Good morning, everybody. Welcome to the 17th Annual Ideas Conference. My name is Erké Gurgan. I'm with Three Part. Today we have Diebold Nixdorf, traded on the New York Stock Exchange under DBD. On behalf of the company, we have Ian Rhodes and Maynard. Take it away, please.
Thanks, everyone, for joining us this morning. I'm Maynard Um. I am the Vice President of Investor Relations at Diebold Nixdorf, and I am here to present to you today our company. Before we start, here is our forward-looking statements. All statements made will be as of today, and I encourage you to look through our forward-looking statements here. Let me start by talking really about our sort of the big picture in terms of, let's call it the elevator pitch, right? We are the number one player in banking globally and in retail for self-checkouts and point of sale in Europe. I'll kind of walk through, but think of sort of our core underlying business as nice and steady as well. Then we've got these new opportunities that's going to help to drive our revenue growth.
In terms of our revenues, we have pretty good revenue visibility on the product side. Our backlog last quarter was about $920 million, so it's roughly about two quarters' worth of revenue within our backlog. Fairly good visibility over the near term on the product revenue side. On that product, we have a pretty good attach rate in terms of services, so 90%+ attach rate for the product that we sell. We sell a service attached to it, and that's roughly about 70% of that service revenue is recurring as well. We've got a pretty good visibility outlook on the revenue side. All of this really kind of drives down through our P&L and our cash flow, and it drives what we call our fortress balance sheet.
We're on track to nearly double our free cash flow generation in 2025. A nd I'll kind of walk you through what our free cash flow looks like over the next three years, but quite significant growth as we continue to move forward. We are committed to returning all of that free cash flow generation, or the majority of our free cash flow generation, back to shareholders. We announced a $200 million share repurchase program back in November, so fairly recently. We completed our $100 million share repurchase program that we announced in Q1, and we finished that program in roughly about a little over eight months. I'll talk a little bit more about that share repurchase program going forward. Let me get into the business a little bit. Like I said, we're number one in ATMs installed globally.
We're number one in total ATM application and monitoring software as well. Roughly about 800,000 ATM units installed across the world. In retail, we're number one in Europe on point of sale and self-checkout, and number two in global markets for self-ordering kiosks. If you've ever gone to a McDonald's and you've walked up to one of those big machines to do your own self-ordering, that would be us. We have roughly about 110,000 self-checkout installed globally. The other thing I want to point out here on this slide is that we are also doing a local-for-local strategy in terms of our manufacturing. This has actually been really helpful for us in terms of the tariffs. The net tariff impact for us is about $5-$10 million.
If you ask our CFO, he'll tell you it's not something he loses sleep over on any given night, which I think says a lot in this type of environment where it can keep you up. In North America, we have a production facility, a manufacturing facility in North Canton. We have a facility in Manaus, Brazil, which does all of Latin America. We also have in Paderborn, Germany, which supplies into Europe. We have one in India that supplies into sort of that emerging market in that area. The local-for-local strategy is something that has been a benefit for us. Let me go into the different segments. If you look at the banking business, the banking business is on the ATM side, it's roughly about $12 billion.
We have a new strategy in branch automation solutions, which I'll talk about, which adds another $8 billion into that market. If you actually look at our customers, we have most of the top 100 financial institutions in the world. All of these names, I'm sure you're very familiar with. If you think through what the banks are really focused in on and what our products solve in terms of the problems that the banks have, it's really about trying to reduce their expenses, right? Because if you think about a branch, a branch is roughly about 70% of the operating expenses for a bank, right? They are looking for ways to kind of continue to reduce that. The other piece of this is to increase the efficiency of that branch and to increase the customer experience within that.
That's all of the things that our products actually solve. When you think about an ATM, and I actually did not realize this until I joined Diebold Nixdorf, right? When you walked into an ATM and you deposited $20 in cash, that $20 in cash never came back out of the machine, right? There was a separate cassette that actually had all the money that you would withdraw from. With our technology, now what you're able to do is you're able to deposit that $20, and then if you're withdrawing, that same $20 is able to be withdrawn from that ATM, right? In the past, that's not been able to happen. There is this refresh cycle that's happening within the industry driven by this cash recycler technology. That's given us a very nice, steady sort of install base of shipments.
