All right. Good morning, everyone. I'm Joe O'Dea . Really happy to kick off day three with Rockwell Automation and Christian Rothe, CFO, and Aijana Zellner, who runs IR and market strategy. Thank you so much for being with us this morning.
Thanks for having us. Good morning.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Day Three, right?
Day Three.
Yeah. You were—I saw you in the gym this morning. You were working out hard, so you still got plenty of energy.
Going hard, right?
That's good.
Yeah. Exactly. Ready to rock.
Good one.
Oh, boy.
Even more of that coming, I'm sure.
Exactly. Let's start on the demand side and in terms of what seems like resilience on customer spending patterns despite what we're seeing on elevated uncertainty. The question is really why. You know, why have we seen—it's not the acceleration that maybe we were hoping for, but it's also not necessarily deterioration that we might have been fearing. What are you hearing from customers out there on that resilience?
Yeah. Maybe I'll split it up in a couple different pieces. The first part is that the product side of the business is coming together nicely, and we are definitely seeing an uptick in the demand side for the product portion of our business. Really, those are some of the fundamentals that you would see maybe at the early point of a cycle, right? It's, you know, we have labor availability issues, labor cost issues, people continuing to try to drive efficiency in their operations, especially, especially in the light of uncertainty. The other portion of it, though, that, again, we would hope is going to come together better, but it's not yet, is really the capital equipment demand side.
The more capital-intensive projects for our customers, that uncertainty that I mentioned that is maybe helping a little bit for folks investing, trying to continue to keep their operations running, but without larger projects, it is hurting us on the larger projects. We are seeing that come through in the lifecycle services portion of our business as well as the configured-to-order portion of our intelligent devices business. That portion, you know, we still got some runway there. We need to see maybe some of that uncertainty fall away.
Just to dig in on that a little bit more and the demand patterns you've seen in lifecycle and the configured-to-order, as we started this year, things were getting a little bit better, right? We saw it within the PMI trends. Were you seeing momentum build in some of the more CapEx-intensive, heavier spend areas, and then that paused?
Yeah. Just to frame it, when we talk about the demand side, you know, when we're talking about that sort of activity, it's really not the booking side of it. It's really the quotation side of it. That is, you know, whether we're doing a budgetary quote for a customer or we're actually getting farther into a project. That activity level was pretty good as we exited last year and came into this year. Frankly, there's still a bunch of it that's in the works. When we talk about a delay and customer delays, it's really delaying them from taking a quotation to an actual booking for us. It's definitely showing up in our orders. Don't, you know, don't have a mistake about that. It's really about getting them over the finish line.
Now, at the same time, those customers, and in fact, I just was having a conversation this week with some of our leaders. Those customers are not abandoning their projects. They're not canceling the projects. There's obviously some modifications that they're doing. They're working hard. Those customers are working hard to try to make sure that there's a great ROI for them, which is exactly what, frankly, you would expect them to do in this moment of uncertainty.
Yeah. I'll just add that the project delays we saw in Q2, a lot of them, were centered around automotive and energy. Energy, you know, lifecycle services being a little bit more indexed towards process industries, that's where you see that impact on projects, on capital-intensive projects.
Got it. And then I wanted to talk about revenue mix a little bit and the, the MRO side versus brownfield, greenfield side. And so just what, what the mix is and then, you know, what you've seen in those different sleeves.
Sure.
Do you want to take that one?
Yeah. Sure. Historically, we've had about 2/3 of our business driven by CapEx and about 1/3 of it by MRO, right? Within CapEx, historically, there's been a lot of brownfield upgrades, expansions. Now, more recently, we're seeing more and more greenfield in terms of the projects going forward. In general, the majority of our business is driven by these big CapEx projects that historically have been brownfield. That's kind of the breakdown. What you see with MRO, as Christian mentioned, that's where we saw some good progress in Q2, good flow. There are still projects going on. It's just some of the bigger CapEx projects that are being delayed. That does add uncertainty. It really depends on each industry and what's driving the behavior there.
Some of it is tariff cost and uncertainty and customers trying to figure out what happens to their global supply chain footprint. Some of it is consumer-driven and what's the adoption of certain things and what's the preference, and the macro situation. Some of it is policy, right, if you look at energy and renewables. Every—some of it is low commodity pricing. There are different drivers for spending, and there are different drivers for some of the delay in customers triggering that bigger spend. We still see very good demand for productivity, efficiency. We talked about it. Even these customers that are in the industries that are challenged, automotive or energy, they are spending. They're spending on our autonomous mobile robots. They're spending on our software. They're spending on our cybersecurity services.
