Great. I think we'll get started. We're running a little late here, but just for those on the Webcast, thanks for joining the Wolfe Global Industrials and Transports Conference. My name is Nigel Coe. I cover the multi-industry sector here at Wolfe Research. I also cover Honeywell, and Honeywell is the next company on stage. It's my pleasure to welcome Bill Hammoud, who's the President and CEO of Building Automation. Also in the crowd, we've got Josh Jonagan. If you've got any CFO of the segments, if you have any nerdy questions on finance, we've got the CFO in the crowd as well. Bill, do you want to make some opening remarks, and then we'll get into Q&A? Thank you.
Yeah, sure. Thanks, Nigel. Good to see everybody here. Just quick opening remarks. Strong business momentum. We've had back-to-back quarters with 8% growth. It really comes down to a couple of things. It's the strength of our customer relationships, especially as you think about closest to the customers in our regions, as well as closest to our customers in select growth verticals, coupled with our R&D investment and the strong uptake in our new product offerings. Obviously, this R&D investment will continue, specifically as we think about the investments we are making in the area of connected and software offerings, something that will play quite nicely to our business model, which is 15% projects, 25% services, and 60% products. We see further upside that this will create as well on our margin expansion journey.
Lastly, we're a couple of weeks away from the celebration of the full year of Access Solutions business being part of Honeywell Building Automation. We're quite pleased with the first year. Everything's coming according to plan, financial and otherwise, in fact, slightly ahead. We still see a lot of upside in that business as we look at our strategy for the next few years.
Great. Obviously, Vimal, your boss is talking about reinvestment, raising R&D, improving organic growth. And Q-on-Q , your organic growth has been 8% for the last two quarters. You clearly have the pack. Maybe just talk about what's driving the higher growth that we've seen in the last couple of quarters.
Yeah, you're definitely seeing the big impact from the R&D investment. Across Honeywell in Q1, we've increased our investments by 50 bps as a % of sales. Certainly, Building Automation is a part of that. That uptake on the R&D investment and on the new product launches is definitely a big part of that growth algorithm, as well as with continued refined focus on the growth verticals. It takes the same amount of effort to win with a customer who's not growing as it does with the one who's growing. As we get smarter about where do we see our growth globally as well within specific regions, that plays out to our growth algorithm.
When we double-click into that 8%, solutions have been growing double digits for two or three quarters now. Products have gone from, I think, flat to negative to now single digits. Maybe talk about solutions. What's driving that outsized growth, particularly outsized growth in solutions? Because over time, it's been quite lumpy.
Yeah. There are two elements for solutions. Within that 40% that makes up our solutions business, 25% of that, 25% is the services, 15% is the projects. On the project sides, delivering consistent growth has to do with anticipating where the growth puck is going and making sure that we go there. This is all about where do we see which verticals in which regions, where do we see that investment happening, and making sure that we do it. One of the advantages we have in Building Automation is that there is not really a country in which we operate in which we cannot scale. Because we are truly a global company. If we anticipate growth somewhere, we are able to scale and make sure we are ready for that growth.
On the services side, it's all about ensuring that the value we're delivering and the way we deliver that value, that strong customer relationship translates into strong project-to-service conversion. We're quite pleased on what we're seeing there, as well as our software solutions to where now you're able to decouple ourselves from the natural investment cycles. Investment cycles are either building a new building or they have a refurbishment plan coming up. When we talk about decoupled growth, now we are able to create, on the back of our connected and software offerings, an opportunity to go to the customer and say, you can do more with your asset base, or you can run it more effectively or at lower cost by implementing the software solution.
Now it's no longer tied to that natural investment cycle, and the customer can create and justify an ROI on its own.
Okay. Now, you talked about the growth verticals, geographies, and maybe some of the customer verticals. Maybe just make it a bit more explicit in terms of where you see the growth verticals?
Globally, there's three verticals where we see cut across all of our regions as growth verticals. Data center, no surprise. Hospitality we see as a very strong growth vertical for us, as well as healthcare. Then within our regions, our regional teams will select based on where the investments are in our specific regions based on what they see. For example, no surprise in places like the Middle East, strong investment in transportation, in airports, in stadiums. Our teams there focus on that. In the U.S., you see strong investment around clean tech manufacturing, whether it's battery plants or semiconductor. The combination of those three global growth verticals along with specific ones that are called out by regional teams make up our growth equation.
Data center is obviously probably the highest growth vertical right now on the planet. Maybe just talk about your exposure to the data center. Where you play, what kind of growth you're seeing, and is that impacting the growth you're seeing overall?
