Start two minutes over. Good morning, everyone. I'm Asiya Merchant. I work here at Citi Research. I look after the tech hardware, tech supply chain stocks. Very pleased to have CDW here inaugurating our Global TMT Conference. I believe it's the 33rd annual conference. Don't quote me on that, but it feels like that, like Jay-Z said. Really happy to have Christine Leahy here as well as Al Miralles from CDW. This is a fireside chat, so we're going to have a few questions. If they want to kick off with some prepared remarks, that's great. Otherwise, we're going to delve straight into questions. I'm going to leave some time for Q&A from the investment community here. Please do raise your hand and we'll make sure the mic comes your way. Good morning.
Good morning.
Good morning.
All right, I'm going to kick it off here unless you had some prepared comments or statements. Everything's on the web.
Just some typical disclaimers. All comments as of Q2. Please visit our website if you'd like additional information.
Yes, it's all there. All right, I'm going to kick it off. You know, CDW, another great quarter in calendar 2Q. You know, a 10% year-on-year growth. Just when you think about your business at the end of 2Q and as you are sitting here in calendar 3Q, relative to where we were at the start of the year, you know, lots of moving parts, tariffs, and all that that pursued, just help us understand how you would characterize your business as you sit here today versus where you were, you know, let's say six months ago.
I would say our performance has been quite resilient. That's a reflection of the diversity of our portfolio and really disciplined execution. The team has been able to help our customers navigate both end market specific and technology complexity and do it very well. We've just had really nice resilient performance. When I think about the progress we're also making in our services area, that's been very positive and we're seeing strong growth consistently. That also grows our relevance with customers. Net-net, I just say it's highly resilient. We're seeing very precise, strong execution and delivering across all the end markets. I would say the end markets have delivered essentially what we had expected. Enterprise is the one area that I think in the first half was probably a little bit above our expectations. Very strong. That's how I characterize it now.
Okay. That leads me to my next question, Christine. You guys actually implied caution in your second half, despite the first half, even 1Q and 2Q, proving to be much stronger. What's kind of embedded in that? You talked a little bit about enterprise. Is there also federal, public, state, and local, if you can just talk about those end markets as well?
As enterprise performed better, and we haven't really baked into the back half as much growth. That's not to say we might not see it. That would be upside, but we just haven't baked it in, you know, to be cautious. From a federal and education perspective, those end markets are obviously challenged by the administration policy changes, funding changes, protocol changes, and we're helping them navigate through that. With regard to federal, for example, we've seen pockets of growth, but we still expect muted third and fourth quarter performance. We've baked that into our outlook. With regard to education, same thing. We certainly see catalysts for growth for both end markets, but we see their performance a little more muted as we're going through the end of the year. That's kind of baked into the cautiousness of our outlook. I would say the word of the day is prudent.
That's the word we keep using. I think it's quite sensible to be prudent with an outlook given the changing nature of policies and administration decisions that are so unpredictable and volatile right now. It feels like the right place to be.
Okay.
On the prudence front, we've seen strong growth across end markets, including healthcare and international. Part of our outlook would presume that it would be more modest than what we've seen so far.
Okay. On the other side of that, what would you be looking for to say, okay, now that has kind of, you know, run its course, and now we're kind of more in a normal environment that CDW is typically operating in?
We're balancing looking at our pipeline, very good visibility to our pipeline with a kind of macro vigilance. We look at all kinds of indicators from IT growth to the cadence of client rollout to GDP growth to budget clarity in the federal space. We're looking at all the components that impact the sentiment in the various end markets and on a macro basis. What we'd like to see is more consistent growth in the enterprise and small business space and more clarity around the budgetary and policy areas for education and federal government. That would give us an indication that we're starting to see more traction and a pickup.
More expansion of the normal business. Okay.
Yeah.
The other question I often get from investors is about your competitive ability, right? How can you, you often talk about, you know, U.S. IT market growth is growing at this, we're generally at a premium to that market. You've proven that in the past as well. I think even in the recent quarters, if we look at you, help us help investors understand about your continued ability to drive market share gains. What's driving that? What's the sustainability there?
