Good morning. My name is Andrew Obin. I'm BofA's US Multi-Industrial Analyst. Our next presenter is the management team from Rockwell. We have Christian Rothe, who is Senior Vice President and CFO, Matt Fordenwalt, Senior Vice President of Lifecycle Services, and Aijana Zellner, VP Investor Relations and Market Strategy. Christian is gonna start out with some prepared remarks and slides, and then we're gonna go to a fireside chat. Thank you so much for being here.
Thanks, Andrew, and thanks for having us. Good morning, everyone. Let's see if the clicker works for me. All right. Normal safe harbor statement. Couple quick comments on Rockwell overall. Last year, a little bit over $8 billion in sales. We're headquartered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in the United States. You can see that we have a pretty good exposure around the globe, but in particular, we're more concentrated in North America. North America is a good spot to be right now 'cause that is where a lot of the volume growth is happening, and that is going to be our fastest-growing market in 2026 as well. We have three reportable segments. The Lifecycle Services segment, which is represented by Matt Fordenwalt here today. He runs that business for us.
Intelligent Devices is our largest segment, $3.7 billion, and our Software & Control segment at $2.4 billion. 26,000 employees for Rockwell around the globe. In November of 2023, we initiated a long-term growth algorithm as well as some segment margin targets. I'll talk about the segment margin targets in a moment, but this long-term growth algorithm is made up of multiple components. The first is faster secular growth. Think of this as GDP plus because we have exposure to a number of end markets that are growing faster than that. We have a really strong exposure to those markets. I'll hit that on the next slide.
The next part that we looked at 3%-5% for that share growth and expanded markets. That is, we're looking to, of course, gain share, but we also have more ways to win, and we've done that via acquisition over the last several years. ARR, annual recurring revenue. It's about 10% of our business today, growing at a faster clip than the overall business. This year our guide is for high single digit growth for ARR, so we expect that is going to add one point of growth to our overall growth algorithm, that 5%-8% organic. Our guide for this year, the midpoint of the guide is 4%. The range that we have in place for the guide is 2%-6%.
We initiated that at the end of our fourth quarter. We just recently, a month and a half ago, we reported our first quarter. We typically do not update our guide after the end of the first quarter just because obviously it's one quarter in. There are lots of unknowns. Know that with that range, that 2%-6% range that is in our guide, of course, that we, you know, at the high end of that if things develop nicely, and we did have a really good first quarter, double-digit top-line growth, that if we get to that 6%, of course, that takes us into that range for our long-term growth algorithm. On top of that, we have acquisitions.
We've been on pause on acquisitions for the last couple of years, as we digest transactions that we've done in the past before that. That has come together really nicely for us. We are now starting to build the pipeline on M&A. On the faster secular growth at 3%-5%, I mentioned this earlier, but this is a new slide for us that we brought out at our Investor Day last November. It shows kind of Rockwell's share. Of course, these are all management estimates. What we think the CAGR is going to be for these markets that we serve over the next five years. You can see that we have really good exposure to a lot of different market segments, which is outstanding.
Areas where we have really strong market share and a really good historical base, things like consumer packaged goods, those are a little bit slower growing, but they're a lot more predictable as well. In other areas that are a lot faster-growing, we have opportunities to continue to gain share. From a margin expansion perspective, we again put these in place in November of 2023, and we've been working towards that goal. We expanded our operating margins overall for the company by 110 basis points last year. Our expectation is we're gonna be able to do that again, in that ballpark again this year, and that's what's in our guide.
Lifecycle Services, which Matt runs, is actually already inside the corridor that we put for a target, that 13%-15%. Software & Control has touched it during certain quarters in the recent past, but hasn't put together a full year yet, but getting closer. Intelligent Devices, that 22%-24%, that's the one that's farthest away. We've got opportunities to continue to go after that with things like operational excellence programs. Overall for the company that target is 23.5% for the total company. This year our guide is at 21.5%, so we're a couple points away from that target number right now.
