To start, moving right along here. Thank you. That we have the team from Terex. Simon Meester, newly appointed, you're into what, month two or three?
Two.
Month two, is it?
Yeah.
CEO of Terex, and Julie Beck, CFO, who's—thanks again for your consistent support at our conference. Good to see you both.
Yeah.
And, I think with that, I think Simon has some prepared remarks to go through, and then we'll open up to Q&A after that. So-
Yeah.
Over to you, Simon.
Cool. Well, hi, everyone. Thanks for your interest in, in our company. Yeah, I've been in the role for, about six weeks now. So, actually, this is my first investors conference, so, I'm looking forward to, meeting a lot of folks today and tomorrow. But, yeah, what I thought I would do is just, quickly share a little bit about Terex. And some of this is also, quite frankly, kinda how I'm looking at the company. It might give you a little bit of a, a flavor of, kinda where I'm coming from at the moment.
But I very much see kinda my tenure is probably more gonna be focused around growing the company, whereas I think my predecessor, that I assume some of you may have met, it was much more of a transformational journey. Because in essence, Terex has significantly changed over the last 10 years or so and is a completely different company now than it was even five years ago. So, obviously, our GC wants to make sure I make this my first slide. So, obviously, I would encourage you all, which I'm sure nobody does, but to read it.
Mm-hmm.
Any kind of forward-looking statement may vary in the future. But yeah, so then, you know, incoming CEO, John's tenure, my predecessor, was about transformation. Mine is about growth. So what does that mean going forward? Well, obviously, I'm still very much in listening and learning mode, kinda, you know, traveling around the company, meeting with the teams. You know, we have a lot of great operational momentum as a company. You know, we've been really improving our bottom-line performance in the last couple of years. So the last thing I want to do is, you know, step in and try to fix something that really isn't broken.
And there's a couple of things, for example, you know, something that was near John's heart was, you know, our safety performance, our values, and, you know, that's one of the things that I can safely say is not gonna change going forward, is we're gonna continue to be focused very much on the way we run the company, how we run the company. Not just because it's a nice thing to say that we care about safety, but one of the things that I've learned in my career is that show me any kind of high-performing team, and it's a team that performs safely. So we correlate it not just to, you know, everyone's right to return home safely, but also, we think it's the identity of a highly successful company.
So that's gonna continue to be part of our DNA going forward. Then, 2023, yeah, a very, very strong year for us on many levels. In terms of top line, in terms of bottom line, you know, we grew our EPS, adjusted EPS, 63%, in 2023, and our return on invested capital is now hitting, you know, north of 28%. But within the portfolio, a real strong story again for, you know, for those who know our company, we have MP segment and the AWP segment. The MP segment, you know, 16.1% operating margins, very strong performance. And then AWP grew 480 basis points on their bottom line performance.
So we're now having all of our businesses running in the double-digit operating margins across the portfolio, which is something that we're very pleased by. Now, it's not just about the financial performance in 2023. We also made several investments. I assume many of you know about the Monterrey facility that we're building in Mexico, which is the largest plant that we've ever built in Terex. It was the second year of our investment. This year is the last year of that investment. And obviously, we made a lot of investment in new product developments and also new technology, including robotics and battery technology. So overall, a very, very successful year, we're very pleased by.
I mentioned earlier, it's not just 2023. You know, I look at this, and I'm stepping in as a new CEO, and I'm thinking: Okay, where is this company coming from? And if you just look at the last eight years, since 2015, you know, our operating margins grew from 5%-12%, our EPS from $1.30 to $7.06 is the adjusted number, and then our return on invested capital from 6.6 to 28.5. So I think overall, just an incredibly strong story, and it's really the function of two things. First of all, because we transformed the portfolio, and I'll share with you in a little bit on what kind of transformation we did.
The second piece is, we really doubled down on our business system, our operating model, and how we run the company. Just to give you a little bit of color on how we transformed the company since 2015, and a lot of credit goes to John and his leadership, we basically just divested a lot of businesses that we felt were dilutive to our portfolio, that were very cyclical in nature. And so it's really been a story of getting rid of businesses that we felt didn't have a future in our portfolio. That's one piece of the puzzle. The other piece of the puzzle is that since 2015..
