All right. We're going to get started again. We appreciate everyone's time. Last but certainly not least today for me is Gates Corporation. We're very excited to have Ivo Jurek with us today, CEO of Gates since May 2015. Ivo, maybe just to start off, I think most of the audience knows Gates now, but maybe you could talk about you've highlighted in the past that you're number one or top three really across your segment. Could you elaborate on what's driving that competitive edge? Obviously, it's been a very difficult supply chain environment for everyone. How have you navigated that? Have you gained share or lost share, in your opinion, over the last few years?
Yeah. Thanks, Andy. That's a really great question. Look, Gates has been around for over 111 years. We've built our presence in terrific end markets through our focus predominantly into replacement side of the business. We have developed a terrific portfolio of products that gives us a great differentiation. We have developed a franchise that is very well presented in all regions across the industrial economy over the decades and predominantly maybe going back the last five years. We have driven a tremendous amount of new vitality into the business. We have fully revitalized our fluid power business. As an example, we have built three new factories in the 2018 timeframe that has given us a great deal of opportunity to drive growth within the regional structure so we don't have to re-export products from one region to another. That product line vitality has given us tremendous competitive positioning.
Frankly, we have benefited from that even in a very difficult year like last year where our fluid power business has been running almost at a peak performance that we have seen historically. Now, on the power transmission side, we have a great business. That business is predominantly focused on growing in a growth initiative that we call Chain to Belt. We have a great set of trajectory not only on the industrial side of that franchise but also on personal mobility. We have spoken about personal mobility quite significantly over the last two to three years. The business has been firing in all cylinders, certainly over the last several years, and continues to grow very, very nicely, giving us the opportunity to continue to drive growth forward. Last year, our business was predominantly impacted by a constrained supply chain with highly engineered resins.
What did we learn from that? When you take a look at our fluid power business, one of the things that we have learned is that when you engineer new products and you have a very specific focus on reducing the complexity in a supply chain, you can benefit from that. We are now in the process of doing the same thing in power transmission. We believe that we are in much better shape vis-à-vis supply of these resins. We anticipate that over the next couple of quarters, we see a great deal of stability simply with the supply of those resins but also continue to engineer around them. That also gives you yet next level of advantages that you can continue to drive your business forward and take more market share.
Great. Thanks for that, Ivo. I'll get maybe a little bit more into supply chain later. You just reported good results, and we'll talk about that a little bit. Maybe just the last thing you did was you put out an 8K just a few days ago on sort of a malware incident you had. Maybe just any sort of update you can give us on that? How is it affecting the business? Anything that you can talk about there?
Yeah. I think it's a fair question. Look, as a follow-up to the 8K that we had issued last week regarding that malware attack on our business and consistent with our expectation, restorative measures to critical systems are basically largely complete, and normal operating activities have substantially resumed. As we have outlined in the 8K from February 14, we are presently making progress as anticipated and with the vast majority of our facilities receiving materials, making products, and shipping products to our customers globally. Importantly, at this time, we also have no evidence that the attacker attempted to penetrate our customers' or our suppliers' information technology systems. That's really positive at this point in time.
We believe that the investments we have made in our information technology and our systems and our organization over the past few years, as well as our incident response preparedness, enabled us to react very quickly and very decisively. We continue to assess the full financial impacts and other impacts from the incident. The assessment is going to take some time yet. We are quite pleased with where we sit presently.
Ivo, you just mentioned the investments you made sort of protected you somewhat. Is there anything now that you've gone through this that you could sort of do better or more to make sure that this doesn't happen again?
I think that you hope that you never have to deal with this. We are living in a situation where this is, I think, very prevalent. I think it's going to become more frequent, potentially, for the future. We continue to harden our systems. We continue to make these investments. Even the most ardent investments that you make and the education that you have with your organization does not necessarily prevent you from this ever occurring. While I wish that I could say that it will never happen again, I just do not know that that is in a process, to be honest. That is not probably.
You said you're still one more just question on this. You said you're still assessing the impacts. You do have guidance out there for mechanically up 100-150 basis points in margin. Is this big enough where we have to think about that and impact to that? Is it kind of like a week and then it's done, and you probably don't?
Look, I mean, it was a temporary incident. Let's start with that. We really haven't quantified what the impact is going to be. I will remind everybody that we are very early in the year, so we don't feel that we have the visibility to be adjusting any guidance at this point in time. As more information becomes available, we'll share it with our investors and with the investment community at large.
