To the stage, Olumide Soroye and Elena [Dume], sorry, Elena Rosman. Did I say Elena Dume? I can't believe I said that.
It's okay.
Elena Rosman, Head of IR at Fortive. I believe we've got some slides to run through, and then we'll get into the Q&A session. Thanks, Olumide.
Excellent. Thanks for having us. It's good to be here. So, just to set the stage for the Q&A, I thought it might be helpful to touch on three things. First, just a recap of how the year started overall for us at Fortive. Second, just some reflections on the key drivers of our success at Fortive, and what those are, and why they are enduring and sustainable. And then finally, I'll just reaffirm the confidence we have in our full-year 2024 outlook, as well as the long-term financial targets that we shared just about a year ago, almost to the day, a few blocks from here. So those are the three things just to get us started. So first, how has the year started for us at Fortive?
I'd say it's been a really strong start to the year overall for us. In Q1, as you know, we exceeded expectations on revenue growth, earnings growth, and free cash flow in all three of our operating segments. We were then able to raise our outlook for the full year, and again, we remain confident in delivering that outlook, which anticipates us delivering double-digit growth in Adjusted EPS, as well as double-digit growth in free cash flows. Now, the key thing for us is what underlies that success? 'Cause if you think about it, for the last 5 years, we've delivered double-digit growth in both EPS and free cash flow compound annual growth rate over 5 years. We've been able to drive over 400 basis points improvement in adjusted gross margins, 600 basis points in adjusted operating margins.
We've been able to reduce our net working capital to revenue ratio by 350 basis points in the 5-year period. So what is it that helps us sustain those results? And I'll, I'll maybe suggest that there are three main things. The first one is, we've created this advantage positions in these three operating segments: in, in Intelligent Operating Solutions, Precision Technologies, and Advanced Healthcare Solutions. We've carefully crafted those positions to make sure they have strong, favorable secular growth trends supporting us. We've created positions that have higher recurring component, which helps it reduce cyclicality. The main thing for us in this segment is what we do for customers. We deliver solutions that delight customers and help them improve their safety and productivity outcomes. Our, our teams are passionate about this. That's what drives us every single day.
The second thing that underpins our success is the Fortive Business System, and you've all hopefully heard about how important that is to us. That's our culture. That's who we are. Now, what does it really mean? I'll try to express that in terms of two outcomes from the Fortive Business System. The first is what it's done for us in terms of accelerating innovation. Based on the new set of capabilities in the Fortive Business System, our teams have now identified over $1 billion of new revenue opportunities from the dream stage of our lean portfolio management system as part of FBS. That means a lot of new innovation ideas coming out. Now, at the same time, we've been able to shift 25% of our development capacity from sustaining legacy products to helping build new things in the marketplace.
That combination means, as you look ahead, just a lot of just incredible opportunity for new product introductions that delight customers and drive growth for us. The second thing FBS does that's well known is what I talked about earlier: how do you keep finding operating margin expansion, free cash flow improvement, year after year after year? It's a big part of our value creation flywheel. We talk about over 75 basis points of adjusted OMX each year. A lot of years we outperformed that. Over the last, again, 5 years, we've delivered, you've seen in the IOS segment, over 700 basis points of adjusted OMX. That's 140 basis points a year. So that's really what we're about, and that's what gives us confidence, again, that we would execute on 2024.
We'll deliver the guide we've put out there, which again, anticipates us delivering double-digit growth in Adjusted EPS, as well as free cash flows. Let me just spend a minute on the Intelligent Operating Solution segment, because in many ways, this is a demonstration of the Fortive strategic playbook that we're putting to work in all of our segments. And just a few observations on the higher growth, higher margin, and much more durable segment that IOS has become. The $2.8 billion of revenues we anticipate this year reflects about 8% compound annual growth rate in total revenues over the last 5 years. 5% core growth. Now, I think it's worth noting that we kept the segment flat in 2020, despite COVID outbreak.
If you look at the last four years, compound annual growth rate in revenues is 10% in total, and it's 7% core. This also, at the same time, we've done while expanding our addressable market by 2x to over $30 billion. That means we have a lot of runway still ahead of us from 2.8 out of 30. At the same time, we've been able to craft a third of the segment into recurring revenue models. There's over $800 million annualized software revenue value embedded in the segment now. That gives us a lot of resiliency through cycle. And again, we've been able to grow adjusted operating margins in the segment 13% compounding every single year over this period, and over 700 basis points of adjusted OMX net period. The things I talked about earlier are the drivers of this.
