Great. Well, thanks, everyone, for being here. It's my pleasure to have up next Rockwell Automation, Blake Moret, CEO, and, of course, Christian Rothe, who joined as CFO about six months ago. I think, Blake, you've got a couple of slides to go through, and then we'll get into the Q&A.
Yeah, great. Well, thanks, everybody, for being here with us this morning. For those who might be a little newer to the Rockwell name, pure play is devoted exclusively to industrial automation and digital transformation. We go to market with three business segments: Software and Control, Intelligent Devices, and Lifecycle Services. And I think it's fair to say that we're the most pervasive technology, certainly in American manufacturing, as American manufacturers try to increase the smartness of their operations. We have great market access across the manufacturing disciplines: discrete - think of things like automobile assembly, warehouse automation, hybrid, which would include food and beverage, life sciences, home and personal care, and process, which would include energy, mining, chemical, and so on, which actually, and maybe surprisingly to some of you, is the single largest industry segment we serve, which represents about 40% of our total business.
We go to market with our Allen-Bradley hardware brand, FactoryTalk Software, and then our lifecycle services for services, particularly digital services, cybersecurity assessments and remediation, as well as defined scope projects. In November of 2023, at our Investor Day, we launched a growth algorithm that recognizes the continuing high need for automation, particularly as companies and countries look to increase manufacturing, even in high-cost locations. The only way that that can be competitive is complementing that labor with the type of automation we provide, so we expect 3%-5% underlying growth of the market, share growth and expanded serve market of 1%-2%, a point a year from a growing amount of annual recurring revenue that we have, and then, as we get back to acquisitions in the next year or so, a point on average from acquisitions.
In the U.S., where a lot of the activity is today, we have the highest share, the deepest relationships, the biggest installed base, and the best channel. So we like our position. We certainly see a lot of competition, particularly from our European competitors. But I'm happy to say that we're more than holding our own, and a lot of those companies providing equipment into the U.S. want to work with us as the U.S. leader. On top of our focus on top line, as we return to growth, is also an important focus on taking cost out to be able to expand margins.
It started last year with a significant reduction in our SG&A expense and has continued on, looking at areas like direct material sourcing, indirect services, manufacturing efficiencies, rationalization of a very large base of catalogs or SKUs, as well as targeted price actions. Our first quarter results yielded an attractive early result from these efforts. It'll continue through this year and into the outgoing years. Importantly, we're enshrining these activities in a revitalized Rockwell operating model that should be relevant through the cycle and not dependent on any one individual. With that, we'll get into the Q&A.
Great. Thanks for that, Blake. Maybe first off, just to start with the very near- term, I think investors are intrigued, and we can see from the turnout in here sort of keen to understand the cyclical dynamics. You had encouraging orders, growth in the first fiscal quarter. Just help us understand kind of to what extent you think that is presaging the beginning of a decent cyclical recovery versus perhaps reflecting just easy comps or some tariff pull forward or something.
So we do think that the. I'll tell you two things that we think contributed to the first quarter orders: positive sequential growth and one thing that we don't think it was. First of all, we do believe that we're getting some benefit by finally getting to the bottom of the destock situation. Last year, we saw negative growth because of overstock at our distributors and at machine builders around the world. And with the possible exception of distribution in China, we think we're pretty much at the end of that. And so we're seeing some bump from that. It's not a huge, homogenous, all-clear where everybody dumps in very large orders all at once, but it's coincident with our view that we're going to see gradual sequential growth through the year.
Then we also do think that it's based on some strengthening coming off of a bottom in some of our important end markets like food and beverage, home and personal care, life sciences. E-commerce and warehouse automation continue on for us. I'm sure we'll talk about that in a minute. We also see continued investment in process, including oil and gas, which remains a decent-sized market for us, but with some difficult comps. What we don't think that growth is coming from in orders is from any sort of pull forward related broad-based orders across regions, across offerings, including where there would be no benefit to anybody in pulling forward an order. We also saw our distributor inventories remain constant, so we didn't see evidence that they were stockpiling in advance of some sort of tariff.
Got it. Thanks very much for that. And when you think about sort of customer purchasing in terms of type of activity, a lot of your business is replacement-driven. How are you seeing the environment in terms of sort of greenfield CapEx versus distribution and aftermarket? I think your points on the end of destock is very good for the distribution and aftermarket. Maybe what's happening on greenfield?
