Our next presenter is Fortive. We have Tamara Newcombe. She's President and CEO of AHS and PT Segments. We also have Elena Rosman, the company's VP of Investor Relations. And I think Tamara will kick it off with some slides, and then we'll go to our fireside chat. Thank you. Thank you very much for being here.
Thank you.
Thanks for having us.
Welcome, everyone. Thanks for being with us today. I'm thrilled to be here. Jim, unfortunately, had a personal situation unrelated to Fortive. He was not able to make it. So, I'll let you have Elena and I this morning, both for an opening presentation, and then I think we'll have a few questions, time for a few questions. They jump in here. So I have the opportunity, the pleasure, of being able to talk about our strong performance in Q1, our winning strategy, and how our Fortive Business System continues to differentiate our performance. A strong performance for Q1, if you listened to our earnings call just recently, you saw that we were able to exceed expectations across all three segments in both revenue growth, operating margin, and free cash flow. Our winning strategy continues.
We focus on connected workflows where we can derive value in our customer and end markets. My responsibility, as Andrew shared, is the advanced healthcare solutions segment and the precision technology segment. I'll go a little bit deeper this morning in those two segments. Then my peer, Olumide, leads the intelligent operating solutions segment. Our Fortive Business System is how we have been able to differentiate our performance now 14 consecutive quarters in a row of revenue growth and 15 quarters of adjusted expanded operating margins. The Fortive Business System, and when I say it's how we do what we do, it's part of our culture where every one of the 17,000 associates wakes up every single day thinking about how do we get better. It's a set of tools, and it's a language.
And then a language that allows us to cross silos, silos functionally, geographically, across the OpCos, to continue to deliver these phenomenal results. Our confidence coming out of Q1 has allowed us to raise for 2024 and reflects double-digit earnings per share and free cash flow growth. We talk about the market opportunities, and we've been very purposeful in the portfolio to align to higher growth secular trends. And one example of this is what's happening across the world in the transition to a more sustainable future: decarbonization. It's driving the electrification of everything, and this power ecosystem is a tremendous opportunity across all of Fortive. And when you're in the business of selling a bunch of equipment that you see on this slide, you love technology changes.
What you're seeing in power generation is moving away from fossil fuels to wind and solar and hydrogen and new forms of greener energies. This changes how the power is stored. You no longer can put it in a barrel. You need to put it into a storage system, an electronic storage system. The movement, the transmission of power is changing. You're hearing about microgrids, EV infrastructure, the build-out of our infrastructure in electrical transmission. And then how we consume power, the consumption of power is changing. In the data center, just massive growth in compute and communications pushed by artificial intelligence. Every industrial factory is going through an evolution. What used to they used to take AC power right off the grid. They're all moving to direct current, DC factories, which means the motor drives in that factory have to change.
E-mobility, how we power cars, trucks, trains, buses, boats, that's all changing. And then even in our homes, our HVAC systems, our heat pumps, where we're going to plug in our robots, all of that is changing in how we consume and we manage, manage power. And you look at the, the well-known brands, the preferred brands across Fortive. I'll start with our Fluke. And the technicians that are installing the wind farms and servicing these end devices, they need new equipment, and that's where Fluke enables our technicians that service this amazing power ecosystem. Then you have the Tektronix Keithley family of products. Keithley, acquired back in 2010, experts in power, both low power, high power. And engineers now designing these new systems, they need new test and measurement equipment.
There's new semiconductor technologies out there called wide band gap that are being used in all of these different electronics, and it requires the upgrade of new test and measurement equipment. And then newest to the family, you know, Tek and Fluke are 75 years young. Newest to the family is EA, who's only been around 50 years. They are a best-in-class DC power supply test solution. And you'll see the storage systems that live in the power generation, the uninterruptible power supplies that live in transmission, and the power supplies that live in data centers and the batteries across e-mobility, that's where EA comes in and adds to the Tektronix portfolio. And then Qualitrol.