We crafted a segment that has three growth platforms in facilities, in asset, and in people, and I'll come back to that in a minute. We've deployed FBS to drive the performance you're seeing here and to accelerate innovation in this space, and we're gonna keep doing that. In many ways, there's still a lot ahead of us. Everything I talked about, we're doing in PT, we're doing in AHS. The deal we did in PT for EA brings in alignment with really kinda high-power test electronic solutions that will benefit from high-performance computing, renewable energy, mobility, a lot of kinda really important drivers of growth for that segment overall. FBS continues to be an anchor for us in PT. Same thing in AHS.
We now have over half the segment in recurring consumables, consumable-type models that tend to have a very stable profile, and another $200 million in software revenues in that segment. Again, you've seen the margin performance year to date. That's the power of FBS, and we'll keep doing that. So this really shows you the arc of financial promise for Fortive overall, and I'll say for IOS, as much as we're proud of this, we're far from done, and there's so much upside ahead of us. The other thing I want to touch on the next page is just the innovation agenda, and my colleague, Tami Newcombe, talked last week about how we're winning in electrification and AI as a piece of that.
And a lot of the innovation we've driven at Tektronix, which is in our PT segment, Qualitrol, as well as Fluke, on solar, on EVSE, and a whole range of other solutions that touch on this idea of electrification, is really powerful and exciting. But there's a second swim lane of innovation that we're driving, which is about winning in digital transformation. And AI enablement of that transformation is turning out to be a powerful instrument for our teams. I'll just give you a few examples. We generally think in IOS that we do three things: We help customers transform the way they manage space, we help them transform the way they manage people, and we help them transform the way they manage assets and systems. For all those three domains, it's about safety and productivity.
Our teams every day are coming up with new ways to help customers do that better, enabled by Gen AI tool sets. Just a few examples. A few weeks ago, our team on the facilities lifecycle solution space launched the Gordian Cloud Platform. What this is, think about it as a single pane of glass that helps a customer plan for their facility, any building you're in, in terms of the, the spend they need to incur in that facility, so the capital planning process. It helps them estimate the cost of specific projects, and it helps them procure the construction to actually get the projects done. And along the chain, there's a whole range of AI-powered analytics infused into that to help the customers make the right decisions. This is an exciting new thing for our customers. It's just incredible to see what that's doing for the team.
The same thing we're doing on the people side. We've always had a great business in helping keep people safe, eliminating death in the workplace. Our team's now bringing in AI-enabled analytics to predict harm and incidents before they happen. We're doing that in our Intelex business. We're also doing it in our iNet business in Industrial Scientific. Same thing on the asset management side. You've heard us talk about our eMaint business, which is a piece of Fluke, and the fact that Fluke now has 5% recurrent revenue in it, a piece of it is this eMaint business. Well, we have an AI-powered machine health business that we acquired last year as one of our four bolt-ons, and that's now integrated with eMaint to help customers not just manage their work orders, but actually predict what might come next before it happens.
That's just a few examples of how our teams take the power of the innovation engine in Fortive Business System, a deep understanding of secular growth drivers, and come up with delightful experiences for customers that intersect those two. And this is why you see us showing more resiliency across the IOS segment, is because of just this incredible pace of new product introduction. And then maybe just to close on the last page here, hopefully, in this few minutes, you get a sense of why we're incredibly excited about the journey we're on. We have a terrific value creation formula that starts with core revenue growth, and we talk about mid-single digit plus through cycle. It then goes with a powerful margin expansion track record we've shown. We talk about greater than 75 basis points a year as our baseline.
You've seen us outperform that so many times, and we expect that to continue to be the case. We're incredibly disciplined with capital allocation and deployment for M&A, and we will continue to be disciplined, but also decisive with the right opportunities. And finally, FBS is a wrap around it. That's what gives us confidence in the long-term guidance we've put out there and the targets we've put out there, which has us, between 2023 and 2028, doubling our Adjusted EPS and doubling our free cash flows. So thank you, and with that, Nigel, we can go to questions.
Thanks. Thank you very much,Ol u. I'll give you a chance to catch your breath. Certainly, if you hit $675 in 2028, your stock today is on sale, so that's fair. So while you're kind of recovering from that, Elena, maybe we could just maybe just touch on, you know, kind of non-IOS for a couple of minutes. Any sort of messages out there on kind of current quarterly trends in particular, the PT inflection and confidence in that inflection?