Definitely impacting the growth. It still remains a smaller part of our business, but it's one that has been growing naturally, as well as our focus on it. We see very strong double digits north of teens, obviously. Our play there is across all the control domains in which we operate. Our advanced fire detection, fire control system is the leading solution in data centers now. We've recently introduced a new control product. It's a PLC that sits between what we saw a sweet spot between the industrial PLCs and the traditional building controls. That's starting to gain traction as a strong offering for that. We'll continue to add in more specific offerings for data centers as we go.
Okay, that's great. R&D investment, however you want to define it, where has that been running in the past for your business? I know Vimal is very keen to see you guys spending more, not just you, but across the portfolio. Where do you see R&D going for Building Automation?
Definitely in line with what Vimal has been sharing about Honeywell. The 50 basis points as a % of sales increase we saw in Q1 across Honeywell, definitely Building Automation was a part of that. There are different ways to create more capacity around R&D. Pure dollar investment, like we just talked about, is one of those. The other one's around the productivity of your R&D resources. As we sit in this room today, about a year ago, we rolled out to our software developers AI tools that will make a proposal to the software engineers to say, use this line of code. We track that every month, and we see continuous uptake. Our software developers are taking more and more of what the AI tool is recommending to them. That by itself, in a very short year, has created a double-digit increase in productivity in our software engineers.
Even though we're investing more than that, our output is growing at a higher rate because of that productivity gain. The third leg of that tool is just a constant discipline on looking at every dollar that's being spent and asking yourself, is it being spent in the right place? Is it on the right path? The value proposition that we had as a hypothesis has proven to be holding through, or do we need to make some tweaks on it? These three things come together to give you stronger output on what you provide on new products that is measured not only by how much more dollars you're putting into it, but by these other.
Thanks. 50 basis points, that's quite a big jump. I mean, obviously, quarter by quarter, it varies. But we're thinking about each year for the next 2 or 3 years. Is that 20 bps , 30 bps per annum?
You know, Josh and I, we have a semi-joke that we run within Building Automation with our teams. We always talk about we have no dollars to invest in fixed costs, but we have unlimited dollars to invest in growth. I first started at Honeywell. I was much younger than now. It was 21 years ago. One thing that's true, we never have a problem coming up with new products because our engineers cannot do it. Our engineers can engineer and our software developers, they can engineer just about everything. Our challenge is making sure that we find the right differentiated value proposition for the right customer. To the extent that we continue to challenge ourselves to find those ideas for investment, we're going to continue to invest.
Okay. Maybe a better way of putting it would be vitality?
Yeah.
Where is vitality running today? Where could that go? What does vitality mean in terms of growth, pricing, margin?
Yeah. Vitality sits today around 25%, which if I look at it from a growth algorithm standpoint, it's something that we can measure. It's a few percentage points ahead of where it was historically. In terms of the opportunity for margin expansion, and that's through probably across all of our Automation business, not just buildings, the value of the product that we sell to our customers, and I think about my system integrator customers, my portion of the overall spend is less than 20%. To the extent I am able to tap into that other 80% they don't spend with me to make it easier for them to implement something, to give them the ability to execute more projects with the same labor pool, now there's a very strong value unlock. That is exactly what our connected and software solutions are doing.
It's no longer just about remote monitoring. It's about smarter commissioning. It's about over the lifetime of that asset, that asset being a little bit smarter than raising its hand when it sees a problem. There is a very strong value unlock there that gets into the way that our customers deliver. The last thing I'll say about that, 10-15 years ago, when you talked about, hey, I can do something remotely or less labor, the value equation was around, okay, cost me $50 an hour. How many hours do I save? That's the value. Today, when you talk to customers, and that's true in just about every company in which we operate, one of the top obstacles to growth is the availability of skilled labor.
To the extent we're able to allow them to do it more quickly, all of a sudden, that becomes part of our customer's own growth vector. There's a lot of value to unlock there, and there's a lot of margin opportunities that come along with that.
Great. I definitely want to come back to software and IoT in a moment because I think that's very important. But thinking about the way that you've set up the year, you just put in 8% for 1Q. I think you're looking at maybe mid-single digits or maybe a bit below mid-single digits for 2Q, and then mid-singles for the back half of the year. So what's driving that deceleration that you're seeing, especially in 2Q versus 1Q?
Yeah, on the one hand, you've got things that are under our control, a strong conviction, and what we've done to focus our teams on the high growth verticals, the strong uptake that we're seeing from our customers and our new products, things that are out of control that are strong momentum for us. On the other side, you've got things we cannot control, the entire uncertainty around tariffs. I'd like to think what we've looked at right now is a pragmatic approach that takes all of these factors into play, and that's what's creating our guide.