I would just start with reminding investors where CDW started and how we got to where we are. You know, we started a very, very long time ago as a reseller and then a value-added reseller. We've really evolved into, I'll call it a modern VaR, but it's really a technology integrator where we're stitching together technology solutions for our customers. Frankly, now with AI and automation adding intelligence into the mix. I would say from a relevance perspective in the highly complex world that we live in, CDW has become even more relevant. You add to that our scale. We don't have competitors on our scale, which gives us a number of advantages in the market, whether it's verticalization or cost leverage eventually. That's a real powerful position to be in.
Our partner ecosystem is stronger than any, I would say, because partners see CDW as the number one channel player, and we are always the first call. Whether it's in good times or tough times, the partners understand CDW can move the needle for them. The other things I'd say are just where we've been investing in our expertise. When I said technology integrator, think of advisory services, think of managed services, think of higher margin areas of business, whether it's data, whether it's AI, whether it's security, but always with the full lifecycle from advising to designing to building to procuring to implementing and ultimately to managing. When I look at where we stand today, I feel very confident that our position is incredibly strong.
We evolve with the markets, and we stay very close to the customers, and we operate with a level of agility, notwithstanding being a big business that is really healthy, and I think differentiates us. The last thing I would just say is if you look at our model, we've got a diversity of end markets, which is always helpful when you've got macro events or technology-specific events, brand events, or end markets like we have now with federal and education where there's some complications, and the diversity and breadth of our portfolio. Whatever's happening in the tech space, our customers are using us because we can cover everything they need and make it work.
Okay, just one level deeper on that one.
Sure.
Just on that particular question. As it relates to cloud, there is this view that as you transition more towards the cloud, you need less of somebody holding your hand to navigate you through this. The cloud's there. Why not just, or infrastructure as a service is already available. Do we need services? Do we need somebody like CDW holding our hand through this journey?
Yeah, I would say the answers are a resounding yes. I think it is often underestimated what the complexity of making technology work feels like. If we think about cloud and the transition to cloud, because I remember it very well, and we still don't have more than 50% of workloads on the cloud, right? This is back in 2011, 2012, when it was really starting to take hold. Oftentimes, in cloud you had this, and with AI, I think we've had this as well, you have customers who are saying, oh, we've got to do that, we've got to hop on the bandwagon, but then they get a bill and they realize it's not the panacea. What CDW does is help our customers optimize their technology, optimize the return on investment. That means you're taking into account all the components around cost, performance, scalability, agility, et cetera.
Right now in cloud, that requires assessment across multi-cloud environments. It's just not one and done. I would tell you that the complexity is there and that customers need us now more than ever. That's validated by our relationships with our partners, where our technology partners are incenting us to provide these services. They're incenting us to bring their technology to market with leading with services because of the complexity and the need to have trusted advisors at the client space to actually make the technology work. There's not an easy button.
All right. I'm going to ask Al a few questions on margins now and OpEx. First, on margins, Al, you did talk about, in the last quarter, there was an increase in volume related to enterprise business that typically does come with a little bit of margin implications there. Just looking forward, how are you thinking about margins and continuing to drive performance while the enterprise, you know, maybe a little bit more softer than your first, or than your first half or second quarter, like you talked about?
Sure. First, look over the continuum, we feel really good about margins and margins continuing to move up. If you look back three, four years, our margins are up meaningfully during that period. 2025, we would expect margins to be reasonably consistent with 2024, and there are some unique components contributing there. We started the year with strength in client devices and netted down revenue. We're expecting a meaningful pickup in solutions growth. We actually had that, and it came in the form largely on the enterprise side. That diluted some of the effects of the netted down revenues. Now, we're expecting or expecting that there's continued growth in enterprise, but not the level that we just experienced. That's how we get to that full year on the margin front.
As we look forward, the holy grail for us is full stack, full lifecycle, and we're seeing contribution client solutions, cloud services, all of those elements together, we think are margin accretive, and that's what we're really shooting for.