For decades, Qualitrol has been monitoring the critical assets within our electrical grid, and they build the sensors and monitoring systems that will continue to grow and expand in this power ecosystem. So it's a tremendous secular trend. It's got a 20-30-year lifespan, and it will continue to innovate and bring great products out here. About a third of the portfolio today is aligned to this secular trend and where we're seeing a lot of a lot of growth. It's also very diversified in the end markets that you go after, because it touches many, many end markets. So I want to give some proof points that our winning strategy is turning into business results. And I've got examples here of precision technologies and the advanced healthcare solutions segments. Very different approaches in these two segments.
So if I start with precision technologies, largely the brands and the operating companies that we started with when Fortive was formed in 2016. What we've done in precision technologies is really employed strategies that align to these higher growth markets, leveraged our Fortive business systems and the tools we've created that are driving innovation velocity. We talked in 2017 about the innovation at Tektronix around a platform strategy for oscilloscopes that has allowed the flywheel of innovation to continue, and they're now taking that strategy to software and to Keithley systems. This has opened up a market for us of about $20 billion, and we've grown our recurring revenues in both services and contractual revenues, within this segment, and we're up over 25% now.
So this has largely been a story of organic FBS and innovation, and now we've added on top of that the acquisition of EA, which just closed here in the beginning of the year. It was January 4th. If I move to the advanced healthcare solutions segment, a very different way that this segment was built. If you go back to the spin-out, we had $170 million of revenue here in Fluke Health and Invetech. And so this is a story of very disciplined acquisitions, and we've built out a segment, RaySafe, Landauer, ASP, Censis, Provation, a set of companies that, first, are 75% recurring revenues, either SaaS or consumables. They are brands that are beloved by physicians and technicians.
I had a chance when I started about a year ago in this segment and got to visit some ASP customers, and I have a photo of a nurse hugging a STERRAD machine. These are machines that keep our patients safe and are beloved by, by many in that field. This is about a $10 billion market, addressable market today. We'll continue to expand that. But you can see here that we're delivering tremendous top-line growth in this segment, and we still have runway to improve our margins here, and we're targeted at getting those to the 30% range in the coming years. So exciting, what we've been able to look back and show that we can do, which gives confidence in what we're going to do in the future.
So as I think about closing here, talked about the strong performance that we saw in Q1, the confidence that we have in the full year. We're a $6 billion company today with a $60 billion addressable market out there. We're continuing to focus on our connected workflows and where we can innovate to drive new customer value as well as value back to Fortive. And we see a path here of continued earnings per share growth, double that in the coming years as well as earnings. Tremendous opportunity, excited to be a part of it and to share with all of you. Maybe open it up for questions now? Yeah, sure. So maybe the way we'll do it, Elena, we do have you, so maybe because we do have Tamara here, the plan is I'll focus on PT and AHS, and then maybe we'll go to a bigger picture.
Perfect.
So maybe you can go big picture. Okay. Yeah.
We can do.
We can do everything. All right. So why don't we start. Look, I think one area that sort of we've spent a lot of time talking about is software, right? It's now up to $1 billion in revenue, growing high single-digit this year. So, you know, how do you think about the M&A strategy from here for this platform? Yeah, I'll give a couple thoughts. Nothing's changed in our strategy around software. We, the Fortive business systems, is a dynamic set of tools, and we've created the Fortive software systems. So a big part of our software strategy is how do we grow that organically within the businesses that we have.
You think of the businesses that are pure software, often forgot is Tektronix has the largest software development team, and they are also delivering innovation to the Fortive software systems. If you look at our funnel, if I were to open up the funnel at Fortive, you would see a really nice mix of software, hardware, and data type companies that we're looking at. Last year, we had a good mix of acquisitions. We had two software, two hardware, and one data.
You know, our M&A strategy, it stays the same. I mean, we look at companies where we like the market, we like what's happening in the market, the growth trends, like I talked about in power. We the company is best-in-class in the industry. It's accretive to us and our financials. And we think that as the owner, we're the best owner for that business.
Was you know, if you look post-COVID, there was a spike in software valuations, and they seemingly have come down sort of pre-COVID levels. But another problem we've heard is that a lot of these platforms have gotten a lot bigger during COVID because, you know, people sort of added to them. So do you guys feel, you know, one of the commentaries we've heard that some of these software deals have gotten sort of beyond these bolt-on sizes, where they become so big that it's becoming a lot tougher to sort of consider them, all of a sudden they become a lot more strategic in nature? I don't know if you have any thoughts there. Maybe I could just start.