That's where the growth story of our MP business started, and I'll share with you in a minute a slide on what MP has been able to do since 2015. But basically, it's grown double digits in terms of revenue since 2015, and so now we are eight years later. I know everyone always talks about AWP when it comes to Terex, but it's really MP that has built the strong foundation that we now have, we've built the company on. And then obviously, the back end of this timeline is what I mentioned earlier, is when, once we've done all the divesting, and we've done all the cleaning up, and all the fixing, is where we started to focus on the way we run the company and our operating model.
Just to give you one more data point here, AWP, for example, in 2020, started their kind of operational excellence performance. I can speak to that very comfortably because I was at AWP at the time when this started. But ever since, we've taken $230 million of cost out of that business, since 2022 to 2023, all with the purpose to improve our through-cycle margin performance. The last eight years, really, the three things we did: we cleaned up the portfolio, we accelerated MP's growth, and then thirdly, we took significant cost out of the AWP business in the last three years. Then where are we today? Today, we're very happy with the portfolio that we have.
We have a collection of roughly seven verticals, if you will, in our, in our business, and all of them are either number one, number two, or number three. They're all all market-leading businesses, and they're positioned really well, you know, from an end market standpoint. But we like these brands, we like these businesses because they're, they're market-leading businesses, and, and they're very competitive in nature, and they're very accretive in nature. So this is the story that I talked about, MP. You know, since 2015, 2016, it's been a real strong growth story. It's been a real, strong operating margin story, growing from 1.2 to 2.2, now almost half in terms of top line, but more than half in terms of bottom-line performance.
So in the last four years, 60% of our operating profit was MP alone, and this is, this is probably, you know, my, my most important message for today and tomorrow, is quite frankly, we, Terex, we'd like to talk a lot more about AWP because we feel that that's really become the foundation of our company and the foundation of our story. And I think what, what that team has been able to accomplish, growing double digits consistently every year, double-digit growth, over the last eight years, is, is really what, has built the foundation. But then, so where are we today? What is our strategy? So obviously, I'm six weeks in, so this is one of the questions I'm asking myself. You know, are we, what are we gonna do going forward?
And if I think about our existing strategy, I think a lot of these pieces are still very valid and will be valid going forward. You know, in terms of execute, one of the lessons I've learned over my career is you can develop a winning strategy, but at the end of the day, if you can't really execute, that's where things continue to fall apart. So there will always be an execute piece in our strategy going forward, a lesson that we've learned over time. And then secondly, at the end of the day, we're a product company. We develop exciting products for our customers. That's what we do. And so there has to be an innovate piece in our strategy, so that second piece is gonna stay in there as well.
And then maybe just what I think I need to focus on is just double down on that grow piece. That grow piece, make it just bigger, bolder, and just see how we can accelerate growth for the company. Because we have a strong balance sheet, we have market-leading businesses, we have end markets that are really, that have a lot of tailwinds. Now, obviously, we want that growth to be sustainable, we want that growth to be sticky, we want that growth to be profitable, but I expect that that's probably going to be a piece of our, you know, our next strategy is to be a little bit bolder on the, on the growth side. So then, where are we in terms of what we laid out during our Investor Day in December 2022?
It's still only 15 months ago. Time has flown, but we're nicely ahead of target, and obviously, as incoming CEO, one of my priorities will be to make sure we stay ahead of target. Now, I already get the question, "So it looks like you have an opportunity to raise your targets," and I say, "Hey, I'm in 6 weeks. Give me a little bit of time here before I change the expectations here." But the good news is we're ahead of expectations, and we're doing really well in terms of what we laid out just 15 months ago.
I talked about our addressable markets, and we've shown these slides a couple of times before, but I just want to lay out, if you look at the part on the left here, is that about 80% of Terex's addressable market is aligned with government stimulus one way or the other over the next many years. I know we still have that stigma that Terex, you know, is allegedly a mining and construction company. We're not. We actually don't do any mining and construction anymore. We're no longer a mining and construction company. We're an industrial company, if anything, a diversified industrial company. But if you look at the verticals there on the left, you know, we have a little bit of infrastructure. We are in electrification, we're in, we're in digital, we're in waste and recycling.