Okay. From what you can see, I mean, are tariffs driving any unusual behavior? I mean, you do sell through independent channels, contractors. Is that driving anything unusual that you can see?
We are staying super close to our customers. It's a time of uncertainty. I think at the beginning, there was a lot of fear of that uncertainty. As things have settled down a little bit, even though we talk about a 90-day pause, I think there's a natural optimism that that 90-day pause would translate into a more permanent pause. At the same time, especially some of our bigger customers, they are looking at that and saying, okay, we have to see what happens and how that's going to impact our overall ecosystem.
Yeah. Very consistent with what we're hearing elsewhere, by the way. There's also been a fair amount of concern around non-risk construction in general, especially some of the larger projects that might get pushed given the macro uncertainty. Have you seen anything like that across your own markets?
On the larger projects, especially when you think about critical projects such as data centers and some other critical infrastructure, those are bigger investments that people make longer cycle. Less of a concern around that. Maybe some of the smaller projects on the one side, somebody may accelerate it to get ahead of the tariffs or maybe pause a little bit. I will have to say, though, past the 90 days, if some of what we talked about in early April comes to fruition, that's going to cause everybody to rethink what they're going to do, even on long-term projects.
Great. Maybe just one more on this topic. Obviously, we've got the U.S. mega projects. Eaton talks about $1.7 trillion of projects out there in the pipeline. What sort of, when you look at this funnel, I mean, what does that mean for Honeywell in terms of content, in terms of opportunity?
Yeah. I mean, you look at our funnel for a long-cycle business. It definitely supports what we've laid out there, the goal for Building Automation to be in the mid to high single digits. We see that playing out quite nicely for us.
So Access Solutions turns organic in, I think, three weeks.
June.
Okay, in two weeks. Maybe just recap on what the first year of ownership of that asset, what have you done to it? I know there was a very strong revenue synergy opportunity, globalizing that business. Maybe just recap us on two to three major things that have happened since you've owned this asset?
I'll start with the revenue synergy is one. Historically, that business, prior to becoming part of Honeywell, was primarily North American business. 70%, 80% of it was North America. You look at Building Automation, about 1/3 of our business is U.S., 2/3 is outside the U.S. Hundreds of salespeople trained on it. A lot of excitement and a lot of strong uptake from our salespeople as well as our customers that are driving our sales synergies to be ahead of where we had committed to when we looked at making the acquisition. Beyond that, we've shifted a lot of investment into Access Solutions on the R&D front. We see that that customer set is probably the most forward-thinking in terms of thinking about the connected journey to be a true cloud-native journey. We've put a lot of investment since we've acquired the business into that area.
We see possibilities on the architecture, which will play out in buildings as well as industrial. That smart edge-to-cloud piece, it'll probably happen first, not that it'll happen first in the security and Access Solution space. We have been putting a lot of work into that area.
Okay. I think when you acquired that business, I think the margins were in the high 30s percent, 40% maybe. Is that because there was underinvestment in that business and you had to then raise that NPI spend and R&D, or is that just the nature of the business? This is a very high-margin business.
We definitely see opportunities to invest organically and inorganically into that business, and we have been doing it, and that's deflected. Whatever the impact of that is, it will be reflected in our results. The true margin on that is the value creation that that business does. The scalability of an LS2 solution as an Access Solution for a large enterprise, no one in the world can come anywhere near it. The piece for us, how do we sustain the growth of such a high-growth, high-margin business? This is where all of our investments are coming in to make it more fully integrated security as well as Access Solution platform and continue to make sure that we leverage the scalability and make it more scalable as a cloud-native solution.
Okay. And what are the barriers to taking the Access Solutions business to Europe and Asia? Are there any barriers? I mean, are there any coding differences that we should be aware of?
There will be something there, but nothing major. It's nowhere near what we've seen in our prior business where you have most strict codes from region to region. We're seeing the uptake there. We're already seeing that start to manifest itself in our sales synergy. It's part of our 2025 growth algorithm.
Access becomes organic in the second half of the year.
Yes.
Is that going to be helpful or hurtful?
It's at least as good, if not better than.
That's good. Great. Maybe switching to, I'd like to touch on the importance of having the solutions, which is design, install, servicing, and the product side as well. How much synergy is there between the two sides of your business?