So the two software acquisitions that we did in the last six months were both bolt-ons, you know, really niche applications that fit very nicely, you know, one in Azima DLI into Fluke, and the other RedEye into Accruent, where they had, you know, leading technologies, you know, that could be literally bolted onto our existing platforms. I think, you know, those obviously are smaller, Andrew, and, you know, very much deliver on the return on, you know, invested capital targets that we have for smaller bolt-ons to get to a double-digit, you know, return on invested capital, you know, before five years. So typically, those smaller deals hit that target by around year three.
Larger deals, I think, you know, we've seen some of the software deals, you know, have, you know, certainly higher valuations that would probably push beyond, you know, our preference from a discipline perspective to stay within the return targets that we typically would target. Excellent. So maybe we can go to PT, so not much of a diversion. So on recent demand trends, book-to-bill of 1x in first quarter, expecting similar in second quarter. What are the areas where demand has already churned up, and what are you still expecting to improve in the second half? Specific to Precision Technologies. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah, and we did see the book-to-bill get back to 1-to-1. I think I'd start with what's been really stable in PT, and we've been purposeful about continuing to work our strategy here, is our services.
I mentioned 25% of the business is now services, and that's stayed a very stable mid-single digit growth for us, which gives us a great foundation. In the sensing technology group, we expect the orders picture to be back positive this quarter in Q2. And it's mixed in the sensing technology group. We're seeing great demand in the electrification space and also in safety. So we've got sensors that go into critical care environments. We've got sensors that go into the food and beverage kind of safety space. That has remained strong. We're still getting back to normalization, especially Europe industrial sensors. But overall, they'll go positive in Q2. And then Tektronix, we're expecting to go positive in Q3 from an order standpoint. And for Tektronix, it's, you know, I mentioned service, really strong. We've had green shoots in the Keithley and Sonix business.
These are systems that go into the build-out of the new memory that is, it's called high bandwidth memory, HBM, that is needed with the NVIDIA chips as we build out all of this compute. So we've had really strong demand there in Q1. This quarter, Q2 and Q3 are kind of mil/gov quarters for Tek. So we need to see the spend come. We've just got budgets approved. We're starting to get word that budgets are moving now in the mil/gov space, which is a big Q2, Q3 for us. And then after that, it's the broad base of business. So our channel is normalized as they're selling through, and we're seeing good point of sale. They're replacing orders. And then the last piece to come back is the big R&D projects, big projects.
EA has a lot of very large capital projects that we got to see that come back as we get through the year.
Andrew, can you just remind us on Keithley because I think Jim was talking about an eight-figure order. How sustainable, how excited should we get about Keithley and semiconductors and their exposure?
Yeah. There are two parts to Keithley. So when we talked about that order, it's specific to the piece of Keithley that's systems that goes into production. Overall, in our business, it's a relatively small part of the business. The piece of Keithley that is the R&D engineer and sits on the bench, that part of Keithley is tied directly to the power wave that we're seeing and very, very strong in the instrumentation space.
Do you feel that these trends are just and I appreciate this, Tam, it could be choppy, but do you feel there's a good runway for Keithley?
There's an excellent runway for Keithley. The production piece of so Tektronix is predominantly playing in the R&D. This production space, it does get to the build-out and
yeah, and just thank you for bringing it up. So, you know, as I said, just it's sort of hard for us looking from the outside. You know, sort of I think outlooks from some of the Tektronix competitors vary a bit. I think Keithley is saying sequential orders improvement in second half, National Instruments, orders to turn up year over year in December 2024 at the earliest. Can you just remind us about how is Tektronix different? Because I think these are the two companies everybody brings up.
Maybe you can throw in Rohde & Schwarz there as well.