Think about our simple way to think about our banking business is that the ATM business is a very nice, steady year-over-year unit refresh, right? Roughly about 60,000 units every single year is what we will ship. That has been relatively steady over the past few years, right? That is what we expect to go forward. In the refresh cycle, we're probably in baseball terms, maybe around the fourth inning. If we continue to ship around 60,000 a year, we've probably got another, call it maybe six years of runway in terms of that refresh cycle. That is sort of the base business. On top of that, where we see the growth opportunity is what we're calling the branch automation solutions, right? Think of it this way. In terms of the cash management, we're now trying to go deeper and deeper into the branch.
If you've ever gone to the teller and you've given cash for deposit, you see them working that machine, and it's like, right? Like that. That machine was in the past also very similar in terms of like the cash goes in, right? What we've done is we've taken all of the technology. It's actually the same physical parts of the ATM, and we've put it into the teller cash machines. Now these are teller cash recyclers, right? What is the benefit? The benefit is that it goes into these cassettes. These cassettes, the teller can literally just lift out the cassette. If the ATM is out of cash and your teller cash machine is full, you just take that cassette, walk over to ATM, put it in, and then swap them out, right? What has this done?
This has reduced your cost in the branch for that cash because in the past, once that cash got full, you'd have to call your cash-in-transit company, right? Your Brinks or your Loomis, the men with the guns and the armored truck would have to come and swap that out. That could be anywhere on a per swap out, let's call it on average, roughly maybe it's like $500 depending on the region, right? If you're doing this three to five times a week, this becomes very expensive. This teller cash recycler technology helps you to reduce that expense. Now we're extending that into the branch as well in the teller cash recyclers, right? Not only that, but the teller cash recyclers are also able to reduce the amount of time you're spending per customer.
Your efficiency actually starts to rise. The employees are now able to spend more of their time going to more value-add things like the higher margin loans and things like that and focus their time on in other places. That is the core of the banking business. Nice, steady underlying ATM refresh cycle with a growth driver in terms of this new branch automation solutions, which we just rolled out this year. In fact, we have a customer, a very large customer in North America who started rolling out these teller cash recyclers. They do not even have our ATMs, right? This is a big opportunity for us because of that interoperability between the ATM and the teller cash recycler. On top of that, we have a very, very strong attach to services.
Every machine that we sell has roughly over a 90% attach rate, probably 95% plus attach rate, a service attach rate to that product. We see opportunity there in terms of driving efficiency to drive up our revenue, which I'll talk to momentarily. On top of this, the other growth engine is our fit for purpose. A few years, it was more than a few years ago, many years ago, we decided to exit the Indian market in part because we were taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut, right? We were basically taking our existing product where the screen was too large, the footprint was too big, the electricity was, it consumed too much energy. What we've done more recently is we've actually created a fit for purpose product specifically for that market.
We're having good traction there, and we see this as another avenue for growth. A couple of growth engines here to drive this low single-digit annual growth rate. Turning to the retail side of the business, it's about a $12 billion market. In the past, what we've seen is we saw a nice big uptick during COVID, right? It's one of those consumption digestion things. The retail business for us has been under a little bit of pressure. We expected that in the back half of this year, we'd start seeing a growth in that retail and that recovery, and that's exactly what we're seeing. We're starting to see not just in our self-checkouts, but also in our point of sale, which was a nice surprise for us as well.
The point of sale and the self-checkout in our existing markets is seeing that recovery within that. Now, where we see our biggest growth opportunity is going to be in North America. While we're number one in Europe, remember that the North American market is much larger than the European market in terms of the self-checkout and the point of sale. There is a lot of opportunity here for us. What is our strategy? Our strategy to attack this is really driven by our AI software, right? Our AI software can basically do three things today and can do more coming in the future. Probably one of the biggest ones and the great feedback we're getting from our proof of concepts and our pilots is around shrink, right? Theft.
Theft for a retailer can be anywhere between, let's say, like 1%-2% of their total revenue. In the pilots that we've been running, we've been able to stop about 70% of that shrink at self-checkout. Of course, all the shrink doesn't happen at self-checkout, but at the self-checkout, we're able to kind of reduce that shrink by 70%. It can identify 27 different ways of stealing at the self-checkout. I challenge you to think of five, right? Because I couldn't. If you are, you might actually be, well, anyway, might be in the wrong business. That has actually been getting a lot of traction. What we did in the fourth quarter of last year is we identified, we hired this one gentleman, Ed McCabe, who came from Zebra and was there for a couple of decades.