We have a real nice mix of portfolios that are aligned with where all the investments are being made at the moment. So then, just the last slide, you know, I feel that John is leaving me with a toolbox with a lot of tools, a lot to play with. I feel that, you know, we're in a great position. We have a strong balance sheet. We have market-leading businesses. We have strong demand in our end markets. We have strong operational momentum. We have great values.
So I really think that, you know, we have an opportunity to go from a fix-it era, which I think is what we were for the last 10, 20 years, to probably a find-it era, where I have the privilege to really take the company forward and see how we can accelerate growth. So I'm pretty excited, as you can imagine- I'm excited about our journey and about our prospects.
That's great. Excellent rundown. Maybe going back to the point about, you know, being bolder on the growth side, and, you know, John, as you mentioned, and Julie have, you know, left you with a balance sheet and a liquidity position that's as strong as it's been. Maybe any thoughts around, you know, areas of strategic priorities in terms of inorganic growth and where you may, you know, kinda be focused on?
Yeah, no, absolutely. So we do have an active pipeline of M&A opportunities. We're looking at pretty much anything that will have, you know, a positive impact on our portfolio as a whole, that will be financially accretive, that will be aligned to the businesses that we have, that will make our portfolio stronger overall. But quite frankly, we'll always weigh this against other opportunities that we have for our capital. We still believe that our share price is way too low, so we'll continue to look at share buybacks as well. So we'll obviously focus for the long term on our active pipeline, and we do have some interesting prospects there.
It's too soon to kinda share some more details there, but short term, we'll, we'll aggressively compare that to the opportunity to buy back more shares. Because, quite frankly, the share is not where we think it should be.
and staying within the construct of, what, the 2.5 times of- kind of leverage is the right-
Yeah. Yeah [Inaudible]
But I would say the 2.5, very much so, is... But it's directional, not gospel, and it also depends on, you know, many, many different variables, you know, where we are in the cycle, and... But 2.5 is our directional, aspirational goal.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This, we can get into the segments a bit more, but just one of the themes across both that your predecessor had been focused on was focusing or growing the parts business.
The what business?
The parts.
Yeah.
Again, for AWP and MP, and, you know, just looking at your background and spending a number of years at Cat and Sandvik, you know, two companies that have done quite well in that.
Obviously, the product portfolios are a bit different, but, but where, where do you see in terms of the opportunity, to, to kinda drive that growth, in that high margin?
Yeah
as a business?
Yeah, obviously, so as I said, we're no longer a mining and construction company. So in that sense, we're not—we don't really compare to Cat. You know, the way Cat's customers are using their products versus our customers are using our products is slightly different. But universally, still, you know, customers invest in, you know, a piece of, you know, capital equipment, and they wanna make sure it's being taken care of, and it obviously consumes parts. So also in our business, we have quite some opportunity in terms of, you know, parts consumption, service consumptions. And we have been growing our parts business. We try to outgrow our equipment business in our parts business every single year, and we have been for the last couple of years.
We have been adding. For example, in utilities, we've been adding our mobile fleet. We've been adding service branches. But we do believe that there's still quite some opportunity to continue to add categories to our parts portfolio. Quite frankly, in several of our business, we believe it's currently a competitive advantage because we have a global footprint of parts warehouses. We have a global footprint of service businesses. We have commercial service businesses. We have product support businesses. And we believe there's ample opportunity to kind of expand on that, but mostly, not so much in brick-and-mortar, mostly in just adding categories.
Got it.
We also invest in digital capabilities to make it easier for our customers to do business with and, you know, telematics data and things to make it easier on our customers, and that helps with the parts and service growth as well.
Yeah, that's a great point.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Maybe just from a kinda high-level standpoint, Simon, you know, obviously present in a lot of markets and geographies, what's your kinda overarching view of the world as terms of the- areas maybe you're, you know, could present some upside risk versus where, what are the areas or parts of the portfolio that maybe could be a little bit more challenged?
