Great. Good morning. For those joining the webcast, welcome to day two of the Wolf Research Global Industrials and Transports Conference. My name is Nigel Coe. I cover multi-industry stocks here at Wolfe, and I also cover Rockwell Automation. Rockwell is the next company on the agenda. Very pleased to welcome to the stage Chairman and CEO Blake Moret and CFO Christian Rothe. Gentlemen, thank you very much for the time. Blake, maybe some open remarks, then we'll get into Q&A.
Sure, absolutely. Thank you for the interest this morning. Rockwell Automation is really the world's largest pure play devoted to industrial automation and digital transformation, headquartered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. We serve manufacturing and production companies across discrete, hybrid, and process segments. In the U.S., we're the most used technology in American manufacturing. That is topical right now and a great home field advantage as we see more investment in the U.S. Beginning early last year, we really leaned into expanding margins to complement top line. I'm happy to see early results of that. Christian, fairly new in the role since August of last year, has certainly supercharged that effort.
As we see the company returning to growth in this quarter, our third fiscal quarter, I'm excited to see that coupled with the lower cost base and what that can do to expand margins to complement top line growth for what we think is going to be a more complete result.
That's great. We're definitely going to get into the margin improvement story because I think that's a really important part of the equity story here. Blake, just want to touch on one thing you said in your remarks. You called out Rockwell as the largest automation player in North America. Can you maybe just quantify that? Just like to market to market where we are, market share, and how market share trends are trending?
Sure. We are worldwide the largest company devoted exclusively to industrial automation and digital transformation. We certainly compete with other companies that are bigger by revenue, but they do a lot of other things, trains and valves and things like that. In the U.S., we are the leading share company in industrial automation. For an example, it is just one part of our product line. We think our market share in programmable controllers is around 70%, which is probably 10 times the size of our nearest competitors, most of which are coming in from Europe.
Okay. Last time I checked, I always had a number between 50% and 60% in my head. I know you talk about gaining share. I mean, what sort of verifiable data do you have to give you just confidence you are getting share?
Sure. We look at share from really four different points. Three that are quantitative and then one that's a little more qualitative. From the quantitative side, the most direct information that we get is from the NEMA US market share reports. We see those regularly. Those include the various aspects of our product businesses as well as the motor control centers. That's one point. The next is we look at the like parts of our competitor's business when we release earnings. We look at the automation portion of Siemens Digital Industries, we look at the relevant portions of Emerson, and so on. That's another point. I'll mention that we've grown favorably compared to our German competitor, the automation portion. We've got quite a streak of multiple quarters of performing favorably there. That's another data point.
We look at the product-specific reports from people like Omdia who are looking at programmable controllers or drives or what have you. Again, there is a consistent message there. Those inform when we talk about gaining, and we say modest share. These things do not happen overnight. The final piece is just anecdotally, when we are in a big high-profile head-to-head competition with one of our competitors, what are their messages? What are our messages? What are our win rates in those sorts of projects? Again, we take a look at that.
That's pretty comprehensive. Okay. We'll get off market share because I'm sure your German competitor is listening right now. I don't want to get into trouble too much. Maybe before we get into your perspectives on the macro and maybe how this could sort of all evolve, what would you say right now, Blake, are the top two or three things on your mind in terms of strategic priorities and where you want to drive Rockwell in the next 12 to 18 months?
Our overarching focus is on integrating the parts. We have built and we have bought a lot of new capabilities over the last, particularly six or seven years, COVID and supply chain notwithstanding, we have been able to play a lot of offense, if you will. Our traditional sources of value, the programmable controllers, the drives, the motion, domain expertise all remain vibrant, but adding the new capabilities, 10% of our business now, annual recurring revenue, the autonomous mobile robots, very strong cybersecurity efforts and offering. Integrating all these pieces together brings a lot of benefit in multiple ways.
