... All right, are we good to go?
Yep. All right, well, thank you all very much for attending today. Last meeting of the day, so appreciate you being here. We are lucky to have Deon Stander come with us from Avery Dennison, CEO and President. He's gonna start off with a few minutes of slides and commentary to update us on the business, and then I will kick it off with some questions. But if anybody in the audience has anything that they would like to ask, please feel free to raise your hand, and I'll get you a mic. Appreciate it. Deon, over to you.
Thanks, John. Thank you, everybody, for being here. Looking forward to this session with everybody. Let me just give you a quick overview of our business for those of you who may not be completely familiar. I'll spend maybe five or so minutes, then we get to Q&A really so Avery Dennison is an $8.8 billion business, and what we do is materials science and digital identification. Those are the two focus areas for our business overall. The whole thrust of our business is really focused on how we help customers solve branding and information challenges they have, largely anchored in solving problems around supply chain efficiency and waste, connecting brands and consumers, circularity, and where necessary, optimizing labor as well. Our two largest businesses are our materials business and our solutions business.
Materials is about 70% of our portfolio, and our solutions business is about 30% of the business overall. When you step back, you look at our business, it's really exposed to a very broad and growing set of end markets, and as well, geographies as well. So as you can see, around about 60% of our business overall is anchored in consumer staples. It's less cyclical overall, and we have a wide range of applications we're providing to all these end markets. We have two growth catalysts, really, at the macro level. One is, and I'll talk about this a bit more later on, is what we call our high value categories.
These are businesses in our portfolio or product lines where they are higher than average growth, typically GDP plus, plus, and have very strong margin profiles representing they are more differentiated in their market spaces, and they're a key part of our portfolio mix moving forward. The second growth catalyst we have is we have very large exposure to all emerging markets, and that gives us, particularly in our base business and some of our high value categories, just the growth that typically comes with those higher than Western or North American GDP markets as well. Our overriding aim still remains the same. We're focused on driving GDP plus growth and top quartile returns, which we believe is a recipe for superior value creation through cycles and across cycles as well. Our two largest businesses are the market leaders in this space.
One way to think about our materials business is that it is a very steady, GDP plus business that grows earnings and free cash flow and strong EVA returns over cycles and through cycles. On the other side, we have a solutions business, which has a number of significant growth catalysts and opportunity for both growth acceleration and margin improvement as well. And then, because we fundamentally believe in a more digitized world, that every physical item in time is likely to have a digital identity in life, so that you can track an item from its start of when it was born, made, procured, how it worked through the supply chain, through to retail, and ultimately, the consumer into end of life.
I think in that more digitized future, we believe that Avery Dennison has somewhat of a unique capability to continue to drive outside leadership in helping connect physical and digital items. Think about it this way: in our materials business, we provide most of the labeling materials that decorate most of the world's items. Everything that you think of in a bottle or a can or something like that, that has got labeling around it, we provide those labeling materials. On the other side, in our solutions business, but now increasingly across both businesses, we are the world's leader in what I think is gonna be the most ubiquitous sensing technology when it comes to digital identities, which is UHF RFID, and we have a market leadership position there that we've had for a long time.
So we're uniquely positioned for the secular trends in the industries that we move forward to take advantage of them. Let me just skip forward. One of the reasons for our success over time is not just being in our market leading positions and the vibrant markets and end markets that we serve, as well as our team, our team around the world of sort of thirty plus thousand employees, but also the fact that we've been very consistent in the execution and application of our strategies. And you can see them up on screen over here. I do wanna touch on at least one of them because I think it makes the point around how we're able to make progression.
When I think about high value category business, these that grow, outsized growth and higher margins of greater differentiation, we've been actively working to make sure we expand our position in those. And these are in our businesses, that would be, for example, our Intelligent Labels platform. I touched on that already. It would be our Vestcom business, our Embelex business. On our material side, these would be things like our graphics business, our tapes business, even some of our adhesive business, industrial and durable tapes businesses as well. And as you can see, over time, since 2014, we made significant progress in driving our high value category penetration of our portfolio to where it is now, roughly about 44%. You'll also note that during that time, high value categories typically outgrow GDP by about two to two and a half times.