We identified which retailers were sort of in their refresh cycle or coming up. We identified these 40 accounts. Those are the 40 accounts where we're actually getting very good traction with our pilots and our proof of concepts. What's actually been very interesting is that we've now actually had some really large retailers come to us and say, "Hey, we heard about your AI software. We want to check this out." Right? Our AI software is actually starting to generate some interest outside of the top 40 accounts that we identified. We feel very good about that. In addition, our AI software is also able to do age verification. In the past, you weren't really able to go up to a self-checkout and buy a bottle of wine, right?
Now with our AI, it can identify, depending on the state and regulations and things like that, it can identify your age. The employee no longer needs to come check your ID or any of that other stuff, right? The employee can spend their time doing, again, more value-add stuff. The last thing, and I'm sure this is one feedback from the meetings that we've had, is produce recognition. If you ever bought lettuce or if you've bought bananas and you go to a self-checkout, you have to go and you have to punch in the number, you have to look at the code, you have to go through and find beef or banana, and then you'd have to go and find it.
Now, what you can do is you can just put it there, the camera will look at it, and the AI will recognize, "Oh, that's a banana," and it will scan it through, right? From a customer experience, what it's doing is to help that customer experience, but it's also increasing the throughput within that exchange, right? Which also is a benefit, again, for the retailer and the customer. One of our customers then asked if we can then take the AI and, "Hey, can you now move it to the point of sale," right? Where the manned person is with the cash register because there is also shrink that's happening there. In the future, you'll see us take that AI and we'll bring it over into the aisles as well.
We'll connect into the CCTV cameras and we'll be able to identify if things are being stolen within the aisles and things like that. The AI solution is something that has actually been gaining a good amount of traction for us. The other aspect of this is if you actually look back, probably like five plus years ago, we were not number one in Europe, right? One of the things, and remember, self-checkout in Europe is a little bit newer than it is in North America. One of the things that the retailers wanted was modularity, right? They did not want to kind of get stuck with one vendor. Typically an RFP in Europe will be an RFP for hardware, an RFP for software. In many cases, we've actually won both of them because of the integration between our hardware and software.
That is typically what they wanted. Now, in the U.S. market, what you have seen is that because it has been 20 years since the first self-checkouts, that is a market where the hardware and software has been one vendor. The retailers now, the trend that you are seeing in the industry is that the retailers want to decouple this. Our solution is already there. Some of our competitors are going to have to upgrade their systems, and they will probably do it soon. They will be tough competitors, but we think we do have another advantage in terms of our modularity with our hardware-software solutions. We think that is also a benefit.
Lastly, what I would also say is that, again, from a service perspective, the more and more self-checkouts that we have, it's the same service organization that we're using to go and fix those machines or if something's happening to them to go and service them, right? We can increase the density of our footprint of hardware using that same service. That can also help us from an efficiency standpoint that we think we can kind of continue to drive some of this margin expansion. Let me tell you kind of what that's resulted in. Where are we today in terms of the third quarter? If you look at our third quarter, this is the third quarter in a row of double-digit year-over-year order entry growth, right?
I think this is a reflection of sort of that ongoing demand that I'm talking about, that nice steady ATM plus the teller cash recycler, the fit for purpose, and then that North America retail as well as the retail recovery. Our revenue grew 2% year-over-year, and our adjusted EPS of $1.39 is up more than $1 year-over-year. We have historically not been an EPS company, but I think you're going to hear us talk more and more about EPS as we move forward because there's a number of things that we've aligned and strategized around in terms of FX hedging, in terms of our tax rate, and then obviously our share repurchase, right? I think EPS will become more of an interesting story as we go forward. On the retail side of the business, I talked about how it's seeing a recovery.
We saw an order entry growth of 40% on a year-over-year basis, and revenue was up 8%. We are seeing that recovery that we have been talking about on the retail side of the business, something investors have been looking for. We are also proud to say that we have had our fourth consecutive quarter of positive free cash flow. If you look historically, the company had not been a positive free cash flow company in Q1, Q2, and Q3. All our cash flow came in the fourth quarter, right? With Tom Timko who has come on board as CFO a couple of years ago, he was very, very focused in on operations and ensuring that we can actually drive consistent free cash flow, positive free cash flow on a quarter-over-quarter basis. We expect that we will continue that going forward.
