sales are zero. So because there's those three channels. The OEM sales, we sell nothing to Deere, but for planter retrofit, it's almost the majority is on Deere customer sales.

Most planters that we're selling onto are Deere planters. Also Kinze, also CNH planters, and a little bit of AGCO.

Unrelated, where are we in the EME order cycle now? Things in the margin getting a little better or-

Yes. Yeah, EME is our least volatile market. It only moves between 90% and 110% of the mid-cycle. We expect next year to be an up year for EME. We're probably, you know, we're at about 90 right now. We think we'll be up next year, and we have the most confidence in that market of any. It's our biggest market. It's got the most subsidies in the market. It's the most stable. It's a high-margin market, so we have good confidence in EME. We've not seen this many years going into a downturn. July was the lowest, the month with the lowest tractor sales in the history in the last 15 years.

Our data model, we put our data scientists together on a data prediction model back during COVID, and it looks at a number of different things: farmer sentiment, net farm income, commodity price, all these things, and it's got a projection pretty steadily up, then the last one would be the CEMA Barometer. That takes the farmer sentiment, and it's been a pretty good correlation, better the correlation than the Purdue indicator, and it's been up for about eight or nine months. So those are all reasons why I think-

Moderator

Any other questions?

push on the EME.

One over here.

Question, so if we look back about a decade, I guess that's when Climate Corp first was purchased by Deere, and that was kind of the start of the precision ag kind of consolidation.

Eric Hansotia
CEO, AGCO Corporation

It was purchased by Monsanto.

Monsanto, correct.

Yes.

Sorry.

Yeah, yeah.

So when I think about precision ag and the farmer's willingness, the dealer's willingness to kind of adopt it, where are we on that scale? Is there still a TAM out there that's achievable for the farmer or dealer who don't believe in it or haven't adopted it yet? Or is it pretty ubiquitous now, and it's just a matter of who has the best product in order to make a purchase?

Yeah. So Climate Corp was really about agronomic recommendations and what seed to plant and what herbicide or pesticide or fertilizer to put down. So it was more about agronomic recommendations, and that's why it made sense for Monsanto as a nice adjacency to help with their sales. What we're focused on is how to do the farming better. So we're not gonna get so much into what seed to buy.

We're really trying to automate all the things that the operator does in the cab today in a manual way, and that they don't get it perfect. So it's much more mechanical, combined with software, using sensors, to be able to be much more precise. Farmers are very bought into that. And especially in these tough times, instead of buying a brand-new machine, to retrofit their existing machine, to give it new capability.

So there's, and it's in conjunction with the fact that farms are getting larger. So if you buy a module, it's got more acres to pay off now. And maybe one last dimension, in Brazil, more and more farmers are going to two to two and a half crops a year. So if you buy a module in Brazil, it'll cover many more acres. So compared to five or 10 years ago, I think the willingness to go for precision ag, the size of the farms and the number of cycles that it gets used is all positive. I think their willingness to pay separately for an agronomic recommendation is still a stretch, and that's why Climate struggled, I think. There was a question over here somewhere. No?

Moderator

All right. I think I got time for one more question. Just on Starlink, and a couple of your competitors have announced partnerships. Curious, what your plans are in that realm? I know it's particularly important for that South American market that lacks cellular connectivity.

Eric Hansotia
CEO, AGCO Corporation

We launched Starlink at Farm Progress last week. We've got the Starlink Mini. We expect all our competitors to actually follow our path. They're the different Starlink solution, we think they'll go to ours. And so with the data platform now, we felt like that was the right time to launch it. As you're moving data back and forth, having real-time connectivity, along with the need for it in autonomy, you have to have real-time connectivity. This is the right time for us.

Moderator

Awesome. Thank you, guys, for your time.

Eric Hansotia
CEO, AGCO Corporation

Great. Thank you, Kyle.

Moderator

Looks like we're up on time, so thank you.

Eric Hansotia
CEO, AGCO Corporation

Great.

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