Our solutions are built on the technology capabilities of our product business. One thing that we were talking about earlier today, we sell a lot of products through our Solutions business. Our bias is we take the projects that have heavier first-party content for a number of reasons, not the least of which the strength of the value proposition. It builds on that. The other thing that it does more strategically is that it creates a stronger connection between us and the customer. The days of developing something in the lab and putting it out there are long gone. We can do it, but it does not mean you are going to be successful. The concept of co-creation is a very prevalent one, one that Vimal talks about across our entire business and that we are all quite keen on.
That direct connection allows us to drive co-creation in two distinct but very valuable vectors of value creation, one around the value of that solution to the end user, and the other one working with our system integrators as well as our own technicians to say, how do we make that solution easier to install? How do we make it easier to commission, easier to service? To give you an idea, a couple of years ago, to walk into a building and provide a connected solution, it would have taken us days. The offerings we just launched now, we're launching with our channel partners, it's taken hours. We put the target out there. We said it should be less than a day. It should be 10 hours. That was my own target.
Every once in a while, my team is more ambitious than me, and I'm glad for that. In some cases, they're doing less than 5 hours.
Okay. When you're integrating third-party content, so one of your competitors, theory, why is that? Is that because they've been specified by the, I don't know, the builder, the general contractor or the E&C, or is it largely because you don't actually have that product set?
It's more of the latter. Seldom, if ever, in some projects, depending on the size, Josh and I get to see them and where the official approvals are on them. That's one of the things that is part of our team's standard work. They look at all the product and software content, and we check the box. Is there something we can provide? Yes or no. If we can, then the better it'll be coming from us. That, by the way, has played out quite nicely for the LenelS2 offering from the Access Solutions acquisition because now, all of a sudden, we're able to create more capability that goes into our projects business. It ends up being stuff that we just don't have in our portfolio that we integrate from third-party.
Any questions from the audience before we move on? Okay, great. Margins. I do want to touch on margins. I believe last year you reported 25% and change, 25.7% margin. This year, I think we are in the 26.2%, 26.3%, maybe 26.5% zone. Your long-term target, I believe, is 20%-29%. That is what it was last time we heard publicly. What are the stepping stones to a higher margin for BA?
Two pieces. One around the execution, one around the strategy. On the execution side, and this is something that's well-engrained in our DNA and we do well, the combination of investment + pricing has to be greater than inflation +, productivity + pricing has to be greater than inflation + investment. That algorithm has been there and continues to be part of our margin expansion algorithm. We saw very nice margin expansion in the first quarter. The other piece of it, more strategically, is around some of the stuff we talked about earlier. How do we continue to drive within our mix more of these solutions that get at how our customers do their jobs, so it creates more value for them so that there's an opportunity there for us to sell more of these software-connected solutions that drive higher margins?
Yep, yep. Pricing and costs. Let's talk about tariffs. I mean, obviously, there's been a lot of news around tariffs. China, tariffs have come back. How has the whole sort of supply chain tariff situation, pricing negotiations, how has that changed the business for you in the last 2 or 3 months?
Yeah, I'll start by saying, I mean, we have a natural obligation to minimize the impact of those tariffs for us and for our customers in connection. There's a very strong relationship, unjoined success between us and our customers, especially on the system integration side. Within Building Automation, we have the benefit of, after 2018, after COVID, we put a lot of investment in not only looking at how we consolidate our rooftops but also how do we make regions more independent. If I look at our major regions, they're more than 80% local for local. That automatically gives us an inherent advantage in terms of dealing with it better. In the instances where we have to make different choices, we're able to execute on those choices in weeks as opposed to months.
Our approach thus far has that our customers see that goodness, and they see less of an impact as it relates to tariffs from us as they do from our competition. That is indeed the case as we sit here in this room. We have to continue watching to make sure that it's a dynamic environment, and that's the right thing to do there.
You mentioned software a number of times now. I'm guessing you're itching to talk about software. Look, we've heard a number of your competitors have made big splashy announcements around IoT, and then we hear nothing else. Maybe just talk about where Forge is right now penetrated within the Building Automation business and some of the success stories you've had, and where do you see the potential for software going forward?
Yeah, you said it very well, Nigel. Probably if I think back seven, eight years ago, everybody had the big splash announcement, including us. As it turned out, the journey to have those visions materialize was more arduous than anybody expected, including ourselves. The difference is we stuck with it. The difference is when I look across our Automation business and industrial automation and Building Automation, those same enabling, those building blocks apply equally as well across the business. It gave us more staying power in terms of that Forge ecosystem and developing it and the applicability of that ecosystem across the board. I'll point out a couple of things.