They're effectively trying to increase their production capacity by increasing their throughput, reducing quality issues, and being more efficient.
On the greenfield side of things and where you're seeing a little bit of activity there just in terms of the verticals, I mean, I know you've raised the outlook for things like warehouse and e-commerce, but just where those verticals are that are seeing some of the greenfield activity.
Yeah, you're right. We increased outlook for several industries in our fiscal Q2. E-commerce and warehouse automation is continuing to be a very strong vertical for us. It's a combination of e-commerce as an industry and also warehouse automation as an application across many industries. We see a combination of greenfield and brownfield investments in that bucket. E-commerce, we do see after a period of digestion in fiscal 2024, we see more build-out of new fulfillment centers. It is greenfield. When you look at warehouse automation broadly and a lot of companies, whether it's parcel companies, whether it's traditional retailers that are trying to upgrade their existing warehouses, modernize them, they want to either catch up with their competitors or leapfrog them, that's a lot of brownfield. It's a lot of core automation we provide there.
Our Logix controllers, our drives, our software. We are seeing both of those firing on all cylinders right now. In addition to that, we see some business with data centers. It's not a big part of our revenue, but we do have some exposure to the power distribution side of the data center business through our acquisition of CUBIC. That's growing strong double digits, and we expect that to be a durable demand. That bucket is a combination of greenfield and brownfield. Life sciences is another industry where we saw good performance, better than we expected in the quarter, and we increased our outlook for the full year. That's where we see also a combination of greenfield and brownfield investments.
There are some parts of process industries where a lot of it is, it's not necessarily a greenfield investment, but a lot of upgrades, a lot of aging equipment, aging infrastructure that needs to be updated, that, you know, you have to have efficiency. You have to have ability to handle more data and security. We see that kind of across the board.
If you take your own spend plans as an example, are there a number of projects that you'd like to move forward on, but given a little bit of uncertainty out there, you're trying to choose the right timing? Just to get a sense of customers are spending, like you said, but we're trying to think about the wave of spend that could be held back right now and moving forward. Do you kind of have that playbook?
Yeah. I mean, there's definitely a number of factors when you're looking at projects inside an organization that you look at. And absolutely, there are, you know, changing dynamics, things that are in your control and things that are outside of your control. The things that are outside of your control are the frustrating ones. Yes, obviously, we have resiliency in our organization. We are using some of that resiliency to try to avoid some of these costs that are coming in. There are other things that we potentially can make some investment in to try to avoid some of those costs, which is fine. Are you doing it for a temporary purpose or a long-term purpose?
How do you think about it from the perspective of, you know, whether or not that's a large investment and can we really dig deep roots with that, or are we doing it for, you know, a really transitory reason? That absolutely goes into the decision-making process. The honest truth is, if it feels like it's a temporary thing, we go back and we do our work another time through, or three times through, or five times through just to make sure that we are gonna get the ROI on our investment. That usually ends up with some modifications to the project. Underlying the whole thing, the notion, the underlying, you know, reason why we wanted to do it to begin with, it's not just typically driven by those outside forces.
It's driven by something on the inside that we really are driving towards. Whether it be, you know, new market growth or going after, you know, assisting some of our new product development launches, those kind of things. It starts at its core with good strategy. Then, again, some of these other factors can be really influential to it, which is, you know, really where you were going with the question, which is, is that happening with your customers? I think absolutely that's happening with our customers. Yeah.
When you talk about the pent-up nature of demand that's out there and you talk about aging equipment and replacing it, like, are they just getting to a point where you can't push it out anymore? Are you experiencing any of that?
Yeah. I think that's part of what, again, what we would do in our own organization, which is, hey, we really were interested in doing this, and maybe we're not gonna be in a position where we wanna invest millions of dollars because of all these other uncertainty factors. But, you know, you do get a little bit, hooked on, okay, but this was a great opportunity for us. Are you sure there's not something else we can do to turn? And so you modify it, and you, you know, you either downsize it or you, or you change it, you know, in a, in a different way to try to ensure that you can still go after the original objective.
Shifting to the tariff discussion, just walk us through kind of the sizing of those costs, how that's developed over the course of the last couple of months.
Sure.
In addition to what we're seeing on steel and aluminum.