Yeah, for us, definitely North America is strong, India is strong, Middle East is strong. We're concerned about Europe a little bit. Europe is definitely the one that we're concerned about the most, and then China, South America, probably somewhere in the middle. But kinda that, that's the spectrum. Australia is actually still a pretty decent market for us, which is important for our Franna business.
Mm-hmm.
But I would say on the polar ends is probably North America in terms of the most upside, and Europe, probably the most downside. That's how we're looking at it. And then in terms of verticals, we believe that there's a lot of pull-through in AWP. In several categories within AWP, it's still a function of supply, not demand.
And then within MP, crushing and screening is looking strong. Concrete is looking strong because of its dependence on North America and all the infrastructure spend that's happening. Environmental, very strong, and our recycling businesses just continue to grow very, very healthily. But then, you know, probably lifting or cranes and material handling, and partially because they're, you know, they're a little bit more dependent on Europe than some of our other businesses.
So I would say, and lifting and handling is the part that, we have our eyes on, and then crushing, screening, AWP, North America is where the upside is.
Got it. Got it. It, it certainly consistent with what feedback from a lot of companies generally.
Yeah.
Maybe zeroing in on MP a bit. You know, one of the target that was, I think you touched on from the Investor Day was a 7.5% CAGR for that business.
As you mentioned, you know, that has a little bit more of a European feel to it. Your ability to reach that, to the extent you have this dynamic whereby North America continues to be solid, but you got maybe some challenges in other parts of the world, is that still a realistic target?
Overall, the MP portfolio is actually bigger in North America than it is in Europe.
And so even though it's being kinda stigmatized a little bit as a European business, it's bigger in North America than it is in Europe. A lso, MP has a lot of tailwinds from North America. But first of all, what they have been demonstrating as a team for the last eight years, and there have been some hiccups in terms of economic cycles in the last eight years, but still double-digit growth every single year for the last eight years, so a lot of momentum. And the MP business is a real perfect example of how to continue to apply existing products into new markets or new products into existing markets. There's just so much that we can do with that portfolio, that we've been able to just expand.
But on top of all that is also the market is still moving more from stationary to mobile products, and that's really our sweet spot. That's where we are the market leader, and we just continue to see more and more applications that are coming our way, going forward. So there's a lot to play with, just from a portfolio standpoint and from an application standpoint. And then on top of all this, we're actually quite bullish about India, so we're taking several new product categories to India. We have a very strong facility in the south of India. India is spending a lot of money on infrastructure as well, that I'm sure you're familiar with. And so we also believe that India is gonna be a growth opportunity for us.
So yeah, we're pretty optimistic.
MP grew, you know, more than double that in 2023 as well- Tom, as you know.
Right.
They had a fantastic year.
Yeah, yeah. One of the areas of growth you mentioned is crushing and screening. You know, if you look at that market, you had some of the larger aggregates producers actually here yesterday, and, you know, that volume growth has been anemic for them.
Yeah.
But now, I guess, you know, there's certainly more optimism around IIJA funds now starting to- to come in. So just what the tone from your dealers in terms of, you know, quoting activity and, and kinda their expectation for- for 2024 in North America.
So, you know, everyone knows that there are like 40,000 projects in the, in these mega project pipeline. What we see, what we hear from our customers, that at only about 15%-20% of those have really hit, you know, where they've broken ground, and there's a lot of projects that sit just waiting for material and people and... But a lot of them pre-approved. So our dealers are definitely seeing upside from a, from a demand standpoint. Of course, there's also an interest rate element here in this whole thing, because when you think about the channel itself, obviously, they'd like to see interest rates to come down, because then that will make them more comfortable to take on more fleet.
I n terms of utilization rates, the utilization rates are healthy. We did report the last couple of quarters that inventories were a little light. They're kind of healthy at the moment. There's not too much, there's not too little. They're exactly where they need to be. I'm not gonna lie, what would really help us if interest rates would come down in 2024.
because that would make our dealers a little bit more comfortable to continue to grow their rental fleets. But at the moment, we're pretty pleased with what we're seeing in terms of utilization rates. We're very pleased with what we're seeing in terms of projects that still need to come online and how our products are positioned to tap into that. So overall, I would say there's cautious optimism in general in our dealer channel, is what I would say.