And because of the higher margin mix, we've been able to elevate, not exclusively because of high value categories, but also because of our productivity margins by over 500 basis points since 2014. That is the recipe for continued creation as we move forward as well. Moving on. If I look forward, what's our growth algorithm? As we look forward, the way we think about this is we're anticipating over this next cycle to grow in the order of 4.5%-5%. Some of that will be M&A, and I'll talk a little bit about that just now. But largely, the algorithm is made up about one point from our base businesses across both divisions, one and a half points from our largest single high value category, platform, which is Intelligent Labels, but actually two points from our other high-value categories.
That's important because it shows that across our portfolio, we have multiple levers that we can pull in certain environments to continue to drive earnings and compound earnings as we move forward as well. And then clearly, that is, that we'll also see continued M&A opportunities. And I make this point very importantly, because for us, the fact that we have such a resilient portfolio of products and solutions gives us the levers to be able to pull, no matter what the environment is. That's allowed us to deliver on our five-year targets that we set over the last three cycles and into the fourth one as well. Finally, I'll say we have and maintain a very strong balance sheet. Our leverage ratio is in the low twos.
We do that deliberately because we make sure that we have available capacity, should we need to lean forward to take advantage of any market dislocations or where we see our share price is intrinsically below what we think it's valued, but our approach to capital allocation has been disciplined, is unchanged in the last decade and will not change moving forward. Roughly 25%-30% of it is in internal growth for productivity, and also restructuring. Roughly 20% on dividends, which have been compounding at 10% over the last decade, and the last bucket is about 50%, which is a fungible bucket between share buyback and M&A, and we always think about that in terms of where we can create most value, so I've spoken about share buybacks.
This year, we've already done in the first half of the year, $360 million. It's a fairly high run rate of share buyback because we saw an intrinsic difference in our valuation. But we also maintain an opportunity to, based on a, particularly on a strategy to drive incremental M&A, and recently, during last week, we announced a small acquisition, a bolt-on acquisition. It's a high-value category business in the adhesive space, and I can speak a little bit about that, I suspect, during some of the questions, but overall, for us, any acquisition has to be rooted in our strategies. This one happens to be, it's a high-value category business. We have to be the logical, high-value owner in the sense that we have to bring some core capability to that. We're a very large adhesives manufacturer. We make our own adhesives ourselves.
It has to be a business that can generate value over time. Post synergies, this business will be at a lower multiple than our current multiple, and it also has to align with the work approach we take, which is a highly application-led business that provides and solves problems for customers. In this instance, it happens to be in the liquid flooring adhesive space as well. So with that, I'm gonna open up to questions, John, and maybe we can get some perspective from the audience as well.
Absolutely, and thank you for all the details there. So just to start off with that acquisition of the Meridian Adhesives flooring business, can you walk us through how that business fits within the materials segment, high-value categories? What gets you comfortable increasing your exposure to the building and construction end markets? And maybe talk about some of the reasons why you feel that business is actually a little bit more defensive in its niche category.
Sure. As I said, for all of our acquisitions that we look at, they have to be on strategy. In this instance, a high-value category business. This flooring adhesives business, part of the Meridian business, which we will call Taylor Adhesives, have been growing at roughly mid-single digits for the last five years and very high margins. That's in a segment and a sector that has not seen much growth, if you think about the broader building construction, points to their differentiation. It has to leverage a core capability of ours. We make almost all of our own adhesives, not just blend them, but we actually design polymers.