Part of what we're doing right now is also we're thinking about the future and going beyond that 23.5%. We're doing that by making investments today that is gonna have a yield for us over the long term. Part of those investments that we're making is we're transitioning as an organization from what historically has been an asset-light organization to a little bit more asset intensity, investing in ourselves, doing a lot more things for ourself. This is capital. It's digital transformation for our organization. It's investment in talent as well. We announced last year a $2 billion investment cycle for us over the next five years, so it's a really exciting time to be at Rockwell. With that, we can start the chat.
Thanks so much. Look, I think if we take a look at the materials from your analyst day last fall, and you know, what you've been presenting, Rockwell is clearly executing on a broad transformative operational agenda. Strategically, when you go to the Board, what are a couple of top priorities for this management team? Right. Like, as you go down the list, because as I said, if you dig in, it's a very broad and deep list.
Yeah.
What's at the very top?
Yeah. I mean, at the very top, obviously as an organization, we want growth. Top line growth is really important for us. It's about trying to make sure that we have a really strong new product development pipeline that we're continuing to invest in the markets that we wanna go after. I obviously hit on a few of those there. We wanna make sure that we are driving that top line as well as getting profitable growth. That is, we're also driving the bottom line, we're doing it through operational excellence.
You know, when we're talking to the Board, when we're having discussions even as a management team, a lot of those discussions are focused on how we're gonna continue to use that ROK Operating Model, which is taking that faster growth and combining with operational excellence in order to get margin expansion. It's, you put those all together, and that's really where the emphasis is as a leadership team, and also with the Board.
Thank you.
No, I would agree. Profitable growth is the number one objective. I think product development cycles are speeding up for us, and the investment in the business in terms of driving productivity, doing things more efficiently, the combination of that expanded portfolio, the market exposure we have, and doing things internally better, will drive that.
Thank you. Maybe, as you know, clearly faster secular growth is number one on your list as well. Can you give us an update on macro? What are you seeing? You know, I think as we sort of dig into your model, your outlook doesn't really have much second half acceleration built in. How do you feel about that? That's a conservative outlook.
You wanna start on the macro, Aijana, and then I can jump in on the second half.
Sure. I mean, we talked about there are certainly some good indicators out there in terms of ISM. What we are hearing from our customers, our engagements with them. I mean, Christian just spent some time with our Italian customers a few weeks ago. Matt just actually flew in from France, meeting with some of our global end users. A lot of activity with our customers, so that's positive, definitely. You know, we continue to look at unemployment, and it's continued to stay relatively low, but, you know, we follow that as well. There are a lot of different things that inform our forecast and our outlook. The biggest one is really our close engagement with our customers and the orders they put in on us.
as we mentioned it on our Q1 earnings call, we did see some great orders and some great wins, some greenfields, a lot of brownfield, a lot of productivity, but we're not seeing. At the time, we didn't see that broad-based kind of uptake. Overall, you know, with macro, from a macro standpoint, uncertainty is still there, and we talked about the need for more stability on the trade front, on the geopolitical front, so that these customers across many industries can actually start with those capital outlays.
With regard to the second half, yeah, you know, as I said, we started off the year really well on the first quarter, double-digit top line growth, and that's against our guide that the midpoint is at 4%. Since we did not, so traditionally we don't update the guide, you know, that outperformance in the first quarter makes it look like the second half is gonna be a little bit more muted.
Yeah.
Let's see, right? Let's see how it all develops. We will be doing an update to our guide after the end of the second quarter. Yeah, it was a good way to start the year.
Yeah.
Importantly, Andrew, it's not a deceleration in terms of sequential. Nothing is getting worse, right?
Right.
We expect moderate sequential improvement as the year progresses, but from a year-over-year standpoint, certainly if you look at the math.
Right
The first half looks like it's a higher year-over-year growth.
Right
than the second one.
Strong start to the year. Model is what it is. Stay tuned.
Yep.
Thank you. Maybe, just, jumping around a little bit, clearly recently, AI and software has been at the top of the investor minds. Maybe I think when we talk to people about Rockwell, there seems to be a bit of confusion as to what it is you do and what your software capabilities really are. Can you just maybe spend some time talking about both your OT and IT software capabilities, where within the factory automation control pyramid you are? You know, when I look at what's happening, I actually see opportunities. What opportunities does agentic AI create for Rockwell, given your dominant position in the machine control layer? Maybe that's where we can start.