Yeah.
The latest there.
Yeah. At our Q2 call, I would've given an update around what our second-half costs were for fiscal 2025. That number at that moment in time, with the data points that were available at that moment in time, was $125 million of headwind. We were, you know, positioned to recover on that from an EPS perspective, via supply chain workarounds, as well as pricing recovery. That since then has changed, obviously, with some of the China tariffs, you know, moving around a little bit. That number went from $125 million down to $70 million. Maybe to put it in context around what drives that $70 million, it's about $20 million that is from Canada and Mexico that is non-USMCA compliant. There's a little bit of work that we can do there to try to help that.
Some of it is, it's gonna be hard to be able to, to make it compliant. There's about $20 million that is related to China, both going both directions, and then $15 million that is related to recently acquired businesses that are, you know, different impact from an organizational perspective, right? Those customers tend to, tend to be a little more focused in certain verticals. We're working through some of those. Then $15 million through a variety of other factors, a portion of which is still in aluminum tariffs. It's still a relatively small number for us. Now your next question is, okay, that $70 million, that was the number that we would've given, I don't know, three, four weeks ago.
You know, after the China matters, but before the changes on the steel and aluminum tariffs that we recently saw. Again, relatively minor. We're not giving out exactly what that number is, partially because it wasn't just taking that tariff number up, but there were a couple other subsections in there that require a little bit more analytics on our side. Again, it's not a huge number for us. It's definitely in the grand scheme, even in that $70 million, it's relatively immaterial.
When we see headline figures like 145% tariffs, we think about what kind of price impact that mean customers are gonna have to absorb. There's also kind of spreading it. Any perspective on some of the largest price increases that you've had to put in place in, in response to tariffs?
Yeah. So, you know, the approach that we're taking on tariffs is that we are, when we're recovering with price, we're trying to be fairly surgical in our approach to it. That is, we have just under 1,000 product family codes that we use inside the organization for our 300,000-plus SKUs. And with various tariffs, when we're making changes, we might impact price on 75-150 different product families, just again, depending on where the product is coming from and all the shipping methods that we're using. And so that is, again, a fairly narrow group. We try to be, again, strategic around what we're doing with regional pricing even. Generally, I would say that most of our price changes related to tariffs have been in the kind of low single-digit, mid-single-digit range.
There are a few, few that are higher than that. The ones that are higher than that are areas where we, you know, things like non-USMCA compliant, that have a margin profile that is not as favorable as some of our base business. You know, if you have a higher cost, obviously, and it's tariffed, then you have a bigger lift on the price recovery. Those are fairly minimal in the grand scheme of things for us. I would think of it more like configure-to-order type of product where it's more project-related. We can build that in relatively easily.
Anything on rare earth elements in terms of exposure? It seems like maybe we're seeing a little bit better environment develop in the latest stuff. Just your exposure there, any supply chain considerations for you?
Yeah. I mean, rare earths are, I don't think you're having any industrials at this conference that would tell you that, "Oh, we have no rare earth," right? It's there. We all have it. And so if, you know, if rare earths never come out of China, ever again, then we're all in trouble for a variety of reasons. And so it's probably just as much of a concern for us around our customer base and what it means for our customers than it is for us in our own business. That being said, you know, our team, our supply chain team did a pretty good job, trying to get ahead of things. And so, you know, we've got some buffer there. But again, if we never get any rare earth ever again, we'll have a problem just as, as will our customers.
You know, it's not a huge portion of the spend, but it can be critical on certain components and products.
I wanted to shift to cycle and with the amount of pricing that was required over the last number of years, trying to think about the volume side of the cycle. When we look at, say, 2024 versus 2019 and think about kind of ITD and think about software and control, you know, anywhere from 10%-17% growth between those two segments if you look over that entire period of time. I would imagine a pretty significant amount of that is price-related. Where are we on the volume side when we think about the cycle? Where are we strong on the volume side? Conversely, a little bit softer?
Yeah. Maybe I'll start, and Aijana can jump in. First of all, I appreciate talking about over a five-year window. You know, so often folks get focused on year- over- year. For me, I'm a big believer in CAGRs. I believe that, when you think about evaluating performance, for us as an organization, frankly, for salespeople, for distributor partners, for, you know, all sorts of things, it's really about the multi-year stack, and it's about the CAGRs that you get over a longer period of time, right? Anybody can have, you know, an easy comp from the prior year and post a big number. You know, having a really solid number over a longer period of time, that's really how I tend to think. I appreciate the way you're thinking about it.