Yeah, we did see some project-related spend in the first quarter spread across our different business segments. So some of it was in the form of products where somebody else is going to do the integration and the installation. Some of it was in our Lifecycle Services business. We continue to see decent orders in our configured-to-order lineups, power distribution equipment within intelligent devices. For scale, about 10% of our business, a little bit more than 10% of our business, is contractually driven Annual Recurring Revenue with software and related services. There's another 30% of our business that is maintenance and repair orders. So it's that flow business that goes almost the remainder being line expansions, modernization projects, some amount of greenfields. Some of that is direct business. Some of it also goes through distribution.
That's very helpful. Thank you. And when we think about market share, you mentioned, I think, at the beginning, you're sort of winning more than your fair share. So there's some share gain happening in North America. Kind of which product areas are we seeing that in? And globally, how would you assess your sort of share position right now?
Yeah, I think our overall share position is stable to slightly up, even given the volatility of the last few years. Importantly, programmable controllers, which are important for customers, important for our financial equation, show modest share increases in the U.S. as well as worldwide. For context, our market share in the U.S. is around 70%. That's 10 x the size, roughly, of our nearest competitor in the U.S. That's an important number, and that's actually gone up a little bit here recently. Motor control centers is another area where we are taking some share. Our lead times, actually, have been a competitive advantage there, as some of our competitors' facilities that produce that type of equipment have been consumed with data center-related activity.
Got it. And you mentioned sort of ARR, and it is a KPI for the organization. It's been a big focus. You mentioned, I think, it's just over 10% of the company. Maybe unpack it a little bit, some of its software, some of its services. And on the software side, how satisfied are you with the acquisitions from a couple of years ago, their integration?
So I'm very happy with the strategic fit of all the acquisitions that we've made. We've made quite a few of them in the last half dozen years. That would include, on the software side, Plex was by far the biggest Fiix with their maintenance management software. There's actually a software portion of ASEM, the Italian industrial PC manufacturer, who also had a pretty good software development team. And then we've also done a pretty good job of transforming our own internally developed software into more of a subscription model. We still have a fair bit of software that's sold on a perpetual basis, but the annual recurring revenue is meaningful. It's profitable, and it's growing double digits, and that has a nice impact on the company's financial performance. There's more work to be done.
One of the reasons that we have said we're going to take a little bit of a pause on new acquisitions is so that we can concentrate on integrating these pieces together. Whereas the challenge in automation to help simplify the architecture 20 years ago and maybe 10 years ago was to have open communication interfaces to connect the products, the differentiation today is being able to provide APIs to be able to exchange data between software applications. It's a multi-vendor world out there, and so taking the time to make sure our software works really well with each other and with other applications at the edge and in the cloud are important focuses for the organization today.
And within software, what are one or two of the highest growth areas or areas you're investing more in? I know MES has been a big push.
We spent a lot of money and a lot of effort over the last few years developing the industry's first cloud-native programming platform for programmable controllers. I'm not talking about something that was designed for on-prem use that can theoretically be run in a container in the cloud. It was designed and optimized to run cloud-native. And that brings some important technical advantages to be able to provide multi-user participation in the creation of programs, multi-controller distribution of a single program interface with other applications, easier to be simulated as creating a digital twin of the process. FactoryTalk Design Studio, which we have shown for the last couple of years at our automation fair, is industry-leading, and I'm including all our big European competitors in that comparison. That's one that we're seeing a rapid increase of users.
We expect to start to see meaningful revenue coming from customers subscribing to the runtime version of FactoryTalk Design Studio here at the end of the year. Fiix, maintenance management software, is another fast-growing software. This was something we acquired. It was a Canadian start-up, and we're seeing good growth as well as good development in the profitability of that business, and again, it's cloud-native. Those are just a couple of examples. Plex is growing double digits. It's quite profitable, and based on its size and what we paid for it, it's obviously an important element of our software as well.
Great, and if we look at the rest of the sort of software and control division, the sort of core PLC business, very high market share, seems like that's cyclically turned the corner. I suppose a couple of questions on it. One is near-term cycle-wise. I think people often think of automotive as being a big PLC market. Kind of what's happening there in terms of customer spending? And then more structurally, the PLC's place in the plant floor always has question marks since the 1980s, I think. Is there anything new in that discussion?
