Great. Okay. Good morning, everyone. Just wanna say thank you for making it to day two of the conference here. We're gonna have a trio of industrial companies on stage, beginning with Johnson Controls. My real pleasure to welcome back to stage Joakim Weidemanis, CEO of JCI, Marc Vandiepenbeeck. I'm glad I got that out of the way 'cause these are two of the more challenging surnames. I'm glad I got through that.
They're perfectly normal where we come from.
Yes.
Absolutely.
Joakim, Marc, thanks for being here.
Sure.
It's always a pleasure. Joakim, maybe I'll hand over to you for some opening remarks.
Thank you, Nigel. Thank you all for being here. I'm a little bit more than a year into this role, and just to go back to, you know, why did I join and what did I find after I got here? What I learned before I joined the company was that this company has some unique proprietary technological capabilities within thermal management broadly, meaning HVAC and controls, but also in other areas. Question was whether we have been leveraging that enough to drive outsized performance. Answer is, no, we have not.
I saw that we had a company with one of the industry's largest field footprints, about 50,000 people in the field, and the question is if we had been leveraging that enough historically to drive competitive advantage through, for example, lifecycle services. My hypothesis was that we hadn't fully leveraged that yet. A year in, I found those things to be true. I'm even more excited now about our opportunities to unlock our potential, not just in those two areas, but in particular in those two areas. We can talk a little bit more about the progress we're making in doing that by implementing what we call our business system, which is how we're gonna run the company, how we're gonna improve the company.
Perhaps for those of you who've heard some of our earnings calls, that's really about simplification, acceleration with lean principles that, you know, other companies that perhaps some of you follow have applied over many, many years. In addition with digital and AI approaches. Acceleration and lean, I think about that as be able to do work that took weeks and be able to do it in days now. The amplification with digital and AI, we have now plenty of examples where we're able to take work that takes days and turn it into hours and even minutes sometimes. We're making good progress standing up and implementing our business system.
That was important to get going to start to drive some performance improvement while we took a little bit of time to figure out where we are with the different parts of the portfolio. I'm glad, I'm pleased that we've made some progress on clarifying for ourselves internally, where we are, and that we've distilled down then for each of the businesses what the expectations, what we can expect realistically, what the expectations are in our leaders, as well as, probably most importantly clarified for our leaders what our strategic priorities are.
Because I think when you're trying to improve a company at pace, it's very important to offer clarity to people on where we're going and what we're gonna prioritize versus all the 59 other things that we're not going to work on right now. Some good progress there. We had a decent quarter. Our last quarter orders were up, 30%. Our backlog is a record backlog, $20 billion. Sales growth now at 6%. We expect that growth rate to improve over time. EBIT margins up, 200, almost 300 basis points, and a decent cash conversion here. A lot more to do, which is the fun part of being part of this team.
That's great. Thanks. Thanks. That's, that's a great way to set the table. You've, you touched on a lot of topics I wanna, I wanna dive into as well. I'd, I'll kick off the Q&A. I'll come back to the audience halfway through with any questions that you have. Look, I think it'd be remiss to not start with, you know, you talked about the progress, but maybe just talk about, you know, what you've accomplished in the first year. You know, what, where is the sort of the changes most advanced? You know, where, what, you know, what needs to be done? Where do you need to build muscle? You know, kind of a progress report on where we are.
I can go deeper into the business system, which is something that just needs to build and will drive continued improvements in performance in parallel as we work on implementing and executing on the strategy that we've defined. Maybe I'll start with, you know, the people side of things. You know, it's important to make sure you have the right people on the bus. For those of you who follow Jim Collins or read books he's written, you know, he talks about first the who and then the what. We've made a couple of changes in the senior-most team. We have a new CHRO. We have a new North America leader, who's an internal promotion.
The CHRO was an outside hire, one of the most talented CHROs in America, I would argue. We have a new Asia PAC leader, and we're working on a couple more changes that have been announced internally. We're trying to staff up, of course, with the team that's gonna, you know, help us win here in this space. That's on the first the who and then the what. On the what, we've clarified, like I said, our strategic priorities, and, you know, no surprise, we'll come to that, I'm sure. You know, we want to help humans unlock their potential with the help of AI. We have important things that we can do for our hyperscaler and colos customers.