That being said, when you talk about intelligent devices and software and control, and you, I think the math you did was a 10% growth. Again, that's not a CAGR, right? 10% growth for intelligent devices, kind of from 2019 to 2024, 17%. Is that?
Exactly. Software and Control.
For Software and Control. And you're absolutely right. Most of that is pricing. And so the end answer is, is that we are down in volume in both of those businesses compared to 2019. And we did talk about on our Q2 call that the Logix business and our Logix product category, which is, you know, upwards of half of the Software and Control business, it is still below 2019 levels as well. So, you know, when you think about the runway then that we have in those businesses, you know, both of them have a fair bit of runway on the volume side, which is good. Now, I think you asked about mix as well in there. And.
Let's go to mix. Yeah.
Yeah.
Because.
Yeah. So, you know, the mix side on, you know, on Software and Control has adjusted somewhat over time just because we've done a number of transaction acquisitions that have added more software to our portfolio, which is a good thing. It's given us a little bit better growth rate. That growth rate is part of the reason why you have that 17% versus the 10% for intelligent devices. So, Software and Control has a mix that is, again, you know, a pretty good mix between the software portion and what is Logix and the product side. When you talk about intelligent devices, we've been talking about, again, even this morning around how the capital equipment environment is a more difficult one with the uncertainty that's the uncertainty overhang. And so that is impacting the CTO business, configure-to-order.
and so while the product portion of intelligent devices volumes are down from 2019, the configure-to-order portion is even a bigger drag.
That's helpful. If you have a question, just raise your hand, and I'll get to you. Let's talk about margins. We'll do it kind of segment by segment.
Okay.
So, ITD, I think you're on pace. Like, back half of this year, it looks like it would be tracking. We'll do the five-year thing again. A little bit.
Okay.
A little bit below, like, 2018, 2019 levels.
Yep.
talk about, again, like, the mix side of things, the acquisitions that have come into the portfolio, as well as just, you know, the cost burden of an inflationary environment.
Yeah.
As we think about where you are today on margins versus them.
You probably could talk about this one for a while. But, so intelligent devices, you're right. We, the momentum is good, right? We've got some margin expansion that's happened, you know, over the last couple of quarters, which is great. And, again, optimism for the remainder of the year. But even for the full year, we're gonna be down on the volume side, year over year. Sorry, down on sales, year over year, which obviously is also translating to volume. And so that definitely is a pressure point for us.
When you put it against that 2019 timeframe, and to put it in context, you know, if I were to think about 2025 sales dollars and where we're tracking, just take some numbers and annualize them, we're gonna be ahead of 2019 from a sales dollars perspective. That gap up is really acquisition-related. In particular, the Clearpath and CUBIC transactions, both of those are dilutive to margins. That would be the biggest driver around what's happening with the margin profile from intelligent devices from kind of that 2019 to 2024, 2025 timeframe. To put it a different way, you know, yes, we've gotten price that is essentially offsetting the volume. There's definitely been an inflationary environment.
Price cost has not necessarily been the best during that timeframe. That's part of the reason why we are in the midst of a margin expansion and cost reduction activity right now, intelligent devices being one of the largest beneficiaries of that.
Yep.
There's a good opportunity there. You know, we have a corridor that we're targeting of 22%-24% segment operating margin for that business. That is a to-and-through kind of number. That is, it's not a ceiling. You know, we want to run after it and achieve it. And then, after we do, we'll talk about the next step.
When you think about that 22%- 24% or Software and Control 31%- 34%, the path there, any kind of dimensioning of how much of that is self-help, how much of that is volume-dependent?
Yeah. I definitely, volume dependency is there, right? We, I don't think we can do it without, without volume coming back, even to 2019 or better, kind of levels. The self-help program is a good one, and it's today where we are right now, right? We've taken a bunch of costs out. I'm sure we'll probably talk about this in more detail. You know, it started with more SG&A-related expenses, but now we're really digging into things that are more cost-to-goods sold related. That really, again, that happens in waves. The first couple of waves have been more focused on logistics cost, direct material cost. I think as we continue to mature the program, you're gonna see us do things more around operational efficiency, which is outstanding.
Shifting to channel inventory and some of the distortions we saw in 2023 and 2024. I'm sure it's not a perfect science in terms of sizing. Any perspective as you've evaluated that on what you saw from the magnitude of channel inventory stocking contribution to growth, and in particular in 2024, what that contribution was to the organic declines?