Okay. The flip side of that is, as you're seeing that migration towards more solutions, more cloud, more AI possibly in there as well, you also have to consistently expand on the OpEx side by investing in more talent, which is a slightly different model than moving PCs. You don't need as many people, I guess, or talent as much to move PCs. Can you provide any color and rationale behind the OpEx levels that you guys have talked about for the second half here? I think there's a little bit of pools and compensation that you've talked about as well. Help the investment community understand the right model, what you're seeing in the back half, and as we look forward, the model for that OpEx.
Let me start with the broader, and then we'll come to the year. On the broad scheme of things, we invest for capability and capacity. That's exactly what we're doing. While we are driving efficiency in our operations, and you've seen that, we do think it's super important for us to continue to invest really across the cycle. What we're trying to achieve in that is ultimately really strong, durable gross profit growth. We've seen that this year, which is encouraging. That's why it's important to invest over the continuum, if you will. We think that ultimately will not only add value from a shareholder perspective, but will get us back to our earnings algorithm that we're really focused on. That's kind of the strategic broad picture, if you will. Just tactically for this year, what we've seen is really strong operating leverage in the first quarter.
I mentioned at the time that we would expect some asymmetry in leverage for the remainder of the year. That was really a function of the prior year being more challenging and having compensation approvals being taken down, say, the bad compare or tougher compare in the out quarters. We're seeing that play out in these quarters. You get to the full year effect, and we may have some modest leverage, but with continued durable gross profit growth, we're going to get back to our focus on operating leverage and really driving results down the P&L.
Okay. That leads to, you know, sort of help investors understand actually along those, like what drives that durable GP growth? Is it devices and then you kind of move to network? Is it server storage? Then you start to do solutions. Do they all have to move in tandem together? It would be great, but you know, how are you thinking about how you exit 2025 and then how should investors be thinking about 2026?
Yeah, look, we are built for, like we said, full stack, full lifecycle. Ultimately, that's what feels most healthy, when you're seeing a balanced contribution across those categories. That being said, we're where we need to be from a customer perspective, right? I talked about beginning of the year, strong client growth and netted down. You would have expected with the strong client growth that our margins would fade, but they hold up quite nicely. What we're seeing now, and again, it's one quarter with Q2, a really healthy contribution: solutions, services, cloud, client, right, across the full stack. What we would like to see is continued balanced contribution across those categories, which plays to our strengths and being where we need to be with our customers and really our capabilities.
I'd just add one thing to that, Al, which is what you can expect to see and what you've seen us invest behind to expand our gross margins and our bottom line margins is overweighted growth in the higher margin areas. It's a balance, as you said, but continuing to double down in areas like our services capabilities, like our managed services capabilities, like particular practice areas, data, and security, as those tend to drive a higher margin.
Okay. I'm going to ask about AI, and then I'm going to open the floor up to see.
Any questions?
Yes. Let's talk about AI in general. What are you seeing from your end customers as they're talking about adoption? We've been hearing a little bit more about enterprise adoption of AI, whether it's in PCs or across towards models, which then lend itself to more storage, more compute. Just help us understand where your customers are in their journey towards adopting AI.
Yeah, they're further than they were before, and they're still in the early innings, I would say. I would just start with just acknowledging that AI and the use of the models, et cetera, is voracious. It does require infrastructure to be able to activate what it has the ability to activate. That's quite important because those are conversations we are having with customers around cloud capabilities versus colo or on-prem opportunities to drive things like AI factories. The need for compute and storage, et cetera, is going to start to really explode. If I break down AI as I see it right now, pretty much across our customer base, the use of Copilot has built. I think CDW is the number one Microsoft Copilot partner, and organizations have really ticked up in the adoption of Copilot and productivity type uses.
The other area that has started to tick up is really getting serious about data. Everybody knows that AI is only as good as the data that it's going to be using. We have seen a lot of work, whether it's workshopping or actual engagements on driving the data readiness, because that's really the gating item for our customers. We also would just note that all of our partners are embedding AI in their products. You look at some of the networking players, obviously AI PCs. It's embedded across their new portfolios. Customers are really intrigued by what the new functionality does and how they can become AI ready. Beyond that, we are having a lot of conversations, I just like the art of the possible and science of getting it done.