I think as many of you know, 30% plus of all the energy that they struggle to secure for their data centers has to be diverted to cooling away from compute. We have the capabilities, and we've made a couple of moves that improve, strengthen those capabilities to reduce that 30% to something materially less, which is a very strong value prop in that space. Second strategic pillar is really about, if you, if you think about some of the innovations, scientific discoveries that have been made over the last couple of decades that are now in full deployment in human society. I'll just take one example. It's the pharmaceutical industry. All the old factories were chemical plants. All the new plants are biologics plants.
As you can hear, you know, you need a, you need a very different plant to manufacture biology. The indoor operating conditions, temperature, humidity, control, pressure, particulate in the air, and the very, very tight tolerances that you need to keep that indoor operating condition and its requirements are much, much higher in biologics, which sort of plays to some of our strengths, not just in HVAC and controls, but of course, what they manufacture is very valuable too, so they need to protect it both from fire and security. That's strategic pillar number two.
Strategic pillar number 3 is basically help the world decarbonize or if you choose to think of it that way, with increasing energy costs, the payback on upgrading to a new HVAC unit or a control system or a digital system that helps you optimize how you run your sophisticated system is of interest to a lot of our customers. In those 3 strategic pillars, we've then gone and developed roadmaps that are now showing up in all of our R&D work. We've reprioritized what we're doing, and we're aligning along these 3 vectors here. I think that's going back to this point about clarity. If you're running a large organization, you know, we have 100,000 people around the world, you can't be running after 15 things.
Just by making quite a bit of progress, not just on the PowerPoint, but translating this into, like I said, the product roadmaps and where we start to shift how we focus our commercial efforts and so on is gradually in our leading indicators starting to show that, you know, we're gonna continue to be able to improve the performance of this company.
Just having a clear mission at the very high level.
Yeah
everything else falls down from there.
Yes, exactly.
Okay. I don't wanna spend too much time on decarb and ESG.
Yeah. Right
Is that still a really important part of the conversation?
Yeah
From a Wolfe perspective, ESG is, there's no question, it's kind of gone into the shadows at this point in time.
Yeah.
Is it still a very real conversation with customers?
You know, yes and no. I mean, increasingly, and it was, by the way, it was always about cost reduction. It was, in addition to that, it could be a, you know, people could improve their ESG performance. If you think about it, you know, in most countries around the world, not I'm not talking about us as private consumers of electricity in our homes, but industrial consumers have seen electricity cost increases of, you know, up to 30% over the last couple of years. The projections are, I'm sure many of you study that, is that that is going to continue. If you're, well, I gave you the data center example, right?
Even the biopharma manufacturing is, the biologics manufacturing is 7 times as energy intensive as the traditional pharmaceutical manufacturing. As part of their COGS, energy cost is suddenly a line item that is visible. It used to not be. Therefore, if you're able to offer solutions that will help people to use 30%, 40% less energy for what they're trying to do, you know, there's a good payback on that, and the payback is improving with the increasing energy costs. That's 1 aspect. Of course, in Europe in particular, you know, there's a big need to shift away from gas in particular, which, you know, comes from somewhere Far East and get away from fossil fueled heating, for example.
Heat pumps, so it's more on an electrification question that where people are trying to get away from certain types of fuels. There's a lot of different aspects of our decarb strategy that is not about ESG.
Okay. I do wanna get into some of the sort of like maybe just an update on trading conditions. Before we do that, you talk about services. I'd be curious how the services strategy is evolving. You know, we tend to think of all services as good, you know, aftermarket, recurring revenues, et cetera.
Yeah.
You called out some changes to the U.S. security.
Yeah
you know, services. Just maybe touch on that as well.
Yeah. Services are about 30% of what we do. And in the domains, the product areas where we play, HVAC, controls, fire, and security, you know, there's a healthy service business in each one of those areas. From a top-line point of view, we continue to do very well HVAC, controls, and fire. Here over the 2 recent quarters, we've been a lot softer in security. Really what we're doing is we're going through our portfolio of contracts that we have, and we're making sure that pricing, margins, et cetera, are in good balance, and there was a need to rebalance. That came with a little bit of sacrificing of top-line growth, but no EBIT dollars.
Okay.