First of all, for customers, you get a simpler automation system when you have common look and feel, when you have open APIs exchanging data between different software applications, and when you can create a digital twin of your overall plant and simulate it virtually without having to run material through a line for months and months. You can do that virtually. Those provide tremendous value to the customer. It's kind of what they're looking for from a full-scale production automation supplier. We are putting a lot of effort into that. The acquisitions, the new capabilities we've built organically, integrating those all together for customers. For investors, you should be interested because it's a part of that margin expansion story. We've not paused on the same frequency of acquisitions because we know that acquisitions come with potentially dilutive integration costs.
While we will be back doing acquisitions in the future, this seemed like the right time as we got to a critical mass with respect to software and digital services, mobile robots to make sure that we do a really complete job of integrating those, but also get past those initial dilutive integration costs without throwing new things on the heap, if you will. I think that is a part of the tailwind that is affecting the margin story that I am sure you will ask Christian about a little bit as well. Finally, and it is an important point, our employees have been through a lot in the last few years, beginning with COVID, supply chain, the overstock situation last year, and giving them a chance to recenter, if you will.
Many of those employees are new and giving a chance for that culture to continue to strengthen with a lot of new people. That is another reason for focusing on the integration of the pieces of our worldwide company.
Great. Maybe if you allow me to jump in a little bit. Strategic priority-wise, we certainly have another one, which is operational excellence. We talked about this at Investor Day last year, but importantly for Rockwell, we have really strong expertise and a really good track record around the commercial side of the organization. We are really good at commercialization. Our sales and marketing team is second to none. We have great channel partners. The commercialization side of the business is really strong. The R&D portion of the business, again, a really good background, great history, and really good technologies in the market and an ongoing development process that, again, we feel really strongly about, which is reflected in the market share.
We're trying to add another leg to the stool, which is really good operational excellence, which is partially a margin expansion story, but it's also partially about trying to continue to enhance the ability for us to serve our customers, which is going to help us on the top line.
Maybe just carrying on with our thought process. Obviously, you've been Rockwell CFO now for eight months, maybe nine months or so. When you came in and did your due diligence visiting the various functions, where do you think Rockwell was maybe falling short on the operational tempo side?
Yeah. Again, you guys all look at a lot of industrial companies. I think when you look at those industrial companies and you think about each one of them, in a lot of cases, you're going to index on or at least focus on a few areas where you say, "Okay, these folks are really good at this." As I was doing my diligence, for sure, it's absolutely clear. Frankly, my experience as a Rockwell customer prior to this, it was very clear that Rockwell is outstanding as far as being really on point with the marketplace around what's happening in industrial automation and continuing to drive that from a marketplace perspective. Also really strong on the R&D side.
What Blake and I talked about even from day one, and that was part of my diligence processes around, "Okay, how are we thinking about the ability to grow gross margins? How are we thinking about the ability to drive operational excellence inside of our own factories and inside of our businesses?" That was an area that I think we all agree that there's a really good opportunity. It's certainly something that I saw from afar. As I'm getting into the business and getting to know the organization a lot better, getting to visit facilities, I think there is a chance for us to do more. That has very little to do with any errors or missteps that were made historically. It was a strategic decision of the organization to be more asset-light over the last 20-some years.
That is an opportunity for us to then say, "Okay, what if we actually put more of our assets to work?" Our balance sheet is in great shape. We have the ability to invest more in ourselves. How do we bring more of things that we are doing on the outside into our own operations? How do we think about bringing more of the Rockwell technology into our own operations, Rockwell for Rockwell? Putting a little bit of our balance sheet to work in order to get a benefit on the P&L.
Oftentimes, as you sort of turn over stones, you find more stuff and more things to do. If you were to say maybe over the last six months or so, how do you think the opportunity sets for that margin expansion has developed?
I think there's a fair bit of runway. That's the good part. When you think about it, at least the way I think about it, it's great to have those opportunities and to know that those opportunities are some that you can execute today that can have a yield relatively early on. You see some of that already in the cost reduction and margin expansion activities that we're doing right now. Some of that's material purchases, working with our supply base. Those are relatively fast. The next layer is thinking about, "Okay, how do we do some of that in-sourcing? How do we think about potentially taking things to be done on the outside, bring them inside, remove people from our profit pool?" Those are great opportunities for us. It takes a little bit more time.