We take monomers, we crack them, and we polymerize them, and we make our own adhesives specifically for applications across all of our portfolio, all our pressure-sensitive products, tapes products, even our IL products, where we have to attach chips to inlays, and this acquisition can leverage our, particularly our acrylic adhesive technology for insourcing and significant synergies. We see real post-synergy values on that basis. The multiple post-synergy will be lower than our current multiple, and then finally, this is a business which has a distinctive position in the market. It services the flooring industry, and specifically, adhesives that go into the flooring industry, and their approach has been a couple of ways that they've generated real value and demonstrated that growth.
So first of all, they focused much more on the repairs and renewal segment of flooring, which is typically less cyclical than you see in the building construction industry. For more than 50% of their business is focused on what's called resilient flooring or luxury vinyl tiling, which is the biggest growth trajectory you see in flooring. And the third element is they spend most of their time focused on the actual flooring companies. So they engage directly with flooring companies like Mohawk and Shaw, and they work with them to say: What is the particular resilient flooring you're trying to implement? What's the substrate it needs to go on, or the contractor is looking to do? And they provide adhesives specifically formulated to make sure it stays down and doesn't lift.
And then Shaw and Mohawk take those adhesives we provide, or that Taylor provides, and own brand and own label, and it helps improve their warranty rates as well. So overall, a very strong business. The only thing I'd say as well, there's a couple of external references to adhesives. The one that I point you at is probably one of the more external bodies where they've got engineered adhesives. That business is in the low 20% EBITDA margins. This business is above that, and on top of that, we will see mid-single-digit synergies. So you can see how we get to the lower post-synergy multiple overall.
I think it has significant resilience because not only does it expose to the most growth-oriented part of flooring, which is resilient flooring, but it also has been able to maintain and grow share in a market relative to its competitors because it's focused on OEMs as well. So we feel good about that. We haven't factored in any change in the trajectory of the broader building construction industry. Should that happen, and when that happens, I don't doubt, we will also see some upside to that as well.
That's great. And then, you mentioned the mid-single-digit synergy capture. I believe that's all on the cost side. Can you talk to us about where the synergy is and how you're generating it, what gives you confidence in it, and then maybe what some of the upside is? If I remember correctly, it's a U.S.-based company, so maybe there's some opportunities, given Avery's global footprint, for taking that business on and expanding it to various international markets.
So the synergies we factored in are largely based on our ability to take the products that they buy before they blend them effectively, which is largely acrylic adhesives. We actually make and formulate acrylic adhesives, so we'll be able to insource that in addition our capability in that area to create specific acrylic adhesives that are really formulated to work very well in certain environments, we'll be able to add to their breadth of portfolio as well. So there's both the procurement and insourcing strategies. That's largely where that synergies are based on. We also know, because we have a small business in tapes that's focused on broader building construction as well, we also know there's some cross-selling opportunities where we're able to provide either liquid adhesives in this, or tapes.
We've not factored those in, but there's a possible upside to that as we move forward as well.
Great. And then, in one of our earlier meetings, you had mentioned that Avery also sells some of the adhesives that you make internally into the open market. Not sure if you've disclosed before, but how much are you selling into the open market, but maybe as a percentage, or, you know, how does this, internalize some of the, adhesives that you are currently selling to the market?
So we make a significant amount of adhesives across acrylic adhesives, solvent adhesives, UV, warm melts, and even some hot melt adhesives. We use them across all our applications, the vast majority of which we use for ourselves and our products that go in our different businesses. We have a small trade adhesive. This is largely focused on selling adhesives to the tapes business as well, and out in the markets. And for each one of those customers, we specifically work to say, what's the application they're trying to address, and we formulate that for it. We don't typically disclose that it's relatively small, de minimis, but it's growing and it has high margins. And that gives us the confidence that when we bring in another liquid adhesives business, we're able to get cross-fertilization of capability as well.
Great. And then, just switching over to more of a macro view, trade policy. Apparel is one of your biggest end markets, and we've had a lot of trade policy uncertainty. Inflation has created a lot of headwinds here in 2025, and apparel, being one of those end markets that was down kind of mid-single digits here in the last quarter. Maybe you can give us an update about how the apparel market is doing for Avery, quarter to date, and what actions you've taken to optimize your Intelligent Label business in the wake of some of these disruptions.