Totally fair. Let's just talk about the one to five, the organic growth that you expect. It's a pretty wide range when you think about it. What end markets really should drive that growth versus what end markets are you still sort of worried about when you think about that growth?
Yeah. Let me start with there's still lots of headwinds out there, right? First of all, we've talked about China-COVID impact in Q1. We've taken that into account. Then the Russia war impact, right? We've exited from Russia in kind of May timeframe of last year. We have five more months of kind of dealing with negative comps, right? That will drive a negative volume growth from the estimate perspective. Look, from the end markets, most of our end markets actually look reasonably well. We have quantified how we think about the global end markets in our Q4 presentation update and as a part of our guidance and framing that. Most of our end markets are reasonably healthy. We do have some opportunities with some of the more niche markets where we believe that the growth can still come in pretty good chunks.
Energy, as an example. Personal mobility, industrial chain to belt, we believe that those applications and markets still have a good opportunity to deliver growth. On the other side, you're going to have some of those headwinds that we've discussed.
You mentioned China. Any sort of update as Chinese New Year ended here? You're seeing more activity there. Is there anything in terms of self-help that you can do to offset the lumpiness in the business? Because it's been a pretty tough business for Gates.
Yeah. It has been, particularly over the last 18 months. The biggest driver for the lumpiness, if you would, has been the zero-COVID policy in China. I think that we are all on the other side of that equation. Look, January was kind of as we anticipated. February activities came in also as anticipated. I do not have anything that would presently tell me that there is something unusual that is happening in China. We believe that we will see the recovery as we anticipated. We will continue to update folks.
Let me keep with the regions and ask you about sort of North America and EMEA. For Q and also for 2022, I mean, you generally saw pretty good growth. You also talked about these growth enablers: ECHO Innovation, digital tools, commercial excellence. Can you comment on how much these initiatives are helping you to sort of catch up to customer demand and provide growth? How do these initiatives help you if, for instance, the macro environment were to deteriorate further?
Yeah. Look, let me start with we delivered about 8% core growth in 2022. That is taking into account that we were quite substantially impacted from the supply chain issues, particularly in Q3. I think that we have delivered terrific growth in 2022. We have positioned the business around verticals that can deliver premium growth rate. We are very optimistic, and we continue to be very constructive on personal mobility. I have stated on my call that about a year ago, we had about $250 million of pipeline of opportunities. That pipeline of opportunities nearly doubled in 12 months. We have nearly $500 million of opportunities that we are working on. That gives us some degree of confidence that, yeah, there may be some lumpiness in getting that growth translated into revenue. We believe that that is a great opportunity to continue to deliver.
Look, our automotive replacement business was performing quite well in 2022. We believe that the dynamics are very strong for 2023 to offer another year of stability. That being said, in our guidance, we have also stated that, look, as the supply chains improve and taking into account what some of the dynamics are driven by, the higher interest rates that we are all dealing with, at some point in time, we should start seeing potentially customers starting to shorten and rely on the shorter supply times and perhaps start taking some destocking activities in the second half of the year. We do not see any of that happening today. We believe that inventories are in reasonably good shape.
Should the end market demand decay and we kind of said, "Probably second half of the year, it's going to be less constructive than the first half of the year," it would be logical to presume that you will see some falloff in volume. That was kind of the framework behind how we are thinking about what happens in 2023. We also feel that we have a good opportunity across the portfolio to deliver more growth and deliver greater stability, greater resilience, and continue to return to the level of profitability that we expect.
Ivo, can we follow up on the last statement you made about potential destock, right, in the second half? First of all, point of sale right now is volume positive too. I think you said it's positive from a revenue standpoint. It's volume positive too. Ultimately, one of the debates that we all have, right, are customers going to return to sort of just in time versus just in case? Is it possible that inventory stays higher in the channel because of enclosed just in case?
Look, I do not believe that we will necessarily see the level of inventory levels that we have seen pre-COVID. I believe that with the disruptions that all of us have dealt with in the industrial complex, that will probably result in an actual elevation of the inventory levels that people carry. As long as the end market demand stays positive. For us, look, we delivered 16-some-odd % growth in Q4. We stated that our volume was up mid-single digits, right? Presently, we also stated that our book to bill remain above one. The PLS data is very healthy. When I take a look at the inventory levels at our channel partners, it is not something that gives me a pause or concern. That is at the present level of sellout, right? What happens if the economy decelerates?