How do we help our customers drive their customer experience, their citizen experience, their own operating efficiency within their own organization? I would just say that as Agentic AI is hitting right about now, that is going to be quite a big catalyst to both advisory services as well as hardware sales and software sales, because it's going to provide step change opportunities in operating efficiency, in effectiveness, in personalization, in experience just across the board of what customers are wanting to do. It really is, you can't, what do they say? You can't, people aren't going to lose their jobs to AI. They're going to lose their jobs to people who use AI. I think Jensen said that. I think with businesses, it's the same thing. If you look at a large level, businesses aren't going to suffer because of AI.
They're going to suffer if they don't use AI. Every conversation now does have an AI component.
Should we see that as a catalyst, not just to the top line growth for CDW, but also gross profit and then through the income statement?
Absolutely.
Okay.
Absolutely.
Higher margin.
Absolutely.
Okay.
Yeah.
All right. Does CDW use AI internally?
Oh, we do. Yes, we run on AI. We use it in a number of different ways. We have a commitment to being what we call an AI-native workforce by January of next year, which means the expectation is that everybody in our organization is using various AI tools to enhance their productivity and effectiveness. Now we're doing a lot of training. We don't just like to put tools on people's desks and say, go after it. We have a real commitment to get past the anxiety and into the enthusiasm, and we're making tremendous headway. Everybody's got Copilot. We were the first to put Copilot on everybody's desktop. The productivity numbers we're seeing are positive, but we have to really convert that into people are more productive now. What are they going to do next? We have a lot of work going on there.
We have built our own agents to drive efficiency across many, many parts of the end-to-end processes, both automating processes and also providing predictive analysis. For our sales organization, for example, next best sale, things like that. We are taking the approach: stop, how can AI help, and let's embed it. In fact, we actually think about CDW as being in an incredibly unique position to develop AI solutions for our customers, be there, be the kind of gateway partner for our partners, and drive our operational improvements with velocity, and be a place where coworkers want to be, you know, an employer of choice by having this notion of AI 360. We have a very tight allegiance or alliance between our go-to-market work, our partner work, our enterprise work, and our coworker work, all revolving around AI center of excellence.
It's been very interesting because we have a number of partners who are so interested in this that we're kind of bringing them AI center of excellence as a service. It's just the notion that the information, intel, learnings, innovation can flow across a company like CDW because of all the touch points we have in the ecosystem. I feel like we're moving extremely quickly.
Just going to ask if there's any questions here in the audience. If you do, please raise your hand so we can bring the mic to you. All right.
Two questions, more about the vendors you work with. One is, as customers are getting ready for data readiness around AI, what are some of the solutions that you're offering, either custom from CDW or third party? Also, what are you seeing in the traditional enterprise hardware and software areas, like as customers are focusing on AI? Thank you.
Yeah, I'll start with the second one. First, I would say that we're still seeing, you know, customers, everything is not AI ready yet. You know, people have to continue running operations. It's always a balance on when do I buy, when do I invest, et cetera. We're not walking away from that business. It's still a large percentage of what we actually sell. I call it traditional. I do want to be really clear that our partners are well ahead in embedding AI as a kind of functionality into their products. One of the biggest networking companies, as you know, it's in all their products now. When you think about, I think you've got a PC, I think you've got HP Next. They're now embedding it into all their products.
We're going to get to a point where it's going to be very difficult to actually snap the chalk line on traditional and AI, because it's all going to be towards AI. On the data, on the data work, we partner with a number of companies across the full spectrum. Whether it's databases, whether it's governance, whether it's security, the orchestration fabric, you name it, anything across the data layer, we have partners and we are building our own intellectual property to help stitch some of those, the various solutions together, in particular for vertical use. One of the things that our scale, you know, an ancillary benefit of scale that we use is the ability to verticalize. When you look at our healthcare vertical, education, et cetera, we know those industries incredibly well. We have strategists in those industries that came from healthcare, for example.