Well, there is. And so we're encouraged that we're seeing a nice development of orders for Logix, which is our programmable controller, despite automotive not really making a meaningful contribution. Because, as you said, the automotive assembly process is quite PLC intensive, and I attribute some of that to the broadening of the markets that we serve. So programmable controllers, in whatever form they come out, hardware, software, are at the heart of the control system. If you think of a classic control system, there's inputs, there's logic, the computer-type function, and then there's a change in state of outputs to control a process. Programmable controllers have typically been characterized by software to program them, firmware, and then hardware all bundled together.
And more recently, we and our competitors are all talking about, whether it's virtual PLCs or software-defined architecture, breaking apart the software runtime from a defined, dedicated, bespoke piece of hardware. We think over the next few years, the majority of programmable controllers, the vast majority, are still going to be purchased with the hardware and the software coming from the same supplier, but we want to give that option and that flexibility so that the software can be run on open compute surfaces. And by the way, we have a very good line of industrial PCs, so that will be ready if a customer says, "Well, I want to run it on a consumer off-the-shelf semiconductor chipset." So we are working on that. We showed it at Automation Fair.
Separate from the programming tool is the actual runtime of Logix, and we think we can compete favorably with our competitors. Importantly, an increasing amount of the revenue will be in the form of annual recurring revenue, whereas today, Logix is sold in a one-time license, as you would expect with hardware. But we think that we can gain an increasing amount of resilient annual recurring revenue from these new business models.
Got it. Outside of software for ARR, how should we think about the development of that, the services side of things? Which industries are you making that push on services?
Well, so Lifecycle Services, which is well over $2 billion, is the break/fix services as well as the digital services, creation of digital twins, cybersecurity assessments and remediation, as well as the projects. Importantly, that business has shifted a little bit away from what it relied on somewhat in the past for volume in terms of low-margin panel build business or high-risk coordinated drive system business. We still do some of that, but it's moving to more differentiated offerings of, as they talk about, difficult digital that really decreases the number of competitors in that space. And we made it pretty clear to that business that we were going to need to see margin improvement in order for that business to be able to attract new investment dollars. And they rose to the occasion, and we've seen probably the best early results in terms of margin expansion within Lifecycle Services.
Yeah, absolutely. It's been a really good runway for that group. And I think they feel like there's, again, still a lot of opportunity going forward for them. Clearly, this year, there's some headwinds for that team, both from the total compensation perspective, incentives coming back into play. And on top of that, of course, this group has FX impact as well. But broadly speaking, it's still a really good runway for them.
More broadly, maybe on the margin point, there's been a lot of leaning in on cost out, the $250 million program. Also, I think an effort to make sort of a discrete program, but there's a more systematic effort underway to get sort of margins higher. Kind of where are we on that? What are some of the big building blocks that you've started out with there?
I've been happy with the early results. I think it was this conference last year that we started leaning in a little more. We had, in the previous November of 2023, talked about our margin aspirations by business. But when we were down here a year ago, we started talking a little bit more vigorously about a cost-down program. And that certainly picked up speed with Christian joining the organization later in the summer as CFO. It started with a reduction in SG&A cost. It continued with many dozens, even hundreds of projects aimed at sourcing of material, price paid for stampings and components, indirect services, movement to lower-cost transportation as supply chain became more stable, manufacturing efficiencies, incorporation of automation, additional automation in the plants, reduction of SKUs. There's a long list.
Yeah, it is a long list, that's for sure. And importantly, we had really good performance on this program in the first quarter, right? $70 million benefit year- over- year. We're still getting the benefit of, of course, what happened in the second half of last year with, as Blake just said, SG&A reductions. We're getting the benefit of that. And as we go farther along in this fiscal year, we're going to see a ramp in savings off the cost of goods sold side of the business while we are lapping those comps on the SG&A side. So that's why overall we've got $250 million in benefit for fiscal 2025.
But I do think it's important for us to have a long-term organizational plan around making sure that the Rockwell operating model gets deeply ingrained in the organization, as Blake said, that it's not any individuals that are driving it, but it's more of a cultural phenomenon for the team. And so the opportunity in 2025 is great, but I'm really excited about the opportunities as we go into 2026 and 2027, especially as volumes start to come back up. Because this organization, the team that's been focused on the COGS side of it, they've had one arm tied behind their back because there's not a lot of negotiation you can do when the volumes aren't there.
I think pricing is something that you've both talked about the past six months of maybe making price increases more programmatic, getting the distribution partners to get sort of used to that. How's that process going? To what extent is it dependent on a very healthy volume environment?