You go even farther out and you think, "Okay, well, what does that mean then once we start to really think about what the Rockwell manufacturing of the future could look like? Is there more that we can do around footprint? Is there more that we can think about as far as how we go to market or how we serve the market?" Those are, again, they'll take a longer period of time. The great news is that we have all those opportunities and we can face them and do it radically while having a really good, again, that long runway for margin expansion.
Last year's business environment served as a strong catalyst for kicking off this, say, revitalized approach. Really importantly, we're spending a lot of time making sure that we operationalize this in a Rockwell operating model so that this continues through the cycle and for many years in the future. It's not dependent on individual heroics or the urgency of the moment, but we've got these things in a broader effort that's self-sustaining as we continue to incent people to look for opportunities to be more efficient.
Thinking about sort of chicken and egg. Christian comes in with a strong operational background, starts to develop this operational framework. Was it a case of you wanted somebody with that kind of experience to drive that margin improvement?
I think from the first time Christian and I spoke on a Saturday morning back early last year, he understood that we were looking for somebody who would take what we had already stated as targets in terms of expanding margins to complement the growth and to make sure that we put in a suitably broad and intense framework for making this happen. I really liked when at the end of a long conversation on that morning, Christian said, "The next meeting I'd like to have is at a Rockwell plant." We snuck him into Twinsburg and he had a look around to understand what our baseline was. That was, I thought, a very good start.
That's great. Thank you. Please, question here.
How do you integrate AI, agentic AI, to increase the total risk of the market charged by CEOs per month for having a solution for that per industry?
Yeah, absolutely. It's a great story. We have very strong AI capabilities. We certainly are looking at using artificial intelligence in our own operations as a next evolution of things like robotic process automation and so on in finance and throughout the various functional areas. For customers, I see the primary opportunity to simplify the effort of designing and commissioning and operating automation systems. One of the best examples of where we're implementing agentic AI is in our FactoryTalk Design Studio. It's a brand new cloud-native, not factored solution that was originally designed to be on-prem, but cloud-native programming tool to design logics-based automation systems. It has a copilot that we developed, and it is able to dramatically reduce the amount of keystrokes to create a new system. It also can go out and document these systems to make them easier to operate and maintain.
That's one example. Another example is with the ability to take basic data about a driven load being controlled by one of our drives and to be able to look at the health of that operation and looking at the signature of voltage and current coming back from that motor, being able to understand, are you in a healthy condition, are you getting ready to throw a bearing or something like that. Simplifying the effort of, again, creating these systems, provisioning them, and then to be able to operate them.
We have an AI center of excellence that serves as a clearinghouse for all the businesses so that as they're spinning up their own efforts, it's not all going to be centrally developed, but giving them the competencies to be able to do things in a common way across the organization, but still with specific applications for the drives business or the programmable control business or motion, whatever. I'm very happy with that pace and that trajectory. We have very strong partners. We work closely with Microsoft, NVIDIA, with others in more application-specific areas. Importantly, we're not trying to do it all ourselves. We look at the areas that we have expertise, we have differentiation, and we work with partners to make sure that we're as efficient as possible.
Any more questions? Okay, I'll continue. I think it's fair to say that the current macro is very complex, very confusing, lots going on, lots of news flow from DC. What sort of environment, given all your experience of management through cycles, Blake and Christian, what do you see right now? Anything to worry about? Any demand pull ahead of tariffs or anything unusual out there you call out?
There's always plenty to worry about, but I will tell you, I think we're managing in the appropriate way in that we're being very prudent with respect to add-backs of cost, right? Even as we return to growth, making sure that we're not bringing back costs at the same rate so that we have a baseline that creates very attractive leverage as we do return to year-over-year top-line growth, I think is the right way to be managing through this. On our product side, which services a lot of existing plants around the world and certainly within the U.S., we're seeing good sequential growth there. We have seen some delays with respect to the more CapEx-intensive projects that largely flow through our life cycle services business and then the configured order portion of intelligent devices. Certainly, automotive remains weak, as we talked about on the call.