In general, I'm super excited about, in particular in HVAC and controls, the service opportunity. In our as an industry, HVAC, not just us, but as an industry, the OEMs have much lower attach rates, service contract attach rates to their equipment than in most of the industries I've come from. We're also at a much lower attach rate than Atlas Copco, Ingersoll Rand air compressors that in many cases are installed sort of 10 feet to the right. Attach rates are sometimes 2x of the rates. You know, there are different reasons for that, which maybe it's a discussion for another day, but it's how you productize your services, make sure they're differentiated. Differentiation anchored in, you know, what you can do in your system.
Different kinds of data algorithms and things like that help the differentiation. Our industry hasn't done quite as much of that, and then there's a commercialization piece, how you do that, where we're sort of early stages, but it's no magic. You know, it's not a mystery of what needs to be done. You have the execution side, which of course with the increasing number of connected devices that we have out there, the economics of serving our customers are changing here rapidly. The cost of connectivity has come down too, that's increasing rapidly.
Is the primary driver of services, increasing the attachment rates on the chillers?
Yeah
kind of just evolving the revenue model into other things?
It's not so much the revenue model yet. We're working on some stuff there, but that's too early to discuss. I think it's, gonna be attach rates, but then as we're pointing the company more towards some of the verticals that we were discussing before, that have for them uptime and because of what we do is more mission-critical, both from an uptime point of view and a cost point of view. The service opportunity is bigger in a, for data centers than it is for a building like we're sitting in right now, for the obvious reasons, right? I'd say it's driving the attach rates overall, and then as a result of where we're pointing the company, the attach rates are gonna come up and the service opportunity is gonna be bigger.
Okay. Okay, I want to save your voice and I know you're struggling a little bit.
Yeah. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you
virus. Marc, maybe just give us an update.
I sincerely hope that's not a virus.
Okay. Well, me too. Me too, by the way.
I spent six years in medical diagnostics, so if I thought it was something like that, I wouldn't sit here.
Okay, fair enough. Yeah. Bad word. Okay.
Yeah
Marc, back to maybe the guidance for 3Q. You're guiding for 6% organic.
Yeah.
6% in 4Q as well. Obviously, a lot of questions around you know, huge backlog strength, order strength, versus the conversion of that into revenues. Maybe just touch on that and in terms of what we're seeing during the quarter and how that backlog converts into revenues.
Yeah. First, the continued growth in our backlog will support an acceleration in our revenue growth. The underlying question is why not just right now and why is it taking a little bit longer? There's two elements to that. The first one is simply our ability to convert some of that backlog in the very short term, meaning in the next quarter or so, is hindered by two things. Not so much capacity, but the ability for customer to take delivery. What we see a lot in the data center world is the chaos around the construction side that's pushed to the right sometimes deliveries a quarter or two. We think that's not a permanent issue, and we have the ability to keep up there.
The other thing is, naturally, we have a very large business in North America in data center. We are ramping up the production of that output. The timing of that ramp-up is really back-end loaded this year. We have opportunity to do better than the 6% we've kind of guided for Q3 and therefore Q4 as well, based on both that ability for the customer to take delivery and our ability to ramp up quicker. Very transparently, we have a large business in the Middle East that's been impacted by the conflict. Europe will have probably a soft quarter in Q3 and Q4, probably very low single digit. For an annualized business, that's about $4.5 billion of revenue.
That's a bit of a boring cost, the enterprise growth. If you look at North America, we're expecting that to grow in the high single digit, starting now and probably accelerating into 2027. If you remember, for us, 2027 will start in October.
Yes, that's right. Basically, you think that as we kick into early 2027, we'll see that acceleration in North America.
Particularly North America, yes.
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. The Middle East, you touched on that. It seems like that's been contained at this point. How do you characterize that?
Transparently, the amount of disruption we saw in March and April are starting to taper down a little bit as the quarter unfolds. But it's not back to normal by any stretch of the imagination. Not a lot of what we sell and service in the Middle East is actually manufactured in the region, except for a factory we have our, with our joint venture partner in Saudi Arabia. But a lot of those products are purchased from our factories in either in Europe or in, in Asia. The logistics of transportation right now in the region are affected by what's happening with the conflict. There's also an enormous backlog of shipping that needs to happen.
Even when things reopen, getting your ticket in line to be able to deliver to the customer on time has remained a challenge. The team has done an outstanding job navigating the conflict right now. It's disrupted that business still in Q3, and our ability to predict what the summer will bring is a little bit difficult at this stage.
That just pushes demands to the right, I suppose.