We're just being cautious about the second half.
Yeah. Any particular regions or end markets that you're more worried about at destock, just out of curiosity?
I think that it's similar in the Western world. Europe and North America probably would be an area that you need to be very carefully watching what's happening. That's where we have the best level of visibility, to be quite frank.
Got it. Okay. On your earnings call, you also mentioned the availability of highly engineered polymers did improve. Maybe could you expand on that? Do you think supply chain is stable enough to give you that material availability will not be a significant headwind in 2023? Are there any other challenges that concern you, like for instance, labor availability? How would you sort of define that for 2023?
Look, over the last 24 months, we've dealt with all of these challenges. We've dealt with labor. We have dealt with supply chain disruptions, logistics disruptions, all of these issues. Frankly, I'm quite proud of how our team has responded. We exited Q4, to your point, with much greater supply of these highly engineered resins. Presently, we believe that we have a good line of sight on being able to secure what we need for 2023. On top of that, we are making a great deal of progress of engineering our own solutions to develop our own resins that we believe give us more flexibility through more channels that that resin is available. I think that that's proceeding quite well. The biggest issue for us in terms of supply chain, the raw material supply, is getting stability of logistics.
Because we consume an incredible amount of these resins. We consume railroad cars full of that resin on kind of weekly, monthly basis. We can't use aero logistics to move that resin around. We believe that it will take maybe one to two more quarters before we see that stability where we can rely on that logistics. Kind of middle of the year, we feel that this is going to be completely behind us.
Just on the pricing side, Ivo, I know you've kind of said you want to cover costs with price. Do you feel like even if these supply chain headwinds continue to recede? I know steel started to come up again as an example. Do you feel confident that you'll be able to sort of the price will be sticky in 2023 and beyond?
We exited Q4 of last year, price, material, economics, margin neutral. Which is quite an accomplishment. For us, it does not just include raw materials. It includes raw materials, logistics, and energy. The biggest drivers of inflation that we have all experienced over the last probably 18 months. We have guided that we believe that we will be able to maintain price, material, economics, margin neutrality in 2023. I would say that we feel reasonably well that we will be able to defend our pricing.
Okay. I wanted to ask you, I asked you a little bit about the end markets, maybe just digging down a little bit more. Because you had forecast as part of your 1%-5% growth, you had forecast industrial off-highway, on-highway, diversified industrial, probably down low single digits in 2023, which means you're forecasting volume maybe to be even a little worse than that. How much of that is what we just talked about? Some sort of implied destock in there, maybe it's weak China to start the year. Just trying to understand, sort of get in your head a little bit as to because some of these markets have been pretty strong, as you know, in 2022.
Absolutely. First of all, what we try to ensure that our folks understand is that this is our global view on end markets. When you take a look at on-highway as an example, on-highway may have been terrific in North America, and it was. On-highway was not great in China, as an example. When you kind of take a look at global purview of these end markets, while it may sound somewhat counterintuitive because we are looking at it through the North America lens, we need to really look at it through a global lens, right? The blended average for us is kind of flattish volume when we take a look at our presence, the contribution of our revenue from these markets in these various regions. That is probably as constructive of a view as we can have. I'll give you an example.
Automotive OEMs, there's lots of enthusiasm that auto production is going to be up. It may be. We have taken a much more conservative view because some of the agencies that forecast the car productions have been a little bit too hot over the last couple of years. We think that our view is maybe a little more pragmatic.
Maybe just sticking with auto OE for a second, maybe just update us, Ivo, on sort of what's going on with you and EV, right? When we took you public, it seemed like content per vehicle was one number. And then it's kind of up over time. You've done a good job of sort of really increasing penetration. Where is penetration per vehicle now? EV versus ICE, as you go through that, I assume that that's net positive for you guys now. Maybe talk about sort of where you are.
Yeah. That is a really great point. Look, as this opportunity starts to solidify, if you would, over the last several years, we've made a great deal of investment in some new technologies, electric water pumps as an example, what we call multi-branch engine cooling, both technology that is being used in ICE applications as well as in electric applications, except that in electric applications, the cooling of batteries is across the entire platform. It becomes much larger in scale. That's what's driving that content growth. We have kind of quantified that we are settling on the opportunity for Gates Corporation is about $400 per platform, where we also lose about $100 of what we used to have on ICE. Kind of net net, we are $300 up on each vehicle.