We see e-commerce, warehouse automation as a real strong spot, life sciences, so pharmaceutical, and you've certainly seen all the announcements as well as strong energy, a little bit weaker. Chemical, Trendarrow is up there. Food and beverage, we're seeing some positive signs, particularly among the machine builders that account for a lot of that business.
Based on what you're hearing from your partners, integrated partners, channel partners, customers, what are they waiting for to get some of these large projects moving again?
Yeah. I had an opportunity earlier this week to attend the National Electrical Distributors Conference and had a chance to talk to a few of our longstanding partners. I think what they're seeing is consistent in that there remains optimism in the market about the opportunity going forward. Projects, even when they have been delayed, they're delayed. They're not being canceled. I think when projects are being delayed, the most common reasons that we're seeing, below a little more detail than just tariff-related uncertainty, is, one, the specific cost. People are wanting to make sure that their ROI for that business proposition remains robust and that tariffs and other cost changes, interest rates, things like that still make it an attractive business proposition to implement that program. Second, on the other side is what about the demand from their customers?
Have anything with the volatility between countries, has that affected what they can expect in terms of demand from their end customers? They are looking at that. In some cases related to that, if they are a startup company, outside funding for that project, is that still solid for them? You start getting into the things that are always present, negotiations on terms and conditions. People are wanting to make sure that they are protected against changes in the tariff regime and so on, making sure that they have all of that in order before moving forward with these projects. Those are the types of specific things that we are hearing.
The White House e-comm, I think 45% last quarter. I think you're the only company out there seeing this kind of growth in White House e-comm. Just wondering, what's driving that and sustainability of that growth?
Sure. Let me talk about four elements of that. For context, that business represents a little bit in the area of 5% of our total revenue. It is not everything. Our data center exposure itself is relatively modest, but what data center exposure we have is very strong. It comes primarily through QubiQ, which was the acquisition of a Danish company we made a couple of years ago. It is power distribution equipment, and everybody is well aware of the kind of power that data centers use. That business is growing strong double digits. The second area would be in parcel handling. Think of companies like UPS and FedEx as they are seeking to modernize their facilities to be able to improve the balance between manual labor and advanced technology to be able to increase their efficiency. There is a lot of investment going on there.
The third area would be in e-commerce and the growth of new fulfillment centers. People are back to building new fulfillment centers, and there's a pretty high automation content there. The fourth really is more of a horizontal cut across a lot of, in particular, the consumer package goods businesses where they have a certain amount of existing automation intensity in the make part of their operation. Making the shampoo or the candy bars or whatever, but where there's still lots of manual effort going on and inefficiency in bringing material to resupply the line or taking finished pallets away and moving it to the loading dock or to the warehouse. That's that whole area that we've characterized as production logistics with mobile robots, independent cart technology, certainly traditional PLCs, using digital twins to optimize the workflow through these operations.
We're seeing a lot of activity there as well.
Great. Thanks, Blake.
I would just say, you asked about the duration. We do see this continuing into next year. We do not see this as some single quarter type of spike. We do see that demand as being persistent well into 2026.
In the time we got left, there's five more minutes. There are three more topics I want to touch on, but if there's anyone in the audience, please put your hand up. Going back to the margin story, Christian, obviously we've got a target for this year in terms of cost reduction. When do you think you'll be ready to help us dimensionalize the opportunity beyond 2025, 2026, 2027?
Yeah, so I think as we exit this year, we'll give you an update on what our expectations are for 2026. There's an aspect around this that, and this is a good news story, is that yes, we have certain aspects that are going to be annualized into 2026. Great. The other part is that as volumes continue to grow, then we're going to capture benefits that we have not been able to get thus far. That is going to be a harder one to dimensionalize, to be frank. It's going to show up more in the core side of our business, and it's going to show up more in the incremental margin side and margin expansion. It probably is not going to show up on a really nice chart that shows a waterfall of exactly what, because again, it gets a little bit lost in that.