Yeah, it makes sense. All four companies play in test and measurement. So it makes sense that we talk about them together. Tektronix shifted a strategy back in 2017 and moved more towards this power ecosystem and the communications piece in wired communications, which is high-performance compute driven by AI. That is a very different profile in end market than if you were one of our peers who has a large investment in wireless. And there you're waiting for significant infrastructure upgrades. You know, we're in 5G. You're waiting for 6G, 7G. And we consciously decided not to do that. Then in the span of product realization, you start in sort of research, development, you go into some validation phases, and then you go into production. We are weighted much heavier in the research and R&D and into validation.
We have partnered closely with National Instruments over decades. They play more in the production, the production space. So different parts of the workflow, different end markets. No, this is terrific. I really appreciate it. And can you just sort of add, you know, tech through tariffs and, you know, we're back to sort of seemingly trade wars. You know, how has supply chain and manufacturing footprint of the business evolved in the past, I guess, six years? The past six years, yeah. And you said specific to tech, but this is sort of broader. This is sort of the industry.
I just remember tech was always I remember going to Shanghai, and I know that this was like the crown jewel for manufacturing for both Danaher and Fortive over the years, so.
Correct. Yeah, it's still remarkable. So that's where my anchoring comes from. Yeah.
So I think Tektronix, much like many manufacturers, went to some type of vertical integration probably 15 years ago, and you vertically integrated by location. And for us, a large part of that was China. But we're in year 3 of a 5-year strategy to really be more robust in our ability to build any place in the world. Because you think about you can talk about de-risking China, but you have to think forward to what will you need to de-risk next. And so our strategy has been one of how do we get the capability to build any product in any one of our facilities. So we're about 3 years into a 5-year plan to be able to have that kind of diversity
. Gotcha. So maybe we'll go to EA. With the EA acquisition, there's a clear cross-selling strategy. Tektronix salespeople can sell EA products.
So how quickly can you train the salesforce and start getting pulled through on orders?
Yeah. So we closed January 4th. So then we had to meet each other, get started here. Our focus is clearly commercial. We spent you know, it was good timing for us because the start of the year is always when we do our sales kickoffs, and we were able to integrate the EA team and incorporate a lot of training. One of the thesis we had as we were making the acquisition was that it's an amazing market that they sit in, this power ecosystem. They have a best-in-class product. Both those things are true. And the third was we could take their sales go-to-market, and we could 10x it. And that's what we are starting to see the early signs of.
Our small orders, we're on a rate pre-acquisition of 2,000 or so per quarter. If you were to average it out, we've doubled that just here in the first quarter. So we're seeing a really nice uptick and expansion of the smaller orders. And you saw that we adjusted our guide on EA. What has slowed is the large orders. And these you know, they are in the middle of some of these gigafactory build-outs. They saw the same surge that Tektronic saw in the China EV battery infrastructure of charging stations. And that wave has completed in China. We're seeing it pick up in Korea now. It's pretty strong in Korea. And now we're waiting to get the traction in the US. So we got to see those big orders turn back on. Funnels up 20% just in Q1. In dollars since the close of EA. Okay. Yeah.
It's been strong. And it's you know, we're walking through the same thresholds. Different personas in the customer, but we're walking through the same thresholds. It's another category that fits in the Tektronix bag.
So maybe let's jump to advanced healthcare solutions. So ASP, this is low temperature sterilization. Been with Fortive since 2019. North American consumable sales up 11% year-over-year in first quarter. Where are we trending for the full year given some of the noise in second half of last year?
Yeah. Trend for the year will be high single digits for ASP consumables. And there's a couple of things driving that. Last year, 2023, was a really strong capital year for ASP. So we get to build off of that footprint to drive the utilizations and the consumables. The other piece is the innovation that's happening within ASP. We've announced a new consumable BioTrace.
It's launching slowly because we need approvals in every single country. We've got about 100 trials in place right now. That will build towards the second half of this year and into next year. The move in North America from indirect to direct has impacted the strategy at ASP really positive. It's accelerated their deep and differentiated strategy. They're experts in the SPD department, the Sterile Processing Department. They go very deep there. They have people on staff. They're a technician community that knows everything about the equipment and the sterilization kind of rules for the equipment that goes in it. Very different than their peer. Their peer is very broad, very broad, not so deep. They are holding education symposiums on-site with these customers because they can see weekly their consumable rates.