In line with our overall long-term strategy, we are practicing selective participation in the OEM space. We are primarily focused on aftermarket, so automotive replacement market. With that focus, we also believe that we need to continue to build out our portfolio. We have the best portfolio globally today. We are very enthusiastic about this opportunity as the aged car park scales up. We have got to see more electric vehicles being part of the car park. We need to get it to be 7-12 years old. I think we are optimistic.
That will help accelerate growth.
Yeah. That is more of a 2035 and beyond opportunity.
Yeah. Might be 2030 at this pace where it's going to go fast.
It could be. No, absolutely. I mean, the sooner, the better for us.
Yeah. Let me ask you about auto replacement then a little bit more in the near term, right? You are going to low single digit growth this year. We just talked about it, right? Global car park continues to get older. I think US miles driven, definitely your people are out this year. Why is low single digits the right number? I know you told me it is globally. Maybe that is kind of China just being slow. How do you feel about auto replacement by region?
Yeah. We actually feel really good about it. I think that this is probably one area where we are being somewhat conservative about potential destock in the second half of the year, right? Again, being more cautious about our forecasting for the second half. Everything that you see today, to your point, Andy, points out to very solid demand profile, right? I mean, miles driven are very strong. I'll tell you that even in China, if you take a look at miles driven, miles driven have rebounded very, very solidly. I mean, China was really impacted over the last two years with miles driven. Today, you see the same dynamics in China that we have seen right post-COVID in the Western world. People are using less public transportation. They are using more personal vehicles for the first time in a long time.
Got it. In just a few minutes, I'll open it up to you, Ians. Let me ask you a few more questions. Personal mobility, you mentioned it, right? Q4, 40% growth. You've been targeting 30% annual growth. I think on your call, you highlighted that the pipeline of personal mobility grew 50% in 2022. It seemed like you have good visibility for that 30% growth. I'm still, I know you've invested a lot in this business. You have the premier technology. Still, the growth has been accelerating even as it seems like the global consumers had a little bit more pressure on him or her. Maybe address why the business has been so strong and the longevity that you think about when you sort of forecast that 30% annual growth. Because it's a lot.
I know it's a relatively small business. It is not that small for you guys anymore.
It's not that small anymore, right? I mean, it was small in 2019 when we started off.
It is a majority of your business.
That's right. And it's 5% of our total revenue contribution. Look, we are very excited about it. We are very cautious about the consumer. However, you have to think about this as a penetration game. We are really competing against a non-traditional competitor called industrial chain. For us, even if the end units produced stay flat, we can take market share every year as we are converting from chain to belt. That's really what's fueling that growth. We are a little bit less worried. I can't say that we are not worried at all about the consumer dynamics. For us, this is a penetration game. We are today at 1% penetration. There is an opportunity for us to get to 10% penetration. With 1% penetration, we can have $180 million. This is a huge opportunity for the company.
We are demonstrating that we can continue to maintain a high rate of growth, particularly as we are starting to get the next generation products into the marketplace and as we are starting to unclog some of our capacity issues. We have sold out all of our capacity in 2022. 2022 could have been a lot better year on personal mobility side if we had more capacity. We are working through those issues as well.
Interesting. Just I'll ask you while we're on it because we're talking about chain to belt, industrial chain to belt, another big initiative for Gates. If I go back a few years ago. Maybe just update us on where we are because you don't talk about it quite as much as you talk about personal mobility.
Yeah. Absolutely. I think that we have just unclogged the personal mobility opportunities. On the industrial side, we continue to develop new technologies. We are continuing to round up with our technology associated around the metal components and the design software to be able to drive more continued growth. To be honest with you, if you are growing at 10% or 15% versus 40%, the 40% always overshadows the 10% or 15%. We are as committed on the industrial chain to building. We believe that, frankly, that is even a bigger opportunity over the long term for Gates Corporation than personal mobility. The market is much bigger. It is much more complex.
The value drivers there are very strong with everybody being interested in improving their overall reliability and uptime of their equipment, reducing maintenance time, having less maintenance technicians, and more importantly, eliminating corrosive materials from your factories. Those are all big drivers for us. They're going to bode well for the next 30 years, 50 years for Gates Corporation.
Ivo, not that it's not growing fast. Is there something to the effect of industrial companies are slower to want to convert versus these personal mobility customers?