Sure, I'll start. When you think about Rockwell's technologies, we're really at level two and level three. Our ability to design and operate a machine control, the control system within the plant floor, the majority of our software is intimately connected to our hardware and the firmware that runs the machines on the plant.
The hardware would be a level one, level two, right?
Level one, level two.
Right.
Mostly level two.
Yeah.
It is part and parcel of creating value for where we're applying AI is how you design the system.
Yeah.
How you actually maintain the system. In terms of the actual value creation, we're talking really at that machine level, how it's integrated.
Mm-hmm.
For us, we see AI as a tremendous opportunity to continue to build intelligent machines that sense, that perceive, that act. For us, at that level where the action is really happening, it's truly a differentiator compared to, well, I'll say cloud-based AI. Now, we do have MES, which really-
Mm-hmm
... straddles between level three and level four. Our MES tends to be tightly integrated with the control on the floor, using data from the plant floor itself. When I think about our software portfolio, and I think about sort of the hype in the market today, I think it's a huge opportunity for us to continue to elevate our portfolio as well as create more value for our customers.
If you look at what we do, just to add to that, you know, we look at our customers in the production environment, and we help them across the entire life cycles.
Mm-hmm.
From designing the system, designing the whole plant, how the production's gonna run, to really production. That's the biggest part of their life cycle. Running something without any unplanned downtime, with a lot more AI-enabled process optimization.
Mm-hmm
better quality, better throughput, this is what agentic AI is, and you're closing the loop. You're looking at, as Matt said, there is something that's sensing, we're making a decision. It's the most valuable data that's flowing through our controllers.
Right
Valuable data that's flowing through our MES. When you hear about some of that potential threat, this data is not available in a public domain. The most valuable data that's flowing through our hardware and through our software, the billions of transactions, this is proprietary. We are using this data to continue to train our models and our agents throughout that. We absolutely view it as an enabler all the way from designing something and using natural language instructions and helping our customers get to production faster, right.
Mm-hmm.
Accelerating time to market. We help them during the production phase across many different levels. We do have, of course, our Intelligent Devices, our autonomous mobile robots. We have our sensors, of course our PLC, and then software throughout. Of course, Matt's Lifecycle Services is helping customers all the way from consulting and using AI to help them figure out the best use cases. What's the biggest bang for their buck? What's the best ROI? All the way through the process to upgrade. How do you do it seamlessly? How do you do it in a prescriptive way?
Matt, maybe what other ARR trends, and if you can sort of break it down because, right, there's software ARR, and then there's services ARR.
Mm-hmm.
You know, can you just talk about maybe between the two, because there is concern about slowing software ARR. What are you seeing there?
Our ARR is very balanced, so it's not materially different between software and service. Specifically on services, our services are to support our customers. My project side of my business, our ecosystem, our SIs, create a large, vast installed base. With the labor shortage or skilled labor shortage out there, many customers do not have the talent and skills in-house to continuously maintain and get and optimize their investment in automation. We have tens of thousands of contracts with customers across the globe where we are applying domain expertise remotely or through our AI investments to ensure that those systems are supported and they're optimized across the entire tech stack that we sell. Those contracts are highly valuable in terms of recurring revenue. The profitability is also very attractive.
Most importantly, it's really about how we meet their, our customers where they're at, how we ensure that they're getting the most out of their automation investment, and we're taking them to the next level of performance through those contracts.
From a growth standpoint, you're right. I mean, the last few quarters, we did see a slightly slower growth rate in ARR broadly, especially in services and the digital services part. We talked about, you know, in this kind of CapEx environment that's with a lot of delays, customers are being more watchful, and they are deferring, delaying some of the services that are viewed more discretionary, meaning they're important services.
Right
They're not urgent, right?
Right.
We did see some of that. Now, software ARR actually is growing above the overall-
Right
ARR growth rate of high single-digit growth. You know, we do think it's temporary, but it's very much aligned with what we're seeing broadly.