One is when you look at organic homegrown software solutions that were not acquired, we probably have within Honeywell the most successful, one of the most, if not the most successful businesses that was built from zero to being a scaled business around our Forge Connected Life Safety software offering. The big lesson learned for us there, the success of that scaling came about from our ability to extend that to our channel partners. That model works. You come up with the right value proposition, the right offering, the ability of our channel partners to scale, magnitude and speed-wise far exceeds any one company, us as well as any of our big competitors to do it. We are applying that same concept across the rest of our Forge software offering.
In fact, just as we sit here in this room for the last several weeks, we've gone out to two regions, different countries within the world, brought in our own salespeople as well as our customers, and we've trained them on these new products. To do that, though, we took great care and made a very big investment in saying, it's not enough for the solution to be sexy and attractive to the end user. It has to become easier to implement. Easier to implement, we talked about earlier, you go from days to hours, but just how do you transact? A lot of our customers are not accustomed to a recurring revenue model.
We created that entire ecosystem from the business, commercial, administrative, all the way to the offering itself and how you implement it and how you keep an eye on it to bring that success to our channel partners. As an association, we'll be able to scale that. What I just described now in terms of opening it up to the broader channel partner community, that's probably something unique for Honeywell in this industry that no one else has done.
Just to be clear, you're selling Forge solutions via your channel partners?
Indeed. We just started that now.
Okay. Maybe just help us out in terms of how big is Forge, the software IoT platform within BA?
Yeah. Overall, for Honeywell, we talked about our connected enterprise business being $2 billion, and a lot of that sits in IA and BA. That kind of gives you an idea of the scale of what it is.
I think you hinted as well, automation within a building doesn't necessarily, it's not radically different from automation in an industrial environment or automation in a process plant, et cetera. From your perspective, how much overlap is there? When we think about the new Honeywell, the Honeywell automation remain co-business, how much technology overlap will there be across the remaining businesses?
When I think about the Forge ecosystem and the building blocks of that, 100% applicable. In fact, when I look at even the big software integration platforms in buildings, we have something called Enterprise Building Integrator, EBI, which is the backbone of what we do in the solution space. That is the exact same platform that we use on the industrial automation side. We call it Experion, just twin sister or whatever you want to call it, same backbone. Very relevant. It's just that last mile, if you will, of how you customize it and configure it to that specific customer.
Just my final question. There's a big debate on Wall Street about what kind of growth financial security businesses are, right, going forward. Are these low-growth businesses? We've seen Carrier selling their F&S business. We've seen Stanley Head of niche business, Ingersoll Rand back in the day as well. From what I can see, only yourself and JCI really has an end-to-end capability from soups to nuts, basically, from front-end to back-end. Is that the right answer that you have to be a scale player in this business or are there other reasons?
Yeah. Two parts to that. Just if I talk about finance security to start, probably security is the biggest in the control domain, the building control domain. It probably has the biggest upside of growth, especially as people wanting to go, people no longer want the responsibility and the burden of maintaining on-prem solutions. The security space is probably the first one that's going to go full cloud native that looked to us and our ecosystem partners to say, it's your responsibility to patch and maintain and upgrade and make sure that everything's safe. That's going to create its own growth trajectory. On the fire side, it's a highly regulated business. In a lot of countries, and they're pretty good at it, they say, there's a replacement cycle. You must follow that replacement cycle. You don't have a choice.
Add to that what we've done in Honeywell on the Connected Life Safety, for example. I don't need Connected Life Safety to run a fire system. Boy, that stronger, quicker transmission of the fire signal to the first responders, coupled with the fact that the system integrator maintaining it can do a lot of that stuff remotely, that creates its own growth vector. Come specifically to your question about some of our peers, and obviously, everybody can talk to the strategy better. You see a lot of people going for pure play pieces. Even some of the names that you mentioned that play in multiple domains, control domains, they're one of the bigger parts of the business around that appliance, which is an HVAC appliance. In building automation, there's no appliance. We are appliance agnostic.
Our pedigree, our DNA, our differentiated value proposition has for decades come from that controls domain. That is through across all of our Automation business. What may be HVAC as a pure play for somebody because that is where pedigree is, for us, our pure play is controls. How do you evolve that into analytics? How do you evolve that into more AI? How do you evolve that into a journey towards a truly autonomous factory and a truly autonomous building?
Great answer. Bill , that's a great discussion. Unfortunately, we're out of time. So thank you very much. I enjoyed the talk.
Nigel, thank you.
Thanks .
Thanks, Nigel.
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