It pushes demand. It's not demand disappearing. It's not demand destruction. Quite the opposite, actually. You saw the order in the quarter didn't slow down in EMEA at all. That high single-digit order growth rate for the quarter included some solid orders in the mid single digit in the Middle East. That means really the business confidence is still there. It's really just a pause, and people are rightfully so being careful about when to deploy resource and where to deploy resource in an environment that's a little evolving.
Yep. Okay. Just a quick touch on China. It's a chunky market. It's not that huge, but it's mid-single digits total sales.
Yeah.
Any rays of light, in that market right now?
I would say, it's massively improved from probably 12, 18 months ago where we were still struggling. I think the, the expectation that China will come back to a high single or double-digit growth like we've been able to benefit over the past decade is probably behind us. It doesn't mean it's gonna be a bad market. It's gonna be a very healthy market. The, the strategic, pillar that Joakim laid out a few minutes ago very much, applied to the Chinese market, and it took us a little bit of time to pivot both our product team and our commercial team against some of those end market.
We've made some progress over the last couple quarter, and we feel we're very well positioned to capitalize on some of those opportunities in the Chinese market.
Okay. Sure. That's great. Any questions from the audience? Raise your hand. Otherwise, I'll continue. Order flow has been extraordinarily strong, Joachim. In terms of the pipeline opportunities you have there right now, I mean, how would you characterize that?
Yes, our pipeline, in general continues to grow. Even if we've had 2 quarters of exceptional order entry, our pipeline is still growing. I mean, the story is just simply aligned with the 3 strategic pillars. Of course, we're following, you know, where the world is going, right? It's not that, you know, we invented some unique verticals here. They were there all the time, and we're just over-indexing our effort on those. Of course, data centers and biologics are the 2 verticals that offer us the best visibility into the future because it takes 1 year or 2 years, sometimes 3 years to stand up these massive campuses that they're building.
In particular, in those two areas, we see the pipeline strength. You also have, there are massive hospital build-outs in a number of countries. Of course, China, that race is over. In India, I was just in India here recently. I mean, India is sort of firing on all cylinders when it comes to the strategic pillars that we have.
Yeah
that we're focusing on.
It does feel like India might have its moment here, you know?
Yeah. Finally. My whole career, I've heard that.
Right. Exactly. Yeah. The next China.
Yes.
Couple of topics in the last 10 minutes I really want to touch on here. One is a mark to market on where we are with the margin improvement story.
Yep.
Obviously tremendous momentum in the last 12 months.
Yeah.
Especially in Europe and Asia.
Yeah.
Just wondering, you know, where we are on the sort of the simplification structuring program?
Yeah
sort of like that timeline towards, normalizing margins.
Yeah. Yeah. Let's just discuss overall what our margin opportunity where it is in relative terms. I see as I think we were talking about it last year, but I see no reason for us not being able to catch up to some of our direct competition. Matter of fact, our EBIT margins were the same in this past quarter as the one we were talking about. Now they have I think some challenging headwinds, so it was not one of their best quarters on margins, to be humble about that. I still see no reason at all for us to not to catch up and even continue to go past.
That's basically based on if we stay on gross margin first, you know, we have 40-plus factories out there. We do not need 40 factories. We, we just simply didn't do that consolidation work that I've been used to doing in past roles. We have a very nice opportunity to continue to consolidate our footprint. We've started a little bit. We also have in manufacturing plenty of examples already of how we're able to increase capacity in existing factories. For those of you who will join us for our investor day that's coming up in 2-3 weeks, you'll see an example of where we've quadrupled the capacity in 1 site without adding any more floor space. As a matter of fact, we're using 30% less space.
This is the direct result of the application of our business system. These are just good old-fashioned lean projects that we've started to work on. Those kinds of things on the manufacturing side will lead to margin improvements. On the service side of things, I think we kind of touched upon that. If you look at, you know, Atlas Copco, for example, an air compressor company, you know, their service margins are hundreds of basis points better than our industry's gross margins and where I think ours could go. If you go into SG&A, you know, we're working away at just, you know, basically cutting costs because as a result of the residential divestment, of course, there's some stranded costs. We're making some good progress on that.