Matt, as long as we're sort of talking about Lifecycle Services, maybe we can pivot.
Mm-hmm.
You know, if we look at the slide, your business has a nice green check mark next to margins. Has been a great margin story, you know, given sort of Christian's drive for margins. You noticed that?
Huh?
You noticed that?
Just, you know, a little bit. So, you know, what are you doing differently, and how much runway do you have, right? Because you've clearly been ahead of everybody else in terms of margins. What has driven the improvement? As I said, how much runway do you have?
Maybe as part of the answer, Matt, you can give a little bit more context, even going backwards to kind of where we started, but.
Sure.
Okay.
We've successfully doubled the margins in my segment over the last several years.
That's what the company is doing, right? That's what the company's gonna do, right?
That's a new target for them.
You're the best. It's great being up here with you.
Thank you.
Specifically in Lifecycle Services, I think we are a little bit ahead of the rest of the company in terms of our focus on productivity and efficiency. We've embraced technology. A large part of our productivity has been driven by modernizing our systems, our business processes, and enabling our workforce to do things more efficiently. That's one part of that story. We've also focused on our joint venture, Sensia, and improving the profit margin there. Now, we have announced, and we will be dissolving Sensia, which will be somewhat accretive to my segment's margins and the company's margins. Last, we've also focused on our labor pyramid, the levels and skills that we have across the globe, and we are truly a global organization in terms of how we deliver projects and services to our customers.
We've really done a nice job, I think, of combating rising wage as well as rising material costs in the environment. We're pricing much more efficiently, much more effectively, and I think what I'm most proud of is our ability to execute. We have done an extremely diligent job in mitigating technical or commercial risk, and at the same time, delighting our customers to create installed base for Rockwell. It's been a great story, and I look forward to seeing what the future will hold, which I think will be a lot more driven by the technology advancement that I have in my segment, and become more and more focused on how we deliver at global scale across our capability centers that we've really invested in over the last several years.
Just talking about margin and just sort of going back to the corporate, how much of what happened in Lifecycle Services is applicable to the rest of the company? Particularly, you know, Christian, when we talk, you really have this laser focus on net pricing for the company.
Yep.
How much of what has happened in this segment can be sort of expanded to broader Rockwell?
Yeah. I think there's definitely some great learnings and, you know, Matt has built maybe one of the items that you kinda talked about, but I'll hit on a little bit more. Matt's built a really good team that is laser-focused, not on the pricing side of it, but also trying to make sure that they really understand the entire scope of the project, the timelines of the project, and how exactly we're gonna execute it, and doing that well in advance, you know, even before they get to a quotation on those projects. They've kind of done it from a very holistic perspective, but they do it with a level of detail that is really important for that business.
We may have had some of your folks go into other parts of our business. We're definitely taking some of that knowledge and we're certainly transferring it elsewhere. The pricing side of it for Rockwell, yes, we have a renewed energy around pricing discipline and price realization was strong last year. It's gonna come down slightly this year, but again, still really good opportunities to get price for us as an organization.
I think when you take that and you combine it with what we're doing on operational excellence, and I'm sure we'll talk about that more here in a moment, but when you combine getting price realization with operational excellence, that's where you get really strong margin expansion.
Yeah, I know. Also here in a sense, you know, you know, clearly you have stated margin targets.
Yep. We do.
Just, you know, talking about long-term margin opportunity for Rockwell, what are the biggest levers that you have operationally going forward? In the context here, you have achieved $110 million in savings fiscal 2024, $325 million in 2025. You do have a comprehensive list of initiatives driving the margins. What have been the biggest drivers so far? What are a couple of KPIs that have had disproportionate impact, and what's gonna drive margins over the next 12-24 months?
So anytime you start down the road on a larger productivity program like the one that Rockwell has been going down, you know, you have to have kind of short-term, medium-term, and long-term objectives. Because, you know, the longer term ones, they take time to execute, right? You need to have the ability to be able to get good yield, good savings and productivity in the early days, while also working on the things that are gonna take longer to
Yeah
to give that yield to it. The way we phase this program, we definitely had that. Good, bad or otherwise, I mean, the early part of our savings and honestly the larger part of the savings early for us was in headcount reduction.