Sure. We don't, we don't give mid-quarter updates in terms of, you know, how things are trending in the middle of the quarter. But I, you know, happy to reiterate our guidance for Q2, which includes 0%, you know, basically flat to 2% core growth. That has continuation of momentum in IOS and healthcare with, you know, call it mid-single digit core growth. And then for PT, we have PT forecasted to be down on a core basis, mid-single digit. Across the company, you know, at the Fortive level, we have roughly 75 basis points of margin expansion. Again, that's higher than. You know, it's closer to, you know, 50%+ incremental on margins. And we have. You know, that obviously translates into good earnings growth. So we have $0.90-$0.93 of EPS targeted for Q2.
And, you know, I think that, you know, again, the, if you will, sort of the dynamic, right, that we sort of said coming into the year is our distribution of revenue, you know, is roughly a 48-52 split. That's normal linearity for the year. So we don't—we are not, you know, assuming that there's any sort of large step up. I think if you break that down, I think specifically, you asked about PT, it's a very similar profile. So for Tektronix, which is expected to be down in terms of revenue for the year, call it mid-single digit, our outlook for PT now for the year is closer to flat. That again assumes a revenue distribution of 48-52. So really benefiting in the second half, from some easier comps as we move through the year.
Okay. And just to be clear, the 48-52 split, that's-
Is for revenue.
Very, very normal.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Normal.
Okay, great. Olumide, you've been at Fortive now for, I think, three years or so. I think it was mid-2021, you joined. I think CoreLogic is where you joined from. Fortive's got a deep bench of very talented leaders, so they clearly saw something in you very special. So maybe talk about the skills that enabled you to run a business like IOS, and maybe talk about why IOS, the collection of businesses, you know, we see today in this segment makes sense.
Yeah. No, thanks. Thanks, Nigel. So I mean, first of all, it's the culture and the team. So a lot of what I've really enjoyed is finding a way to unlock the potential in our people. We have a great team that really has a lot of passion about what we do at Fortive, and that's what makes my job easy. So the main thing I try to do is really increase the passion for innovation, remove obstacles in the way of us getting that done, because really believe that driving top-line growth and value for customers is what enables our success, both from a top-line and sort of a margin expansion point of view, because pricing is a big part of our margin story, and you can't capture price if you don't create value.
So a lot of what I've tried to do is just really elevate the Fortive Business System. I'm a passionate evangelist of that, and then help our teams just get more innovative. With respect to the IOS segment, it really goes back to the point I made earlier around digital transformation, and we have these three domains that you do it in the facilities, you do it to the space. Think about it like that. You do it for the people that work in that space, and keeping them safe, keeping them productive, the same idea. And we do it for the assets and system, in that space.
And whether you're in a manufacturing plant, whether you're in a power plant, whether you're in a mine, whether you're in an international space station, you need space, you need people, and you need systems. So that's the way we kind of tie it together. The journey for us started on the system side with Fluke, and we very quickly found that customers not only wanted us to help them test and measure the performance of their systems, but keep the people around those systems safe. And so that led us into Industrial Scientific, and Intelex. And then very quickly, we found that, well, there's also kind of the space that all this happens in, and that led us to acquiring Gordian and ServiceChannel. So that's the way it hangs together for us.
It's the same idea of safety and productivity across those three domains.
Right. Okay, that's clear. You've got- you had a lot of experience with, software and, and data management analytics, in your, in your prior roles. How would you rank the quality of the software businesses, of the FAL businesses, within IOS?
Yeah. So, so our software businesses, which are the, the bulk of it's in FAL, to your point, but we have some in EHS and, and some in-
Yeah
... in connected reliability as well. You know, I think my assessment of FAL software businesses is they are a terrific platform, right? In almost $800 million of revenues, and if you think about it, it's a Rule of 40 kind of FAL group. So, you know, solid growth and incredible margins, which a lot of software companies I've seen will give a lot for the margin profile we have. I think in terms of the quality of those businesses, I think about it as starting from what we do for customers. And I would say that we have a terrific offering to customers across the FAL group. We've got almost 20,000- over 10,000 customers across that group. And I see the passion that customers have for what our teams do every day.
I would say that we have a variety in the quality of the businesses, in terms of the pure product quality of the businesses. As you can imagine, you know, Gordian is kind of a clean data software business, that's, you know, pristine and great. ServiceChannel is a very clean sort of network, software, data, performance benchmarking business, and just terrific. And Accruent, which is our first kind of toe in the water, a big toe in the water in this growth platform, is a bit more diversified. And so a lot of the journey we've been on Accruent, which by the way, you know, last quarter, the team's now seeing 20%+ growth in their new bookings.