I think the way that you need to think about personal mobility versus industrial is personal mobility is more of an OEM design cycle. We convert an OEM. The OEM sees that, "Hey, look, I'm putting an electric machine on my apparatus." We have a great opportunity to convert that. In the industrial space, we're going after existing installed base. We are driving conversions of industrial chains into our belts. That is predominantly how I would describe that.
Yeah. Great. What is going on in your energy and resources business? Because again, it is another reasonably small business. You did M&A somewhat recently, maybe a couple of years ago. Is that helping accelerate growth now? It has been a pretty strong business for you guys now.
Yeah. About 2017, we did a small acquisition. It was more of an.
Amazing. I was 17. It's like it was yesterday.
Yeah. It's a long time ago, isn't it? It was around bringing additional technology for us. That has, frankly, accelerated our opportunity to drive more innovative products into the energy markets. As these markets started to recover, we had a great penetration. One of the things that I haven't spoken a lot about is that most recently, we have worked with a very well-known player in a fracking spreads field. We have been able to convert a steel pipe into Gates-produced flexibles, a very unique design of flexibles that is eliminating some incremental leakage that they have in the frack fields and driving, again, kind of that theme of being more environmentally sound, more environmentally friendly, maintenance-free, more maintenance-friendly. That's also been incrementally driving our penetration and delivering a very, very nice premium growth in the space.
Got it. When I back up, right, I think it was maybe two years ago, something like that, where you told us that your target kind of was to grow mid-single digits above where your markets were through all of your innovation and your branching out in your various markets. Do you think you're doing that? I mean, obviously, you grew pretty strongly in 2022. Do you think you're doing that? Or is there something you still need to do to do that?
Look, when I take a look and compare the organic growth that we have delivered over the last five years, three years, and certainly last year, we are at or above the premium industrial peer set that we compete for shareholders with. I think that we are demonstrating that we are growing faster organically than that peer set. We are very confident that we can continue to deliver good, strong growth. Yes, we still want to do incremental things. We still need to get further beyond the level of innovation that we have driven into our power transmission business. We're in very early stages. We have a ton of opportunities to be able to do that. We believe that those opportunities, as we are evolving our product portfolio and we get product vitality up, we are able to deliver more premium growth.
I point out again our fluid power. Our product vitality in Q4 was over 25%. We've delivered very strong growth.
Maybe just talking about your execution now, Ivo, you talked about improving it through complexity reduction, Gates production system. Can you update us on the progress that you've made on these initiatives? You mentioned on the last trans call that productivity is expected to contribute to earnings in 2023. What should that benefit be? What are those actions that you're taking?
Yeah. Look, when you look back, the way that we frame it is kind of if you just eliminate the inefficiencies that crept in kind of 2022 through premium sourcing, premium freight, and the disruptions that you had to deal with from the raw material supply, we kind of think that that's kind of 200-250 basis points, right? And frankly, not a lot needs to go right to be able to reclaim that, right? We just want to make sure that not more things go badly. The other 250 basis points of growth is you should think about it as 80/20, more complexity reduction above the skin and under the skin, baseline productivity, getting back after what we have demonstrated year in, year out that we can deliver, and some restructuring. That's kind of another 250 basis points of improvement.
Kind of 50 basis points of improvements you get through volume growth. The initiatives that we discussed should give us another kind of 50 basis points. If you go back to where we finished 2022 and you take a look at the 250 basis points of less headwinds from supply chain, 250 basis points of productivity improvements, and then some volume growth, kind of over the midterm, you get to that 24% plus, right? We feel quite good about our ability to do that.
Could we do that math, Ivo, on 2023 in the sense that you talked about 100 basis points of margin expansion? Maybe give us a little color on the operating conditions that dictate that. Of those numbers, how much of the supply chain headwind is still holding you back? We already talked about price versus cost. We know you expect neutral. How do you think about the 100 basis points?
Right. As I said, we still think that the first half of the year, we're still going to be facing some headwinds associated with getting the logistics sorted out of the raw material supply. We no longer think that we're going to have impediments from the raw material supply on our factories. We still are consuming some premium freight. That eats up into a little bit of the stability number. We feel actually quite positively about delivering that 100 basis points of margin improvement in the present environment. Things do not really need to dramatically improve. We are not counting on any significant improvement. Frankly, we still have a number of headwinds in China with Russia volume dropping off. Those things, they are still some impediments that you have to deal with. 100 basis points, reasonable level of comfort.