Yeah. I think the story actually goes back to 2022. Obviously, I wasn't at Rockwell at the time. I certainly have been studying kind of some of what happened. I think it's important to know that history. You know, as we think about forecasting, we think about trying to make sure that we don't have some of these matters happen to us again, that we should be really cognizant of how it came together and what levers we would pull having perfect information in hindsight. It really started back in 2022. You know, supply chain crisis, there, you know, demand levels had increased dramatically. There was already a ramp that was happening then that was driving a larger backlog.
And of course, as we all know, the supply chain crisis happened and things started self-perpetuating, right? You cannot deliver. Lead times go up. People have to order more because they do not want to get stuck, you know, blah, blah, blah. That really developed, you know, it started in 2022, built late 2022, and then developed during the course of 2023. 2023 is kind of where we peaked out on our incoming orders, and then started to crater on the incoming orders as we exited 2023 and went into 2024. We were shipping off of a heck of a lot of backlog, all the way through, frankly, the first quarter and a half, maybe two quarters of fiscal.
Fiscal half of 2024.
Yeah, of fiscal 2024. You know, there was a lot of backlog reduction that happened even in, you know, let's say 15, 18 months ago. That, of course, then generated the high inventory levels in our channel. The high inventory levels in our channel then had to work their way down. That really was the second half, let's say Q2 to Q4 event, for fiscal 2024. There was a lot of movement that occurred during that timeframe. You know, this is my really long answer of not giving you an answer. Dimensionalizing it is a, you know, I have views around the dimensions around it just because I can see the vis, I have visibility to what the actual distributor inventory levels were. It was definitely material.
It really did move things around a fair bit. You know, we did go back and do some analytic work around, okay, if they had not had the overstock, what would demand have actually looked like for us based on what their demand was? The good news is that they did not have, you know, while it may have looked like we went through a serious trough period around a lack of demand, the demand on them actually was relatively good during that timeframe.
The good news now is we're largely done with this destocking.
Yeah.
We do not have to worry about that buffer, right, that is suppressing that underlying demand.
Switching to the software side, I think there's a fair amount of focus on required investments in software and more on competitive positioning. Just talk about your approach to software and, in particular, your competitive positioning there.
Can you do that one?
Sure. We have been investing intentionally, with speed and urgency in our software portfolio. We are, really, we have built out a leading portfolio of scalable and flexible software, both on-prem and cloud-native over the years. In the space where we play in, the space of production design and production automation, we think our portfolio is second to none. If you look at how we approach it, we look at the customer investment life cycles, from the design of their systems and plans to operating them in runtime and then maintaining them and then upgrading them. Throughout that entire life cycle, we have a leading portfolio of both on-prem and cloud-native software offerings. We can meet customers where they are.
Depending on what their use case is, which plan they're trying to optimize or what they're trying to do, we have leading offerings. We've invested in R&D. We've developed on the design side, industry-first cloud-native design environment, which, you know, certainly gives us a leg up in terms of how we develop, how we optimize, and also helps us with our generative AI offerings and capabilities as well. We look at operating within that operating-maintain phases, as I mentioned. We bought companies like Plex and Fiix, leading cloud-native companies, that actually have these offerings at scale. That's helping us really penetrate and help customers drive even more productivity, even more yield, even in across industries that are already pretty automated today. If you look at acquisitions, this is where we bought these companies in that space.
Some of our competition is investing quite a bit in other areas of software from a technology stack standpoint, in areas like product lifecycle management or computer-aided design or EDA. These are not the areas where we play. While it may seem like there's a lot of activity in the software acquisition space, that's not the area that we view as strategic to our growth longer term.
Got it. I should have asked this earlier, but related to the acquisitions comment, when you talk about something like Clearpath and CUBIC and you think about the margins getting better.
Yep.
What kind of margin trajectory do they have in front of them? You know, for how long might that be a drag on segment margins?
Yeah. Clearpath is an interesting one from, you know, when we bought that business, we were very clear that that was a loss-making business when we bought it, and that the target is for it to be break-even in fiscal 2025, to be profitable in fiscal 2026. You know, next year is a big year for them. You know, I do love moments where you go from a negative earnings number to a positive earnings number because it actually does, you know, you get a little bit of a double-up benefit. You know, the expectation is that they do go into profitability and they continue to drive, you know, their profitability much higher. That is really a revenue game, right?