Yep.
We went from 30,000 heads as an organization down to the 26,000 neighborhood. Right? There's real savings there. You know, at the same time we were doing that, we were also doing a lot more around productivity. That was again, multi-layered. Direct material negotiation and getting savings from our suppliers, that can happen really fast, and it did happen really fast for us. When you're going farther down into things like insourcing and doing more things for ourselves, well, that takes time to put it in place, where you have to buy machinery, you have to buy, you have to do some training, you have to, you know, put things in place. Sometimes you have to deplete the inventory of what you're buying from suppliers.
Those are longer term objectives. We're staging that such that we're gonna continue to get a yield well into the future. That program more than $400 million over an 18-month window, and that's structural cost savings. Those costs are not coming back into the organization. We're not done. It did transition. It transitioned from what we call a what we were calling cost savings and margin expansion to now it's just productivity, and it's actually built into our overall Rockwell operating model. We're not spiking it out anymore. I for sure from an investor perspective I understand that there was a they liked the visibility around what we were getting on yield on that every quarter.
At the same time, I think we all can agree that organizations that constantly have a target around productivity every quarter that they're talking about, I'm sure in this conference or other discussions, you'd be saying, "Geez, it seems like Rockwell's always restructuring. They're always. You know, you always have these cost out things that you're doing. What's going on there?" The reality is continuous improvement, right? We want it to be part of our culture, part of everything we do every day. The result of that is that we're not gonna be giving that level of visibility anymore, but know that it's definitely happening. We had really good yield in the first quarter.
We're tracking very nicely for the second quarter, and we got a great plan for the second half of this year. Right now, we're building the funnel for 2027.
Generally, if and when volumes accelerate-
Yeah
You should have nice operating leverage given what you're doing.
We should, yes. It will flow through nicely. Especially with our business, we've got, you know, the gross margins are good for us.
Right
We do have the ability to get some nice leverage when the volume starts flowing.
The other thing you sort of talk about and you have these two metrics you're highlighting, cost to produce and ROI.
Yeah
... investment model. Can you expand on that? Because that's something you, couple of years in, can you just why these metrics and what has it been operationally?
Yeah. This is, you know, again, we have a really strong culture at Rockwell, and so we wanna continue to build off of that culture. One of the things that as we transition from a more asset-light organization to a more asset-intensive organization, we had to give the right tools to the team so that they knew that there were bigger changes that were happening. You can't go to a more asset-intensive and more investment in ourselves without really giving a really strong model for us to use across the organization. That's how we developed a new ROI model. Not to say that we weren't doing ROI models before. We were, but it was different.
Matt's business had ROI models they were using, which was different than other segments, which was different than what was happening in our manufacturing side of our business. We now have the exact same model that's being used throughout the organization, which allows all of us to be in a position to be able to compare the returns on each of these these investments. Now, that's one aspect of it, and then you brought up the cost to produce. The cost to produce is we, you know, we are a manufacturer. We have cost accounting like all manufacturers do, but cost accounting doesn't actually fully bring in all the costs that it takes to manufacture the product. That's really what we're doing, is we're bringing in a much more holistic measure on everything it costs for us to produce that product.
Think of it like cost accounting plus plus. The most important part is that we wanted to put it in a right sized way so that organizationally, our manufacturing team can. The objective is that year-over-year, if we're making the exact same things as last year in the exact same quantities, we should be able to make it at the same cost or less. We had to have a model in place in order to actually be able to do that comparison. We have that in place now broadly by each factory. The next objective is to continue to take it down further and further into the organization, so you can do it at the cellular level and then, down to product families.
Don't know if we're gonna be able to get to SKUs, but you know, that would be the Holy Grail if we can get there.
Thank you. You know, you've clearly alluded sort of reinvesting in your manufacturing. How is your manufacturing footprint evolving with more focus on production capabilities and high CapEx spending, right? You have new greenfield facility. You know, you're sort of highlighting what's happening in Twinsburg and Singapore, and you do have this $2 billion investment framework that you've highlighted.
Yeah
on the slide. Can you just bring it together for us?