Continuous positive free cash flow every quarter going forward. We did get an S&P credit upgrade rating from B2B+ in part because of our free cash flow generation and the traction that we've seen kind of getting there. In terms of what we said about the guidance for 2025, we did say that we were trending towards the higher end of our guidance ranges for revenue, adjusted EBITDA, and our free cash flow. I think so far we've seen some pretty good momentum over the last couple of quarters and heading here into the fourth quarter. Let me talk about a little progress on our growth strategies for the different segments. In the banking segment, I talked about that branch automation solution, right? Going deeper and deeper into the branch and our fit for purpose.
We actually started delivering our first teller cash recyclers to our customers in this last quarter. It is starting to gain that traction. In fact, one of the customers has asked us, we are replacing their teller cash machines from a different vendor. They have actually asked us if we can, obviously, I will put it this way. Most large banks do not say, "Oh, here is my entire fleet. I am going to replace them on day one." What they typically do is they will kind of roll from branch to branch, right? There is a pretty good visibility once you get one of those deals. In the interim, they have dual vendors. What they have asked us is, "Hey, can you service both of the machines?" Right?
We did a small acquisition called ATX that allows us to actually now do a multi-vendor solution because it's not just about knowing the machine, but it's also about getting the spare parts. That's what this ATX acquisition helps us with. We've got some good momentum here on the teller cash recyclers, great feedback from our customers. We expect that to be one of our growth engines next year. On the retail side of the business, I talked about the smart vision, our AI, and the AI is also getting really great traction. Our dynamic smart vision is live in 50-plus stores globally. We continue to kind of go down that path. Typically how it works is you'll roll it out into a dark store.
Instagram shoppers, right, who go into stores that are not open to customers, those types of things. Once you do that, you go into your pilots. It is lab, dark stores, pilots. That is kind of we continue down that path. We are exactly kind of where we want to be in terms of where we are with all the retailers and the traction that we are getting there. In terms of the service side, increasing density. The more teller cash recyclers that we continue to drive, it is the same technology as the ATM, right? The density increases. The more self-checkouts that we have, the density increases. That service benefit starts to you start getting some of that scale and efficiency benefit, right?
Some of that, I think, will result in the margin expansion that we're talking about going into the next couple of years. We did make an accelerated investment this year. If you look at our gross margins, they will be comparable to last year because we've invested into some technologies. Our field technician software, we've accelerated that rollout. We started in Puerto Rico, moved to Canada, and we accelerated into the U.S. What this is, is typically like when an ATM, something happened in the ATM, what we used to do was we'd send the nearest person. If you were the nearest person, we'd say, "Okay, we need to roll you out to it." What if you didn't have the right part in your truck, right? Or you didn't have the right experience with that particular machine.
What this technology, this software will do is we'll now say, "Oh, okay, well, he has the right part, and he has the experience doing it." We will truck, even though he's further, we'll truck roll him. We don't have to do a multiple repeat visit to that ATM or that scope or whatever it is, right? We see that that's one of the places where we think we'll see that benefit as we continue this rollout in terms of the investments we're making. Some of it's working. Our SLAs are up pretty significantly year-over-year. Our long-running service calls is reduced on a year-over-year basis very significantly. We're seeing some of that traction. I think you'll probably, we've said, you'll see some of that traction in those investments starting in the fourth quarter as well.
On the operations side, tremendous focus on improving our working capital. If you look at our DSOs, improved by about nine days. Our DIOs improved by about 11 days. I think there's a lot of opportunity on DPOs as well, the day's payables, as we go into 2026. Still more opportunities on DSOs and DIOs as well. I think you've seen that we've actually had a very strong focus that's actually starting to gain traction here. We're also optimizing our manufacturing operations and doing a lot of consolidation work, which also we think will kind of help with some of the margins. Lastly, what I'd say is that we're very focused on our operating expenses. We've identified about $50 million of run rate savings in 2026.