Sure. Apparel being a discretionary purchase, was significantly affected by the tariff environment, and it's not necessarily the tariffs per se, it's more the uncertainty that tariffs have generated, so in the second quarter, we saw the start of the second quarter apparel volumes being down, for us at least, in our apparel business, you know, high single digits, and as the quarter progressed, getting slightly better. We ended the exit of the quarter with still low single-digit run rate. I'd say the environment for apparel overall still remains highly uncertain.
Although there is general alignment that most of the sourcing countries where apparel is sourced now have a similar tariff rate, somewhere in the 20%-30%, depending on where it is, there is still no certainty about what the impact of that's gonna be, as most of our apparel retail customers and brands are looking to decide how they manage that net pricing impact, particularly as they look towards the holiday season. Some of them are choosing to raise prices, some of them are choosing to raise prices in certain categories, some of them are choosing not to do so.
The biggest challenge all of them are debating as we think towards holiday, which sourcing-wise starts really for us and the brands, September and October, is if they are going to raise prices, no matter what they are on a discretionary item, what's the volume impact gonna be at the consumer level? And there's, I think, gonna be more caution in that regard overall. So that's what we see. In terms of our IL impact to that, clearly, more than 60% of our Intelligent Labels business is still anchored in apparel, which as a consequence, has been affected by that. Some of the actions we're taking relate to some of the other segments.
We continue to double down in driving pilots and trials towards rollouts in food and logistics, and at the same time, we're step changing some of our innovation to make sure we're bringing new innovation to the market quicker, so we can help customers get to that adoption rate quick. And I can talk about that a bit just now.
Yeah, that'd be great.
Okay. So the way I think about our ability overall from an Intelligent Label perspective is we want to make sure we are the market leader, more than 50% of the share we've had in both apparel and these new segments, and our job is to maintain that share moving forward. These are segments, both in food and logistics outside of apparel, with significant growth runway. By comparison, I'll give you an example. Apparel's total market is in the order of 45-50 billion units, and we're only at 40% penetrated. Logistics is 65-70 billion, and we have one customer that's just gone in UPS. Food is 200 billion units, and we have one customer in Kroger that's gone. So we have high conviction in the likely adoption in these segments.
Our focus has been: how do we accelerate new customers now that the first two have gone in those segments, and at the same time, bring new technology, innovation at the technology level to bear? Some of these new categories, particularly in food, require some innovation thing around more difficult-to-read items like proteins. Those are following what will happen in bakery. Some of it is innovation at the manufacturer level, and the rest of it is how we continue to lean forward in making sure we're having market-leading teams, which we're the go-to-market leader in, to help customers as they adopt that, and our view is, if we maintain our share through innovation and our service and value proposition as these markets grow, then we will disproportionately benefit from it, and that's the reason we're continuously important to invest in them.
Great. And maybe, I guess, just kinda on that point, can you give some examples on how you're accelerating the adoption? I mean, some... I don't think a lot of people who are new to the story necessarily understand-
Sure
... some of the complexities of adding an RFID label onto something with, like, produce that has, you know, some wet applications or, like, the microwavable capabilities. Maybe just if you could explain, like, why there needs to be innovation that continues the adoption.
You know, let me just say, you know, at the end of the day, driving a new technology like RFID to adopt in new segments is really only anchored in the fact that it can generally, genuinely deliver return on investment for those customers. Otherwise, it's just technology for technology's sake, and that's not what we're about. For each one of these segments we've looked at, we have a view, initially a hypothesis, now backed up by data that there is real demonstrable benefit from a retailer perspective or the brand perspective, so in apparel, that was clearly around inventory visibility and accuracy, which led to greater sales lift and gross margin expansion. That's proven, it's out there in multiple cases. In logistics, it was solving for labor in the last mile fulfillment centers and making them more accurate. This is also public knowledge.