But a lot of that journey has been trying to take that, potpourri of very different products, that came in with Accruent, you know, 30+ of them, and get that down to the eight really high-quality things that we're now focused on, and that's enabling us to have a really solid foundation to grow from. So I, I think it's a, it's a great business as a whole, but as you would imagine, there are kind of variations to the theme within that.
Yeah. I do wanna touch a bit more on the Accruent turnaround, because I think when you joined, that was. It's very much a work in progress at that time frame. And you mentioned basically 30 platforms down to eight core platforms. So is that a case of just divesting or just, you know, stopping these platforms, or was there some consolidation within that process?
Yeah. So our team at Accruent, I'm incredibly proud of the work they've done. So it's, it's been a journey of taking, you know, kind of 22+ different products and platforms that we had, that kind of didn't have the trajectory of enhancements and improvement that customers need. So it's been a process of finding a graceful way to move those customers to the 8 that are really gonna be the one we invest in. And that's, as you can imagine, that's like flying a plane and then switching out the engine at the same time. And the team's been able to do that, and that's shown up in fairly choppy kind of top-line numbers for Accruent over the last three years. But the good news is, once you, once you've finished doing that, you have that foundation, it's just an incredible story to grow from.
And that's really the essence of what the team's been doing at Accruent. And, we're at a great place, and I think you will see the fruits of that, in the quarter, sir.
Okay. You know, we think of the key competition for these platforms as, you know, pen and piece of paper, the Excel spreadsheet. Where are we on the migration of moving these workflows onto, you know, onto the cloud or connected platform?
Well, everything we have in our software businesses at FAL, with the exception of maybe a stub that's, you know, less than 7%, is fully cloud-enabled, fully SaaS. So we don't have a big migration project, which I appreciate.
Mm.
That's a different problem to have. So we don't have that problem at all. And the thing, the little stub that we have that's not fully SaaS, fully cloud, it's really kind of customer, customer preference in certain industries where they wanna be on-prem. And we respect that, and we enable that to happen for them.
But the customer workflows themselves, so actual using non SaaS platforms, you know, to do their workflows, you know, whether it's product planning or construction planning, you know, what, you know, what, what is the penetration of of your product? So is it mid-teens, 20%? Where do you see the market?
Yeah. Well, so we think about it as sort of there's a whole market that's possible, and to your point, over 60% of that is not yet using anything. They're using Excel, using paper-
Yeah
... using different things.
Okay.
That's kind of the untapped market. For the piece that's using something, we have a decent share of that, but we're still sub 10%, of the vended market. Any way you look at it, in terms of converting the 60% that's not yet on the digital transformation journey, which we find very attractive, or frankly, gaining share from some of the competitors that are dealing with the vended market already, that's, you know, that's kind of the headroom we have.
Okay. Does that in itself underwrite, you know, your ambitions to grow, you know, these businesses, you know, 10% or thereabouts, you know, for the next, you know, five years?
I think that, combined with the self-help of the innovation acceleration that our teams are driving, yeah, because that's what's gonna unlock that 60%, is doing something that make them tip from what I have is good enough, to I really have to be on this train.
Yeah.
So I think a combination of the size, Nigel, of that untapped market, plus, just incredible innovation pace. And frankly, if you look at what our teams have delivered in the segment, in this particular growth platform in FAL, we have a lot of confidence in that 10%+ growth.
Okay, great. Then ServiceChannel, when that was acquired in 2021, I think it was-
Yeah
... came in obviously strong, strong growth, but, you know, low, low single-digit margins. But I think the pathway to, you know, 20%, 25%, 30% margins over time, where are we in that, in that process?
The team's been outstanding on that. First, we've maintained the top-line growth. You know, I think 2021 to 2023 was high 20s compound annual growth rate in that business. At the same time, delivered over 2,000 basis points of operating margin expansion in the business. So we're getting to the zone, you know, the 25%-30% zone. That again, it's quite incredible when you can combine that with double-digit growth. So again, just a testament to the Fortive Business System and what's possible. And we've done it across the P&L. There's been pricing, value-based pricing, but also just driving some of our FBS lean tools into the software engine room to get more out of less.
Yeah. We've got 5 minutes remaining, so I want to make sure any questions in the room, please, raise your hands. Nope, we'll continue. So I think, you know, you obviously you had a chart there showing the 5% organic growth from 2019, you know, with very strong margin expansion. It's been, you know, Fortive's, you know, highest growth, most consistent business. I think Fluke has surprised me certainly in terms of the consistency of that business itself, and I think the growth rates were still in the mid-single digits in 1Q 2024. Historically, that business has cycled, so maybe just talk about what's changed there. I know that there's you got eMaint there, but what's changed at Fluke specifically?