When I say identified, I mean that we've actually got a list that shows 200 different items, who the owners are, what the action plans are, and where they need to be at what periods of time, right? We think there's more opportunity on top of that. One of the things that you'll always hear us say is making sure that we do what we say, right? Our say-do ratio. We're very committed to that. We don't want to commit more than what we have already planned, but we have identified and we think there's more opportunity on the OPEX side. Maybe you hear more about that as we move forward and as we start identifying specific action plans and people against that. Let me go to what we've talked about in terms of our three-year plan.
I've talked about the growth engines that we have in our banking, very nice steady, and then on top of that, the growth engines, the recovery in the retail plus the opportunity in North America. This is what it translates into. In 2025, it's about flat to low single-digit revenue growth and then starting to accelerating to kind of this mid-single-digit growth by 2027, right? I think we're exactly where we need to be, and we're seeing some really positive signs on the retail side and the teller cash recycler acceptance side. Still feeling very good about where we are there. Adjusted EBITDA, we said we're trending towards the higher end of all these guidance ranges, so trending towards the upper end of that $470-$490 this year.
I am committed to continuing to drive that through all the initiatives that I've just talked about to continue to drive that adjusted EBITDA. What that's going to result in is our free cash flow growth. That conversion in 2025 is about 40% conversion rate to get to our $190 million-$210 million. It's about a 50% conversion in 2026 and a 60% conversion in 2027. What I would highlight here is that there's nothing really in here that's out of our control, right? We're not banking on something big to happen. We're not banking on some big M&A or some. This is all about execution. Everything that you see on this chart here is sort of within our hands. We just have to go and execute to it. If we execute, this is what we're capable of achieving.
That's roughly about $800 million in 2025, 2026, 2027 cumulative of free cash flow, right? Again, a commitment we've made to return the vast majority of that free cash flow back to shareholders today in the form of share repurchase. All of this has resulted in what we call a fortress balance sheet, right? I talked about the upgrade we got to B2B+ from S&P because of that outlook, the commitment we've made in terms of the $200 million share repurchase program, our free cash flow target I talked about of 40% conversion, so nearly doubling our free cash flow and continuing to grow that to 60% in 2027. If you look at our cash balance and our revolving credit facility, $310 million of credit facility, there's no borrowings outstanding. We don't plan to tap this.
This is purely just to adjust in case, but our intention is to really not tap this credit facility given our cash balance of $280 million plus the free cash flow generation that we expect going forward. Our net leverage is well within our range, 1.6. It's in our range of 1.25-1.75. This is, as far as I know, the best in the industry in terms of net leverage. Our commitment is to stay here. In fact, as our adjusted EBITDA continues to grow, this number is probably going to continue to shrink. Let me talk a little bit about the capital allocation framework. We talked about that fortress balance sheet. The CapEx for our business is very light. It's a CapEx light model. It's about 1.5% of sales. Really, not much is going to be changing from that standpoint.
We'll continue to invest in R&D because customers have told us we have the best products in the industry, right? They want to reward us with more. As long as we continue to drive up our service SLAs, which we have been, I think there's more opportunity here because our products are so good, right? This is what our customers have told us. We'll continue here, but think of CapEx as about 1.5%, very CapEx-like business. Talked about the return to capital of shareholders, and we expect to return the vast majority of that free cash flow. I did say that we did make an acquisition. We get a lot of questions of, "Oh, wait, are you going to do a big acquisition?" The answer is no, right?
When we think about our capital allocation strategy, it's always in the context of where are the best returns. Today, we think the best returns is going to be on our share repurchase program, given sort of where we think the value in the valuation in the stock. We will do M&A, but it has to have a better return than what we see in that share repurchase program. We did see an opportunity, but they need to be small, bolt-on, and immediately accretive, right? Small, bolt-on, immediately accretive. If you look at the last acquisition we did, I mean, it was higher margin than probably our service business. We paid one-time sales for it, immediately accretive.
Those are the types of things that you'll probably see us do to continue to strengthen, probably on the services side, most likely, which is kind of where you'll see the best valuations. That is sort of how to think about our returns-based approach in terms of our capital allocation framework. If I stop there and kind of close, here are the key things I want you to take away, right? We are the best positioned from an end-to-end branch cash ecosystem perspective. Nice steady underlying demand for our ATMs with growth opportunities and our fit for purpose as well as our teller cash recycler.