UPS, where shipping one in 400 parcels would be mis-shipped at the last mile fulfillment center to the wrong destination. Each one to correct is north of $15 to correct that. So we've helped them move that, through accuracy, down to one in 800 or one in 1,000. The scale of that is significant. Again, applicable across the logistics industry. In food, it's all around labor productivity, freshness, so less waste, because these are perishable categories, and ultimately sales lift. And with Kroger, we're currently 700 stores into the rollout with them. It's on track. It's actually showing for them better results than they'd anticipated. We have a number of pilots and trials going on with other grocers, where we've been able to demonstrate similar returns for them.
Typically, across almost all these segments, the return on investment is within a year, and now it's really down to: how do we accelerate the adoption of these customers as we move forward?
Great. And then, as you approach some of these new markets, for Intelligent Labels, like food and logistics, where the margins may be a little bit lower relative to some of the other higher margin apparel categories, how do you maintain the margin profile in these markets?
Yeah, I think one of the things that we've learned over time. I think it's a bit of a misnomer, but the, the belief that you have to have a high-priced item to afford an RFID tag. That was historically true ten years ago. That's no longer true. If you go into a Walmart store right now, where they're rolling out RFID use across many categories, they're tagging items as less than $1. If you go to a customer of ours called Decathlon in Europe, they're tagging protein bars in their stores at $0.50. Not because that item economically made sense to tag, but because when you tag the whole store, you then have one standard operating mechanism for running a store. It's highly automated.
You can also allow for self-checkout, and you can ultimately get even to theft detection and loss prevention as well. So for us, you know, as I think forward in these segments, we're gonna continue to bring innovation to bear in this regard, because I think that is what helps differentiate us and drives greater value for these customers in these segments. Even in apparel, where we've been doing this for more than 10 years, we recently launched some new innovation last year that takes the RFID device and embeds it in the garment or in the woven label, which then acts as a loss detection device for Inditex, the largest fast fashion retailer in the world. They own the Zara group. And that allows them to do two things.
It allows them to not only identify when things have left the store through theft and replace them, but also allows for customer checkout and fraud prevention, return fraud prevention as well.
Great, and then, in some of the lower penetration categories for Intelligent Label, how can Avery maintain its share, its leadership share, which you pointed out one of the shares? And just to be quite open, I mean, that's something that has been pretty impressive as when I covered the company five, seven years ago, same amount of size above the nearest competitor, as it is today. How are you able to continue to take that leadership, and opportunity, and not necessarily have to worry about other new technologies that may come into the market or other competitors? What gives you that advantage?
I think first and foremost, we remain, and I remain as a leader, paranoid about both competition and innovation, because that's what keeps us agile and moving forward. How we stay ahead of competition is really threefold. Number one, it is really around innovation. The new innovation, I've spoken about a couple examples that we bring to bear. We've actually got in food some new innovation coming out in the second half of this year that's proprietary, gives us more pricing advantage as well, and greater margins as we move forward. These are products that will help make more complex products to tag and read, things like proteins, more visible, easier to do. So innovation is key for us. That's innovation at the product level, but it's also innovation in the process and how we manufacture.
We're the world's largest manufacturer, the world's largest inlay designer in that regard, in that piece, and maintaining our low-cost leadership is critically important because it brings scale when volume comes that very few other people have. The final one is kind of innovation when I think about how we go to market and our teams. We're typically the single company that people go to when they want to adopt the technology, not just because we do one element of it, but across the nodes. Outside of chip manufacturing, that's not us, we do almost everything else. We maintain and drive inlay production, design, integration into some form of label, data management, including, and then on top of that, software as well.
We've invested a lot to make sure that whole node of solutions and services is possible, and that gives us often the position where people look to somebody with the global stature of Avery Dennison, with the capability of Avery Dennison, to say, "We need you to help us drive the technology adoption first.