Yeah, I mean, Fluke is a great story of purposefully transforming a business that, to your point, was more kind of short cycle, cyclical, to something that's now very resilient. And I'd say, you know, there's kind of three main things that our teams have driven at Fluke. The first one is deliberately diversify the end markets that we serve. So Fluke's always been one of our most global businesses, so you have that geographic diversification, but we've also now built a stronger presence in renewable energy type use cases, right? So our teams have the leading multifunction testers for solar. We have the leading sort of, you know, level two EVSE charging station, automated test instrumentation. We have the leading solution for 1,500 kind of volt, kind of high voltage type test and measurement.
Again, a lot of renewable stuff, in our, in our Versiv and our LinkIQ product set. The team's tuned that offering for data center type applications. So very deliberately, the team has looked at the markets they, they used to serve and really found some new verticals. So that's the first part of the journey. The second part of the journey is, goes to NPI. So, so Fluke, as a team, is literally doubling their NPI revenues, every 18 months now. So if you, if you think about the NPI revenue kind of track, they're doubling every 18 months. It's kind of a new Fluke law that they're setting up in terms of how NPI scales.
But that's been just a very large-scale operation, getting focused on moving more resources into building new products, and it's showing great results for Fluke. And then the third thing, to your point, is we've deliberately brought in some software services type components into that business that create customer value. So, for example, you used to buy kind of a calibration instrument from us. Now we have software and services that help you through the life cycle of ownership of that instrument. So the customer is happier. Not only do we have more recurring stuff, but we actually stickier, and we have better customer loyalty. And those three things combined, and done at scale, over multiple years, is what's gotten us to this point where Fluke is...
If you look at our NPI velocity right now, not only are we less cyclical, but there's actually a really good chance of elevating the through- cycle growth rate at Fluke, which obviously will do wonders for the segment overall.
Okay, two more topics. I do want to touch on margin targets and also M&A. So you've got a 2028 margin target of 34%. You're not too far from that level right now, so it seems like you're on track to exceed that. But I just want to talk about, say, you know, your gross margin is 65%. It feels like your incremental margin should be, you know, 45% or so, even with a very healthy level of reinvestment. Is that sort of the right level of how we should think about your incremental margins?
Yeah, I mean, I think... So the math for us starts with kind of a mid-single-digit plus type core growth. We generally use 40% incremental-
Okay.
-for our planning. I do think your point about there being upside is a fair one, because we've shown that we can outperform that. So I have all expectations that we'll keep doing that. So but that's how we generally kind of set the target, is mid-single digit plus and then 40% incrementals, knowing that we have a good chance of doing better.
So this Moore's Law you've got of, like, doubling NPI revenues every 18 months, if you were to invest more, let's say, let's say you are overdriving margins-
Mm.
If you invest more, do you think you could actually accelerate growth from here? Do you actually think...?
So we ask that question all the time-
Yeah.
I think the thing I would say to you is we don't turn down any good ideas that are well underwritten.
Okay
... in terms of having the right return.
Great.
We haven't hit that point yet of saying, "This is a good idea, we're not going to do it.
Okay. And then finally, on M&A, what are you seeing in the pipeline? Is the M&A market starting to open up? And I've got to say, I'm a little bit surprised we haven't seen more deals in the EHS area, so maybe just touch on that as well.
Yeah, I mean, I would say that, so first of all, our approach hasn't changed. We're disciplined, but we're decisive. When there's a good asset that meets our criteria, which is attractive market with strong secular trends, a great kind of financial profile that's accretive to what we're trying to do in terms of recurring revenues, top-line growth and, and margin and cash flow generation profile, and, and something frankly that we feel has a good chance of, of us creating distinctive value with a Fortive Business System, we do that deal all day long. I would say the market is still... There's a lot of things waiting, especially high-quality things, waiting to deploy, and we're close to them. We have a great, great pipeline. We're hyperactive, in cultivation, and we'll be there when the right things show up.
For your point about the EHS platform, we have a big pipeline there. Back to my point about discipline, we'll only do deals where, you know, where the math makes sense for our criteria. And there's been some that we've decided not to do because it was— And again, we learn things from Accruent about how to think about these deals and how, for me, personally, how to make sure that the deals we do outperform. And so that means we turn down some things. But again, we're disciplined, but we're decisive, and I expect at some point you would find us do the right thing.
Good. Well, I'm glad to hear that. Look forward to that. Olumide, thanks so much for the chat. I found this really instructive. And Elena, thank you, too.
Thank you.
Thank you.