Yeah, absolutely. This is, you know, again, we what we do as an organization is automation, and we have the capability and the opportunity to actually bring a lot more automation into our own operations. It started in Singapore. It's one of our locations that has a narrower SKU profile. I think compared to a lot of other companies, it still has a lot of SKUs. We're continuing to work on that. It has a narrower SKU profile, which allows them to have more volume in each of those SKUs. The result is that that's some of the easiest areas to at least go after automation first. We did that in Singapore first. Think of that as a pilot. We took those learnings.
We're now doing that in our Twinsburg, Ohio facility. We're starting to scale that up. Twinsburg is a much larger facility, has a lot more breadth of SKUs and continue to learn from that. That will inform and continues to inform us as we think about our next opportunity, which is a greenfield facility that we announced in New Berlin, Wisconsin. That's gonna be about 1 million sq ft facility that is going to be purpose-built for Rockwell and is going to be purpose-built, not thinking automation only, but actually autonomy. We're trying to take our operations in Singapore, Twinsburg, and then in New Berlin, all the way to autonomous operations. Now, are we gonna be able to fully get there? That'd be great, but it's a journey for us.
Some of the parts that I'm most excited about, I'm excited about obviously what it can do for us for the P&L and what it does for us for our employees, but I'm also really excited about what it does for us with our customers. Taking our customers along on that journey and being able to show them that in higher cost locations, you know, Singapore, Ohio, Wisconsin, these are not low cost locations.
Right.
That allows us to show folks that you can have world-class manufacturing in a higher cost, higher labor cost location and be able to do it efficiently and get a great margin for the organization.
What's pricing like today? What's the pricing environment? How do you think about inflation?
We have an annual price increase that's going through next month. That is a little bit later than what we did last year. We had actually pulled forward our pricing last year was done in February of 2025. We're doing in April of 2026. Our normal cadence before all this was actually in June. We'll probably get back to that cadence. We're gonna go through a couple month trough here where without any price change, but it'll be fine. We're good 'cause we have the ability to get good price realization. We do have the ability to get price. We've been obviously getting tariff-based price ever since the tariff environment came into play.
There are inflationary costs that are coming in that's built into our price change that we've got for April.
Excellent. Maybe just shifting a little bit to end market and growth vectors. You know, can we talk about your exposure to life sciences? I think was one of the buckets you sort of highlighted. What do you do there? What are you seeing in the market? Lots of talk about potential reshoring in the U.S. We actually estimate it can be as big or bigger than semis, and you do have a lot more exposure in life sciences than you do in semis. What are you seeing just maybe even beyond GLP-1?
Sure.
You have some very large customers in the U.S. Maybe you can talk about that.
Yeah. Life sciences is one of the growth verticals for us longer term, and we are well-positioned there on many fronts. Actually it's one end market where we have the most concentration of software and services. If you look at where we play, it's really across the value chain. You mentioned GLP-1 and beyond that, GLP-1 is a great growth driver for us right now with our customers. You have the end users, you have the SIs, the contract manufacturers that support them, that try and helping build out that and accelerate time to market-
Yeah
to have that supply. We're working with med devices also that are very tightly coupled with that. We also support other growth vectors. For example, CGT, cell and gene therapy, ATMP, a lot more personalized medicine, personalized therapies, which is really necessitating a lot more flexible and much more modular kind of manufacturing.
Right.
which is perfect for our technology, including our Logix Control Platform. Our software, whether it's digital engineering, digital twin, MES, manufacturing execution systems, quality, regulatory compliance, I mean, that is what we excel at. Digital is a big part of what we offer. Cybersecurity is key. It's an important part of every conversation with our customers. We're working really with global companies, and it's a global pursuit. Now in Q1 for us, we did see some delays that were just more transitory on some projects, but we are very bullish on life sciences.
Those delays should get better. You know, Q2, those come back.
Correct. We have not changed our guide.
Maybe just jumping to e-commerce and warehouse automation, those are relatively small, but been big driver for your discrete business, right? I think up 60% in the first quarter. Can you just tell us what's going on here? What products do you have here, and why is it up 60%?