The nice benefit is that it allows us to do a better job of going back to, it's really hard to renegotiate with suppliers when you're telling them that, and we're not really going to grow for the near term. Being back to growth makes that a better part of the story. Then getting into the next portion of it, which is, okay, how are we investing in ourselves and what does that look like as we go into 2026? We'll be able to dimensionalize some of that. It's probably something that we're going to spend a little bit of time talking about in investor day in November. Then we'll talk about more of the longer-term plan. I'm not sure if we're ready to sign up for exactly what those numbers look like.
Keep in mind, we've been talking about for us since 2023 that we think Rockwell, the next target for us for operating margins is 23.5%. Our current guide for this year has us at 20%. So 350 basis point expansion from where we're sitting, where we're going to end this year, again, versus the guide. Let's go achieve that, and then let's run through it and keep going. Dimensionalizing that, I'd like to go achieve first, and then we'll start to put numbers out there.
350 is not a bad number. Tariffs, we obviously had some good news on the China tariffs since you reported results, I think, since you reported, maybe?
Yeah, since we reported.
Since, yeah. You had very nice price realization in the second quarter. Anything changing on the pricing side or the kind of measures?
Yeah, so we have a tariff-based pricing price recovery method that's in place. Importantly for us, and what we talked about on the call is that the tariff environment, it's going to go up, it's going to go down. We know that. It's been that way. It will continue to be that way likely. Our expectation and our commitment to our investors is that the impact on EPS is nothing, right? So it's nil. Our intention is to offset it both from supply chain actions, but as well as pricing. And so the pricing number has come down somewhat. To dimensionalize that, when we were on our call, it was $125 million was a headwind for the second half. That number for us now after these pauses puts that number at $70 million, $70 million. So we have had some relief there.
That's made up of about $20 million in Mexico, Canada tariffs, about $20 million in China, both the back and forth on China, about $15 million that is from acquisitions. Those are a little bit harder for us to have resiliency to lean into at the moment. And about $15 million from the rest of the world and some of the other steel and aluminum tariffs. In the interest of time, I'm happy to talk about price as well outside of tariff-based pricing, but maybe that's a different question.
Yeah, I was going to finish on what does an acquisition look like for Rockwell. Let's go with pricing. I think that's a good topic.
Sure. Price realization was really strong for us in the second quarter at 3%. That price realization, importantly, none of that was related to tariffs. Tariff-based pricing was quite minimal in Q2, as was tariff-based cost. That price realization really came from two different areas. The first part was that we did pull forward our annual price increase. That was done not for anything other than we wanted to clear the deck and make sure that as we knew there was going to be noise from tariff-based price changes going up and down, we did not want to confuse it with an annual price increase at the same time. We brought that forward and again, brought some certainty for us.
Frankly, there is a little bit of an aspect around that we did not want partners of ours or customers of ours taking advantage of trying to get ahead of a price increase if they knew what was coming too. There was one aspect around that. The second part, and again, a really great driver for us in price realization in Q2 was the fact that we have tightened up our price realization policies and practices. There are all sorts of ways that leakage happens on price. That is, you have a list-to-list number, and then realized price is something typically a little bit less than that. Because we are in this situation of tariff-based pricing, that allows us to tighten up and say, you know what, in situations where maybe we would have had concessions before, we are not going to do that right now.
We're trying to make sure that, again, we're realizing as much as we possibly can.
Okay, great. Maybe just a quick one on acquisitions. Blake, any ambitions to white spaces to fill, any technologies?
Sure. You know, I think we've got a great offering, great portfolio. As we talked about, right now, focuses on integrating the pieces, always on the look for annual recurring revenue sources that will be a good fit strategically as well as financially, looking at ways to increase share and market access outside the U.S. and Europe and in Asia. Whether it's application-specific technology or it's existing profitable businesses that can be supercharged by running through our great distributor network, that's another area that's of interest as well.
Okay. Blake, Christian, that was a great discussion. Thank you very much.
Yeah, thank you.