So this visibility now to weekly consumable rates by hospital is giving them an opportunity to go and impact the utilization customer by customer. That's a huge part of their strategy is cycles per machine. And relative to the expectation at the start of the year, how is surgical volumes trending? And I think that's, is that the right key macro variable for your business? I assume it is, right? Yeah. Yeah, I would say that's still a good macro. And from expectations, I'd say we're right on what we expected. The ex-China, like outside of China, we're back to pre-COVID rates. Within China, we had kind of plotted by quarter what we expected with coming out of this anti-graft issue. We're about 95%, which is right about where we thought. We did have starting in February. So this is already baked into our great results in Q1.
But we did see in February, there's a nurse strike in Korea. So that's brought some surgical volume down. But like I said, we're expecting that to be over here in Q2. And you've talked in the past how new product introduction takes longer in life sciences. Can you talk about the new product introductions for 2024, what targeted NPI revenue is for this year, and where you would like to see the trend over time? Yeah. So our trend is more velocity. And at ASP, the BioTrace NPI will exit, probably exit rate on $10 million annual increase in consumables with that NPI. At Fluke Health, we announced in Q4 a new infusion device analyzer. This is a refresh to the Fluke Health portfolio. It's been a long time since we've refreshed that. I'd like to see two NPIs, maybe three, every single year in a refresh.
It's some replacement revenue, but we do expect an increase, a net positive in those NPIs. If you move to the software businesses, Provation has continued to drive a differentiated experience in their SaaS offering versus on-prem. They launched and released video in Apex, which is driving more desire for that product. Censis is on their third module release of what they call AI , which is their asset recovery platform. So across every single one of the businesses in advanced healthcare, we're driving the innovation flywheel. Maybe sort of talk about Provation just to focus there. You had a tough comp in first quarter, but SaaS portion, as you said, continues to have double-digit growth. There is 2, 3-time revenue uplift on SaaS conversions. So where are we in the SaaS revenue mix today versus back in 2021 at the time of the acquisition?
Where d o you expect it to be by 2026?
It's a long question. SaaS at Provation. So SaaS at Provation, a couple of things. 35% of the mix today. It's 3 times what it was at our jumping-off point. So in 3 years, we've grown. We've 3X'd the SaaS revenue at Provation. One piece, there's a tough comp here in the first half. We did a large on-prem order last year in the first half. And it got us the install base in a government healthcare account that will it throws off your comps because it's not in the recurring revenue. We took all of that at once. But we have locked in the footprint to be able to upsell over the coming years and then eventually move to SaaS there.
So I think it was the right move to extend our on-prem solution and bring more customers into the family.
And where do you see SaaS going? You know, as I said, as 2026, but whatever date you want to pick.
Yeah, by 2026, I would expect at Provation it to be 60%+, just if you just do the math on the numbers.
And I guess last question. You've recently increased the quarterly dividend for the first time since going public, directed about 20% of free cash flow to buyback last year. So how are you thinking about capital return more broadly? And are you considering moving from opportunistic to more systematic repurchase strategy?
Maybe I can take that one. So first, I would say our priority for capital deployment hasn't changed, right? We're still very much focused on disciplined M&A.
We talked earlier about where that fits in our five growth platforms across Fortive. Some changes, I think two changes that you mentioned that we've made in the last couple of years. One was to institute a share repurchase authorization. So our board and our management team are always looking at ways to enhance shareholder value. And so we put in place a couple of years ago a 20 million share authorization. We drew down about 11 million on that over the first two years of its implementation. And we just re-upped it back to the 20 million level at the start of this year. And that really speaks to the opportunistic nature of our opportunity to kind of look at where we're valued on an intrinsic basis and supplement shareholder returns where we think it makes sense. That has also offset share dilution over that period as well.
Now, just in the last couple of months, we did increase the dividend. So while, again, it's not a central focus of our capital deployment strategy, the reality is we have grown earnings and free cash flow at a mid-teens compounded rate annually over the last 5+ years. As a reflection of that, our dividend is going to grow more in line with that sort of earnings and free cash flow growth over time. We're out of time. Thank you so much. This is terrific, really. Thank you. Thank you, Andrew. Thank you, Tam. Thank you. Thank you, Elena.