Sure. I mean, some of it is comps. We are guiding to 10% for the full year, so it's a great growth rate above company average.
I think it's guiding the data center business 10% too, but yeah.
Data center is a piece of that end market.
Yeah.
We have e-commerce and warehouse automation, and then there's a portion of our data center business that also is in that bucket. You know, we're seeing growth across different types of customer segments. Clearly the e-commerce players, and there's continued investment in automating those fulfillment centers.
Right.
That's continuing. You see traditional retailers who have a lot of older warehouses that need to be updated.
Yeah.
Labor shortage and labor cost is a big impediment. It's a big challenge for our customers, and they're looking at more autonomous ways to manage their facilities. Parcel companies, you know, we had some of them at our Investor Day, they're reimagining the network of their sorting facilities. Again, what they're using is our software, Emulate3D, digital twin. They're using our core automation, our largest controllers, our drives, our HMI. It's really the full spectrum.
It's basically effectively the comeback of fulfillment centers for e-commerce, which was on pause post-COVID.
With Emulate.
On top of data center control systems recently.
data center as well as the portion of our data center business that resides there is really like CUBIC, our power distribution.
Yeah.
They're like modular motor control centers.
Right
that help with that faster data center build out.
Right.
We do think as a durable, broader, overall, growth drivers is really just fulfillment, the flexibility consumer needs for that, a lot more of that, investment and scalability.
Speaking about sort of warehouses, can you just talk about progress on Clearpath and OTTO Motors acquisition? What are the key KPIs that you're focusing on?
Yeah. The Clearpath business has grown nicely. It's been a double-digit grower ever since we bought it, where our expectation is it's gonna grow double digits again this year. Clearly, you know, for us, from a KPI, that top line growth is really important. We're expecting that it's gonna stick in that double digits for quite some time. We do think it's a really nice spot to be in. Another key KPI for us is also profitability. This business, we were always, from the day we acquired it, we knew that it was going to be a loss maker as we were focusing on growth and integrating it in our business, until 2026.
We're staying in the same plans we always had, which is that we're gonna turn to profitability in the second half of this year.
Okay.
Yeah.
The growth has been in line with your plan?
Yes.
Okay. Maybe you know, just sort of going back, driving on the same thing on the control systems, you know, I think battery EV battery, that was a big focus, and then EVs didn't happen. What is happening is, you know, a lot of battery energy storage system, and I think when we're at PACK EXPO, like six months ago, you know, the message was, "Hey, this EV battery business is holding up way better than we would have thought," because there is this path to battery energy storage systems behind the meter. You talked about having control systems there. You benefit from A, you have control system, I think, for the BESS, and then you benefit from actually making the batteries. Can we talk about that? How big is that for you? What are you seeing?
Are we back on the growth path there? Just expand there.
Sure. First of all, there's still investment in EV. Now, it's not happening at the same clip that-
Right
... that, of course, that it used to, but, there's still investment. We talked about Hyundai-
Yeah
... and Rivian and Lucid. What we're seeing with automotive, with our brand owners is really investment in multi-energy powertrain.
Yeah.
Traditional ICE, hybrid, and EV. Battery, you know, in terms of BESS, it's not really kind of a standalone project request that's coming in from our automotive customers. It's really more part of the broader story of energy management.
Right
Overall, that's what we do. In terms of what our software provides, our hardware, our solutions, it's integrated energy management.
That's right.
Right? It's making sure that whether it's from the grid, it's on-site generation with other sources and making sure that there is a plant-level resilience and sustainability. For us, it's an additional driver. It's the same set of technologies. We don't need something additional to be able to serve that, so it's part of our overall proposition and story. Right now what our customers are looking for is really more of a broader level.
Is it fair to say that there has been this handoff in the industry from the EV story to behind the meter energy storage system, or it's just not enough to?
There's some of that, but it's a lot less focused on just like a standalone utility of storage.
Yeah
It's more how can you have a broader energy management and, you know, managing your cost volatility.
Excellent. We're right on time. Thanks so much.
All right.
It's been great.
Thank you.
Well, thank you.
Thanks for having us.