It's gotta be driven by leverage on the P&L because we have a great infrastructure in place. The infrastructure is oversized for the volume of the business that we have today, which is fine because the growth rate is great. It's a double-digit grower. That's the reason why we bought it. We believe that it's a great solution for our customers. On the CUBIC side, CUBIC is a business that, because it is capturing a lot of growth opportunities right now, we need to continue to invest more heavily in that business. That's brick and mortar, as well as OpEx, for the business. We're committed to it. We like the runway in that business. You know, as long as we can continue to drive that growth, I think we're gonna be willing to continue to invest.
Now, a lot of the CapEx investment is mostly behind us. It's really now about trying to get it to be fully optimized. That does have an opportunity to bring a better margin profile in the near term than maybe Clearpath does because, again, Clearpath's coming from a lower position in that.
On acquisitions, you've talked about a pause. How long do you think about a pause being in place?
Yeah. Obviously, our balance sheet's in a good spot. It's not necessarily a pause from a capital deployment perspective. It's more of a pause with regard to we wanted to make sure that we did a really good job integrating these businesses. And when you think about integrating the businesses, don't think about it like, "Hey, we've got them on our back office systems. We've got them, you know, so the functional areas are reporting to the right folks and that, you know, we've harmonized benefits and all that kind of stuff." Those are relatively easy. The opportunity for these businesses is instead to put them into the broader Rockwell portfolio, to put it under that umbrella of the assistance for and the expertise around the production environment, and bringing this whole host of solutions, the ways to win to those customers.
That is what we are talking about when we are talking about putting the entirety of this together and integrating these businesses. It is a great opportunity for us. The team has done a really good job. We have got a little bit more work to do. Now, if the right transaction came around today, we would be looking at it. We have got an active pipeline that we are working. At this moment, it happened to be timing-wise good for us that we were taking a pause because, frankly, not a lot of deals were getting done over the last 12 months anyway for a lot of other reasons. You know, the uncertainty in the market also created a lot of uncertainty in the M&A market. It has not really hurt us all that much.
I think we're gonna see more and more transactions start to come through just in the broader industrial universe. You know, Rockwell is open to participating again with the discipline around we wanna be focused on that production environment.
You talked about on the CapEx side and a willingness to invest a little bit more, and you talked about an asset-light model. Expand on that a little bit and then what that would mean from a spend dollars, what it would mean for percent of COGS that's sourced versus made just in terms of understanding the magnitude of this kind of change.
Sure. Yeah, historically, Rockwell has been an asset-light organization. I'm not saying anything that is a big surprise to folks. If you'd looked at Rockwell for quite some time, you'd notice that their, you know, CapEx spend is relatively modest. On top of that, if you look at our balance sheet, there's a, you know, we don't have a ton of assets on our balance sheet. That is a philosophy that works for a number of organizations. At the same time, we are still at our core, we're an industrial company that manufactures a lot of stuff. What we do as a business and how we actually sell to our customers is we sell to people that make things, in a lot of cases.
You know, there is no reason why we should not also be investing in ourselves to make our things. And there is a shift inside the organization that is happening right now, where we are looking to be a little bit more asset-intensive. You know, to put that in context, historically, we have been about a 2% sales, CapEx spender. You know, does that number go up to 3%? Yeah, potentially. It is really driven by the ROI that we get on those investments. The opportunities coming out of the cost reduction and margin expansion work that we have done, where we have really gone heavier after our spend, our direct material spend.
and that's okay, because when you're asset-light, you've got a larger direct material spend because you're actually spending it with outside parties that are doing a number of things for you. The more we look at it, the more we see opportunities to bring things in-house. That is, you know, do the buy-to-make analysis and start to do some of those things for ourselves. Essentially, spending some CapEx dollars, maybe a little bit of OpEx dollars, but we're doing it to get a yield by removing other people from our profit pool. We want to bring them in, bring those things in, and push those other parties out, and hopefully use that to expand margins over time. That's just one aspect of it. Again, you know, asset-light, you're probably not gonna invest as much as you would in your facilities.
Even though we are an automation company, we have still a pretty good runway on doing more automation. Even in, again, we're more of a light assembly kind of a operator today, and, you know, those assembly operations can continue to be automated, which is great.
Great discussion. Thank you very much for being here. Really appreciate it.
Thank you all. Appreciate it.