That was a good chunk of what's showing up on EBIT already. We have tremendous opportunities to break the connection between our growth rate and how our SG&A cost has grown over the years. I think Nigel has heard me talk about how we've doubled the amount of selling hours in a couple of our sales teams, and that's now being deployed. That takes time, by the way, to roll out globally, of course. If you can double the amount of selling hours with customers and a sales team without adding people. It takes time to recruit people, to train people and so on. We'll still be adding some people, you know, basically doubling the amount of selling hours is going to give us a really nice cost leverage.
Then on the R&D side of things, we are gonna continue to increase our dollars in R&D because there's more opportunity to differentiate with technology in the areas where we're pointing the company. You will see, for those of you who join us in two, three weeks, examples of how we've taken the time to get certain new products to market down significantly with applying our business system. When you can, for example, you know, take one project and say instead of it's gonna take 24 months to deliver same scope, same cost, all of that, and do it in 14 months, you didn't quite double your capacity, but it's pretty darn close, right? We're gonna see some R&D cost leverage there as well.
None of this is magic, it's just tried and proven principles applied in other places and the opportunities are plenty. That's why I'm, you know, one of several reasons why I'm so enthusiastic about our future here.
Yeah. I'm sure our founder, Ed Wolfe, would be intrigued on how you double the number of sell now. Maybe we'll talk to you after that.
Yeah. Some of it's about management getting out of the way.
just on quickly on the, on the kind of the margins across segments. Europe and Asia are now within spitting distance of North America. Do you think that convergence continues going forward, or do you think North America will always be the most profitable region? When do you expect to see the real acceleration in operating leverage for North America?
Yeah. Starting with the last one. North America will see most of it, operating leverage improve, thanks to volume. There's some opportunity there, of course, and the rationalization and consolidation of our manufacturing footprint plays an important role in the margin improvement in North America. It's more of a question of how quickly can we get that operating leverage from the volume that is coming and unwinding that backlog as quickly as we can. That's where, over the next year, you will see North America margin rate, accelerate in that improvement. Now when it comes to, North America or Americas versus its regional peers, you've heard me saying that multiple times.
Like, there's really no reason for Europe to be materially different from a margin rate standpoint than where North America is today. Except for the fact that we probably underinvested a little bit in Europe over the years in product leadership and in some capacity and technology. We have made tremendous progress over the last 12 months in starting to close that gap, but there's more work to be done. But over time, there's absolutely no reason for Europe not to be very close to the Americas margin as they stand today. APAC, we have made a good investment in product management leadership. It's about continued growth.
You know that that business has seen ebbs and flows of what was happening in China and in different parts of the region. If you look at the opportunity we have in India, as Joakim laid it out, Southeast Asia, and then Japan remains one of our most attractive, not from a growth standpoint, but from a margin rate standpoint, markets. I think there's a lot to like about APAC from a margin rate and honestly a growth profile as well.
Okay. Thanks, Marc. Joachim, you said, the normalization of margins last year was 3-5 years. If I do my genius math, it's now 2-4 years. Is that?
I think you were the one who said three, right?
Oh, did I say 3?
Yeah. It turned out you were right. Yeah.
Okay. There you go.
Yeah.
In the 2 minutes we got left, is that a yes?
Yes.
Okay, that's good. Thanks. In the last 2 minutes, what's the latest message on the portfolio? There's been some, you know, Bloomberg articles.
Yeah
about potential divestments.
Yeah. Yeah. We, and that's I kind of skimmed over it here. In my first couple of quarters with the company, we took the board through each part of our portfolio and looked at how are we positioned tactically, how are we executing rather tactically versus competitors or versus what we think we could do. We looked also at the business strategically, how are we positioned strategically? What are the competitive moats? And you know, as in every company this size, you know, no one has the perfect portfolio, and not every single business is incredibly differentiated or as much differentiated as you would like. As a result of that, we drew certain conclusions on what we would like to do with the portfolio.
The overarching goal here is, of course, to create shareholder value or at least absolutely minimize dilution, if we were to exit certain pieces. Which we had communicated before I even joined the company that about 10% of the revenues was something we were considering to seek other ownership for. We are going to be looking at a little bit more than the 10%. We'll keep you posted on the progress on that, and the goal here is to create shareholder value.
That's fantastic. We're out of time. Thanks, Joakim. Thanks, Marc.
Thanks.
Thanks, Nigel.
I'm looking forward to the Investor Day coming up soon.
Yeah. Great.
Great. Thank you.
Great. All right.
That's great. Thank you.
Thanks, Nigel.
Thank you so much.
Thanks.