One of the things the partners really appreciate about what CDW can do is we build solutions, including data readiness solutions for industry. That is a game changer when it comes to partners and customers.
Did you have another question, Jay-Z? Is that two? Okay.
I got them both. Great. Yeah.
All right. Anything else from the audience? Otherwise, we can continue with the questions I had. When you think about all this innovation that's going on, you know, AI PCs, server services, solutions, just help investors understand, like, how does it flow through to your income statement? You know, how do you generate value? Is this all higher margin stuff that you're selling? AI PCs, just because they're higher cost or higher price points, that translates then into higher margins for you guys as well. Just help investors understand how that kind of flows through your income statement.
Sure. Obviously, it varies. If I took kind of broad categories, there are certain categories that I would say are more volume intensive. I think client devices, to some extent, solutions. They are certainly accretive and important to our gross profit growth. I think in the realm of volume. There are categories that I would say are a bit more margin intensive and accretive. I think some of our netted down categories, SaaS, cloud, and the like, the one that I would put in there, obviously, would be services as well, which is super important to our strategy. For us, it's about the combination of those things. What we're pleased about with Q2 results is we saw that balance of contribution, both the volume side, which drives gross profit growth, but also the margin intensity, which drives results down the P&L.
Okay. Taking it further, you guys generate a nice amount of free cash flow. Just remind investors, what do you do with that? Is acquisitions back on the pipe, something that you would look at as you're expanding the talent base to drive AI growth?
Yeah. First, you're right. Free cash flow has been very strong. I'll be proud of ourselves on kind of stability of our free cash flow generation. On the capital allocation side, what we're focused on is discipline, right? Really thinking about all of the categories, right? You know, dividends, managing our capital structure, certainly M&A is a strategic driver and lever, and then buybacks. If we look at this year, as an example, we've had a nice blend there and more recently really leaned into buybacks because we would view our valuation as attractive. Over the continuum, obviously, M&A continues to be an important element and a growth driver for our business.
Okay. I think you did acquire Mission Cloud Services, if I got the name right. Just walk us through how the integration, it's a small acquisition, it's fairly tuck-in, so it's not like a big one to integrate, but just walk us through the capabilities that you acquired through Mission Cloud Services and how that transition's gone as you've integrated it into your business.
Yeah, Mission Cloud is an organization that actually knits together a complete cloud solution. What I mean by that is they tend to package solutions together, so advisory engagements along with procurement off of marketplaces, along with migration services, along with managed services. They've got this great way they go to market, which is packaged solutions, which then drives margins. What we did in the integration was very interesting because we forward integrated our practice into Mission Cloud, which is the first time we've done that. It's an AWS practice, and I would say that has gone really quite well. Mission Cloud is known. They're one of the premier providers for AWS, and they're on the stage at re:Invent all the time. It helps to actually continue to cement the relationship with AWS, and I think it's got a nice halo effect.
We thought that was the best way to do it. It's been absolutely performing as we had hoped, and we're seeing incredible uptick in, obviously, opportunities from AWS, but from our own sales organization. When you plug that into a sales organization like ours, you tend to see pretty fast, nice take-up rates.
Okay. We're almost to the tail end. I'm going to ask both of you, like, you know, what do you think investors are underappreciating here about CDW business?
Sure. I would say broadly, the full effect of our capabilities and our capacity. Obviously, everybody knows us as a scale player, but over the horizon, we've invested significantly in our capabilities, and we're seeing it play through this year. While our outlook is cautious, you're seeing the tailwind effect of those capabilities. I think we're excited and encouraged by the direction and think that there's an incredible opportunity as we think about things like AI and other secular catalysts. Really excited about the future of the company.
I would agree entirely with Al and just add that I think that investors can underestimate the complexity in the technology world. There's more choice, more brands, more consumption models, and newer technology coming to bear. That just means more complexity, which is great for our business. It's not going away anytime soon.
Great. I just want to thank Al and Christine here again for being here at Citi Research's conference. Good luck with the rest of your investor meetings today.