We traditionally have been able to get and keep price, I think, reasonably well. That certainly accelerated during the period of supply chain crisis as we were having to implement even larger price increases to deal with the rapid inflation of inputs. It also caused us to make, as you said, certain programmatic changes in pricing so that we can realize price quicker. We're mostly complete on some of those initial structural changes. And thank goodness because we've had to put some of that into action here recently with rapidly announced and dynamic tariff situation to be able to make sure that we can realize price so that we're protected against increasing costs as well. But more broadly, the ability to have a more surgical approach to price increases in different parts of our product line, I think we've got good data for that. We implemented some systems even going back half a dozen years ago, and Christian, with his experience, has really made an early contribution, and we're not anywhere near done in looking at how we can drive additional price across our offering.
Yeah. And I think it has to do with, and Blake talked about a little bit on that slide where we were talking about our overall cost reduction and margin expansion activities. That portfolio optimization is one aspect of that. So yes, part of it's SKU rationalization, and there's an activity going on around that right now. We eliminated about 21,000 SKUs in the first quarter. We've got about 39,000 more that are under evaluation. May or may not result in actual elimination of SKUs there, but also pricing and using price as a lever around if we have low-volume products that are to customers that are in the B category, we'll be opportunistic on price with those. And so there's a lot of different dynamics that we're putting into play here, and I think that's good. And it's not just a broad brush. I think we have to really use the data that we have and be opportunistic.
And if we think about kind of operating leverage when that recovery in sales comes, you have the 35% core sort of placeholder for the medium- term. When we think about Logix bouncing faster because it dropped more and the cost out and sort of volume leverage, shouldn't we expect core operating leverage to be a lot higher than 35% in the first year of an upturn?
Yeah. So we put this framework in place back in November of 2023 at the same time that we put the top-line algorithm in place for our objectives. And when we did that, previously, the organization had talked about a 30%-35% range on incrementals, and that range was really banded more around a 5% or a mid-single-digit type of growth rate. We dropped the 30%. We went to just 35%, and we also dropped the notion that we needed to have a mid-single-digit growth in order to achieve that. So we want to, of course, see performance and hit that 35.
I understand that there are certainly dynamics that we do have some very profitable product lines that, as they recover, they're going to drive some good margin growth. Yes, we also have other activities that we're doing around trying to make sure that our cost structure stays. We take all the hard work that we've put into place here over the last six to nine months, and we continue to leverage off of that. Changing from that algorithm at this point around 35% core conversion, we're probably not ready to step away from that right now.
If we think about the sort of guidance for this year overall, kind of tying it together, you have that orders growth backdrop, the good progress on cost out. I don't want to pin you down to one adjective to describe the guidance framework, but I suppose how would you describe it?
Yeah, I think balanced is one word that comes to mind. We want to make sure that we can deliver what's in the guide. There's some optimism, but there's still a lot of volatility in the market after the last few years. So we're importantly doing things to make sure that our innovation on the top line remains strong and that we're holding and winning new share, but also working in a very definitive way on the cost base, which is going to be important regardless of what that top-line growth looks like over the next few years. We think we're returning to a period of growth, and it'll yield very attractive benefits. But these are the right things to do regardless of market conditions.
Cash usage, it's less M&A for the foreseeable future. Is it mostly kind of going on to share buybacks than the excess cash?
Yeah. I mean, we have an active share buyback program this year. We talked about at a minimum $300 million in buybacks that we're looking at. We've got about $1.2 billion left under our existing authorizations. There's an opportunistic overlay that we've put in place that should the market provide an opportunity that the program will accelerate some of those buybacks with different levels, obviously, related to that. Beyond that, we'll use the opportunity to pay down some debt, keeping in mind that as we're taking a pause in acquisitions, it's not a bad time to reload and create a little bit of dry powder for when we do get back out in the market again.
Perfect. Well, now I think we'll pivot to the audience response questions. So the first question, do you currently own shares in Rockwell? So 80% no. Secondly is kind of general perspective on the company at the moment. So fairly balanced. Third question is around through cycle earnings growth for Rockwell versus the multi-industry peer group. So generally in line. Next question is around use of excess cash. So mostly share buybacks. The penultimate question I think is around valuation. What PE should the company trade at? So generally sort of market multiple or slight premium. And then last question, kind of what's the biggest holdup? Why do 80% of you not own the shares at the moment? So about 70% says core growth. Great. With that, thank you, Blake.