Great, and as an industry leader, I mean, Avery's historically done a good job showcasing its pricing power. A lot of volatility, as I mentioned, in the market earlier, a lot of different trade policies, tariffs in and out of effect. How has Avery been able to, or if you've been able to, successfully push through pricing in the current environment and uncertainty, especially around tariff surcharges to cover some of the incremental costs that you've seen throughout the supply chain?
I'd segregate between indirect tariff impacts, which are largely apparel demand related, from direct tariff impacts, which mostly are really on our materials business. Now, we make, buy, and sell in every region around the world, our materials business, so we have very little direct tariff exposure. In fact, in total, it's probably low single digits inflationary impact from our current procurement and manufacturing expense overall, and we've done two things, so one is we have implemented some pricing surcharges when we see that, and we've also leveraged our global scale and sourcing footprint to change sourcing routes if we need to, and as we do typically in our materials business, if we see an inflationary environment, we tend to pass that through to our customers, and then when there's a deflation environment, we tend to sort of withdraw that.
Across a cycle, I always think about inflation being, or net price inflation being sort of neutral across that time period, depending where we are. As it relates to tariff, we'll see how long they endure. We're using it as a surcharge at the moment. Should they endure longer, we'll have a different decision. Should they be withdrawn, we will withdraw them at that point.
The tariff surcharges, that is something that doesn't have a pricing lag to it. That's something that can be-
Typically not. When we see the impact to us, we put that through in terms of pricing, because there's a very large degree of immediacy. If we see an impact, our products on that part of our business typically go to our customers pretty quickly at that stage. So we tend to act with urgency, and there may be, you know, a small lag, but it's not very big at all, really.
Got it. So Intelligent Labels takes up a lot of time from a lot of your conversations, but I did want to touch on a lot of the other high-value categories that you have, particularly those that have been in focus as of late. Vestcom has had a rollout with CVS that's been relatively sizable. Can you just give us an update on Vestcom, how it's performing, maybe some of the things that you've learned with the CVS rollout?
Yeah, for us, this has been a significantly good business to have. Not only in itself, a high-value category business, really strong margins, uniquely positioned. It's a data composition engine. It takes pricing, planogram, point of sale, promotional data from retailers, whether they be drug, dollar, or grocery, and the output of that into that data composition engine is a shelf-edge label, mostly for pricing, but that same real estate can also be sold as a media selling opportunity. So if you're a CPG wanting to advertise a national campaign, a regional campaign, you can use that shelf-edge label we produce to promote, buy one, get one free, whatever the content be. So we have two parts. One is a productivity solution, and one is the media solutions. A really strong business and highly proprietary as well.
The rollout with CVS has been, as we expected, excellent and on time, has been really accretive. It's great to have them as a customer, and I think we've done a lot for them in terms of the value we've brought to them. And I continue to see this business as a mid-single digit, you know, growth potential moving forward with a very strong margin profile.
Great. Embelex is another high-value category, and it's done very well over the past several years. Bit slower this year. You know, it's tied a lot to discretionary spending in apparel. But what's the growth outlook for this business, and where do you see the greatest opportunities for this business maybe going into 2026 ?
We see typically this business to be mid- to mid-single- to high single-digit growth over the cycle. That mirrors where the market is growing. Think about this business as providing names, numbers, and decoration on garments that are largely in the performance segment. So think about the big performance brands, mostly in team sports. So we provide the names and numbers for most of the team sports that you see, both in Europe, started in, football, soccer, depending on your vernacular, and now in the U.S. , we anchor it in most of the professional sports as well. And what we see is the growth trajectory is really you know, secular. People want to decorate, when people want to engage as fans, that growth industry is gonna continue to be there, the merch and the product, and then supporting the fans.
And so we see a lot of opportunity for us to continue to deliver. It's highly fragmented. We're probably the largest player, so we see opportunities for further growth for us in that regard. And particularly outside of that, outside of performance sports, team sports, we also have a small part of a laundry business. We're using digital identities to manage laundry, and we've added digital identities even to our team sport stuff. And then finally, when we are in stadiums, so any professional stadium that you see here for professional sports in the U.S. , we are actually often the hardware, software, and consumables provider that allows you to go and decorate that shirt, put your name and the number on, and so forth. That's also equally true.