As the year progresses, I think we should start seeing very good performance in gross margin. In the second half, we got a little bit of a creep on executive and not executive comp, but variable comp that's going to come in. That is going to be an offset to some of the improvements that we're going to see in the second half. 100 basis points, I think, is a pretty good number to baseline our 2023 on.
Helpful, Ivo. Questions from the audience? Any questions from the audience? Anyone? Anyone? All right. I will continue. On the free cash flow side, right? That has been a bit more challenging in 2022. It did jump pretty nicely in Q4. You are guiding 100% conversion this year. I know you have talked about inventory normalizing and benefiting you. What else needs to go right for you to hit that 100% guidance number?
Look, first of all, I'll say that we were not really an outlier in 2022. We were right kind of smack in the middle of the industrial complex with our cash conversion. I would say that it was a differentiation. It was in Q4 where we have had a terrific conversion. One of the things that we have highlighted there that I think maybe did not get lots of notice is that we started to eat into our inventory levels. We believe that we have a huge opportunity to continue to reduce our inventory levels of the raw materials that we carry to support our customers as we start getting some stability in the supply chain, which we are starting to see. We believe that getting after the working capital that we carry on our books is a huge opportunity for us.
Now, then remember, over the last couple of years, we were dealing with quite a significant amount of growth. Our receivables were climbing, impacting the conversion to adjusted net income. We think that as the volume growth starts to stabilize and our receivables start to stabilize, taking out that inventory, you get pretty quickly to that 100% cash conversion that we've provided guidance on.
Got it. Just talking about leverage for a second, you're at 2.8 x. You've been slowly ticking down, which is good. You do have a midterm target of 1.5x . It seems like you're prioritizing deleveraging. Does that stop you from doing M&A? You've been kind of quiet on that front. Maybe the last bigger one was that energy one in 2017, I think. You tell me. Give us an update on sort of your pipeline because it seems like you've been talking about us having a pipeline of opportunities.
Yeah. I mean, there's plenty of opportunities, right? I think that we also want to make sure that we pay a fair price for these assets. As you know, Andy, that has not been the case over the last 12-24 months. The multiples were quite elevated. Look, we returned over $200 million last year to our shareholders through a stock buyback. We purchased about $200 million of our own stock. We do believe that we want to take our growth step down. As we continue to accelerate our free cash flow conversion, we will have opportunities to not only pay down debt, but there will be plenty of cash left over to think what's the best for our shareholders. Do we buy more stock back? Do we do some bolt-on M&A? What type of deals do we take a look at?
We're going to be very pragmatic about it. Step one, continue to deliver 100% cash conversion.
Yeah. That's definitely step. Okay. Let me ask you a question that I've been asking all the companies. What are the top two or three innovations, mega trends, or structural changes affecting your company or have affected your company? What's going to affect your company in the next five years? Are there any emerging industry trends that are perhaps being overlooked in the current environment?
I don't know that they are overlooked because I certainly try to speak about them continuously. I mean, for us, there's a massive mega trend in replacing industrial chain with Gates belts. That goes across the entire industrial complex, from robotics to inner logistics, warehouse logistics and distribution, and certainly personal mobility. That's a massive mega trend for us. We believe that that's a multi-billion dollar opportunity over the next 5 to 10 years that we are very laser-focused in executing on and converting from an opportunity into revenue, profits, and cash flows.
Got it. You mentioned sort of digitization, all that kind of stuff. Where are you in that part of the journey in terms of front-facing digitize, all that kind of stuff? Where are you in that part of the journey?
Look, I think that one of the big beneficiaries of driving design tools forward, so the digital design tools, is demonstrating itself in personal mobility where we are helping people. People have been designing drives with chains for 100 years plus, right? We are doing something very different. We could not really do it effectively without developing digital design tools. Those design tools are now opening even more opportunities for us to make it much easier for the OEMs and very soon for the industrial customer base to be able to design drives with our belts. I think that that is a huge driver for us. The second driver is really digitizing our back office. We continue to be, what I say, opportunity-rich, early stage. You do kind of think about it the way that you want to.
We continue to make those investments in shared service centers. We continue to digitize back office processes. By the way, when we talk about 80/20, we also talk about 80/20 on our processes. Digital is playing a big role of leaning out your overhead structure so that you can refocus those dollars spent either as profit or you can also wisely invest it in R&D, which I think pays big dividends.
Great, Ivo. I think we're out of time. We very much appreciate you being here with us. Thank you.
Thank you, Andy.
Yeah.