On the retail side, strong number one in Europe with taking that exact same product and strategy to come to the U.S. market in terms of modularity and our AI solutions to see that growth in a market that's much larger than where we're number one in Europe today. We see a lot of growth opportunity there for us. Third is our continued journey in lean, right? Focusing on really improving every part of the structure from our manufacturing and gross margins to our OPEX structure to our working capital, DSO, our cash conversion cycle, and continued commitment to improving that and driving that lean story and lean commitment. Fourth, maintaining that strong balance sheet. I can't emphasize this enough.
We really want to make sure and ensure that we keep this fortress balance sheet, and we are on track to nearly double our free cash flow generation, right? You saw kind of where we are going to continue to drive that free cash flow, and we are very committed to doing that. Of course, returning that cash to our shareholders in the form of our share repurchase program that we just announced in December. I hope that was a good overview for you in terms of the Diebold Nixdorf story, and I think I have some time for some Q&A. Yes.
Your excellent presentation brought opportunities. Let me think you were going to grow in the 10%-15% range instead of 2% in the third quarter and single digits in 2027. Can you help me understand what I missed?
Yeah, no, absolutely.
If you think about what we've learned, let me take it in two different pieces, right? If you look at the large banks in North America, while they have a very large footprint, most won't spend all of that money in one quarter, right? It's kind of rolled out over a period of time, right? You can actually win all of that business, but that revenue income doesn't come in. It's kind of more of a staggered approach, right? On the retail side, yes, the opportunity is very large, but it's sort of the same concept, right? What happens is if you look at 2025, we didn't dial in a very big number for our retail wins, right? In 2026, we started dialing in some of those wins and coming in.
What typically retailers will do is they'll roll out a number of stores, then continue to roll out and then get bigger and bigger and bigger, right? I think what helps is some of that visibility. That's why it's not like a rocket ship. Typically, they won't do the installations all in one quarter, one year. Yeah.
Looks like there's been a very impressive turnaround in business. Can you talk back a few years ago and financial challenges that the company faced and what you've done to turn it around, especially with free cash flow? Also, what are your points when the company has a capital-light model? Given that outcome, the free cash flow generation has been a challenge in the past. You can just talk to us.
Yeah.
In terms of the first question, historically, we really did not actually have a financial challenge. What ended up happening was that we had an investor. We did an acquisition financed by a lot of debt. That debt was callable by the German investors. It was called and put us in basically a capital crunch that required us to go into a restructuring, a bankruptcy. We were there for a very short period of time, and it was like 72 days. We came out, restructured everything. You can see we have had some very, very strong support from our debt holders who are in our equity currently. I would not look at it as, "Hey, we had financial problems in the past." I think that was sort of an event that happened that caused a capital crunch immediately. Sorry, the second question was?
Talk about free cash flow being a challenge in the past. I mean, obviously, you're finally growing rapidly. Can you talk about how that's happening and why it was a problem given the capital rights that's gone?
Yeah. I think a big part of it was just sort of, let's say when Tom came in and Tom built out a completely new team, I think most of his team have been there less than a year. What he brought in was a discipline to all of the different metrics. In particular, when you look at the cash conversion cycle, DSOs, DPOs, DIOs, etc., there wasn't a lot of management there. Even when you think about Octavio, when he came in, here's what would happen. We would win a deal, right? Let's say that we rolled it out over a year.
We would start building all of those ATMs immediately for the entire year rather than sort of staggering it out. What you saw was a big jump in inventory, right, because we were just building it. There was not that strategy and discipline in the company. Octavio has really changed that around where if you sat in some of these meetings now, you can see what that discipline is. It is a night and day difference in terms of what has happened in the past.
Where did your products lose winners for other products, or is there a net profit?
No. We make margins on our products and our services. If you look, in this last quarter, it was roughly about 26% product margins, 26% on the services side. We committed to growing our product margins like 50-plus basis points on a year-over-year basis.
This year, we'll be much higher than that. On the services side, we think there's a lot more room for improvement. We think we can do 50-100 basis points of margin expansion on the services side as well. We think there's opportunity there. Octavio makes it a point. Listen, we don't sell at a loss just to get the services. We want to make money on both. Okay. With that, I'm 16 seconds over, so I think that worked out perfectly. Thanks very much, everyone. If anyone has questions, feel free to reach out.