Most stadiums are used for, for example, live concerts, and there's a huge demand for that, and so we see opportunity there. It's not within our growth formula, but we can clearly see adjacent opportunities that will give us more growth if we needed to.
Great. I'll ask one more, and then if anybody has any questions, please raise your hand. There are other high-value categories, obviously get less attention.
Yeah
... than the last three that we talked about. Are there any particular ones that you wanted to highlight that you're maybe most excited about, or you see the greatest opportunities going forward for the business? I mean, taking on Meridian is also now a high-value category.
Yeah.
Is there anything else that you care to highlight?
Yeah, we touched on a lot of the solutions group, high-value categories, but in our materials business, if you go back to that growth algorithm I talked about, two points of our growth will come from high-value categories outside of IL. One point is in solutions, one point is materials. So they're significant. In those ones, we have a very strong specialty and durable label business, a high-value category growing mid-single digits. These are things that you'd imagine. They're labels that have to be really durable, going onto oil drums in harsh conditions, scratch-resistant, et cetera. That's one example. Another example of that would be a specialty label is when you buy fresh produce, and sometimes in that clamshell with a peel and reseal, we provide that peel and reseal capability, leveraging our technology for adhesives.
You know, clearly within that, we also have labels that are around wines and spirits, highly decorative, different substrates, and so they stand out on the shelf. I'd say the area that I'm also continuing to have a lot of enthusiasm beyond adhesives as well is our graphics business. We, following again, a secular trend of personalization, we provide highly customized films that allow for paint protection in the auto industry, or window protection, or even color change. So as people choose to protect their cars, change the color in their cars, we provide cast films for those, and that has a lot of share opportunity for us as we look into that market as well.
Great. Are there any questions? Okay, if not, I can ask one last one-
Sure
... before letting you go here. So admittedly, one of the areas that I'm less familiar with is the cloud platform that Avery has, the, I think you say Atma?
Atma.
atma.io. How does this differentiate your Intelligent Label offering, and can it be further monetized? What specific capabilities does the data management ecosystem provide sustainable competitive advantages as the physical and digital-
Sure
... convergence accelerates?
I think if you think about if every physical item has a digital identity, and you capture the first event during a supply chain when that item was made, born, grown, whatever the case may be, you need to capture that information somewhere. Typically, at the moment, it's captured largely on the chip, the semiconductor chip, that's part of the Intelligent Label device. Moving forward, our view is that in time, that will all migrate to the cloud. And so as a consequence, what we deemed necessary two or three years ago is we thought we need a digital identity platform that could house each digital identity and all the episodic events that happened with it. And so we built atma.io from scratch because we saw nothing in the market. It forms the backbone of much of the solutions that we provide.
It also is a key part of how we provide software, highly customized software for the apparel industry, for the food industry, as it relates to tracking digital identity. So we have a set of apparel solutions called Optica that we released at the end of last year. These allow brands, apparel brands, not only to understand what's happening in sourcing, but also to track each item as it comes through their supply chain, even allows the garment manufacturers to track back to raw materials as well. We have a similar one coming out called Optica for food, which we're using in the food industry, similar dynamics as well. So selectively, we will invest in building or acquiring specific pieces of software.
Our approach currently is to monetize those largely at the item level as we charge for the tag or the label, but we do have small pieces where we also have SaaS models that are running, and we're still understanding exactly how best to leverage that capability. At the end of the day, we're gonna be able to generate significant amounts of data through all these items, and then that'll allow us to be able to solve problems for customers, but also leverage that capability for further digital, pure digital solutions as we move forward.
Fantastic. All right, well, one minute to spare.
Great.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, everybody.
I really appreciate it.
Appreciate it.