Yeah. In terms of... And that's consistent with what I've heard from some of the Powerscreen dealers on, you know, obviously, the value of the machines have gone up quite a bit- in addition to higher rates, so that- that's creating a bit of- of tension for them.
Yeah.
So that's probably an area where, in terms of, you know, if we get three, four, five Fed rate cuts, that's probably an area of the portfolio that would probably- see a more immediate impact. Is that fair?
Well, but we also, as a manufacturer, have the ability to help them out to make sure that, you know, there's some easing on the interest rates there- as well. So, but yeah, obviously, rate cuts would make that a lot easier-
Yeah
That discussion. But yeah, I mean, there is demand. It just, you know, if it just costs a lot of money to bring new equipment into your rental fleet, if you can finance it, you know, at a lower cost of capital, that would obviously help.
Yeah, before I go on, if anyone has any questions, feel free.
Hey, right there. Yeah.
Thank you. Does it work?
Nope, but we can hear you.
I can.
Yeah, you can hear me, that's good. So, oh, there we go. We've seen some peers talking about an improvement in demand first quarter versus the fourth, but we always have the seasonality, i.e., the spring season, when dealers are typically building inventory versus the fourth. Have you seen any underlying improvement in demand, or is this mainly seasonality that you... I think you talked during the call about some improvement, just to clarify that.
Just on the aggregate side.
You're talking MP now.
MP and aggregates within MP, please.
You wanna take a stab?
Yeah, I mean, we would say that, you know, as Simon just mentioned, that we're, you know, optimistic about North America in particular with that aggregates business. And so we're expecting another strong year this year. And I don't know that I can comment on any specific demand in the last, you know, 30 or 60 days, but the continued strong strength in aggregates.
Okay, so no sort of short-term demand trends that you've seen sort of improving? No.
but it's been strong. It just remains at a nice, strong level.
All right.
Okay.
Thank you.
Mm-hmm.
Can you talk a little bit about the evolving relationship that you have with your end user customers? You know, in terms of either better or worse. Obviously, there were some in AWP, a lot of difficulties previously. Talking to some of your customers, they'll say, "We're working better with our suppliers today than we were five years ago," and understand some of their issues. So I guess what I'm wondering is whether the US, you know, whether it's United Rentals or whether it's Ashtead and AWPs, or maybe on the aggregate side as well, in different companies.
Is just there a smoothing event that's occurring here that we don't see, where we're not just always talking about the end market demand, but their re-fleeting activities and things like that, that are gonna be able to give you greater visibility and better sustainability, going forward is the way you think about the business?
You're talking mostly about rental companies and AWP?
Those are, those are pretty big businesses for you.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the short answer is most definitely, because I think as an industry, we had some hard lessons to learn, quite frankly, over the last 10 years. Even coming out of 2008, but the industry was still relatively small, but we had, we had a little bit of a hiccup in 2018. Coming out of 2018. We had a hiccup in 2020, and so obviously, rental companies are incredibly well-run companies. They're incredibly disciplined, and so they're looking at, you know, how to manage supply. They're looking at their demand.
We're looking at our supply and our demand, and I think one of the things that we've learned coming out of COVID is that, you know, we probably overreacted in terms of switching off our supply chain, and it took us years to build that back up. So rental companies are looking at that as well and say, "Hey, maybe we need to start talking about multi-year forecasts here, multi-year outlooks." And so, if anything, this has definitely, I think, us as an industry, has made us come a lot closer in terms of how we plan and how we forecast. And I definitely see an opportunity to just by collaborating more intensely and maybe with a slightly longer horizon, we can just take some of that opportunism out of the market.
So what do you think, if you think forward over the next five years and you do your planning, or even 10, how much reduction are we gonna see in that business in terms of volatility? So, you know, swings from year- to- year, versus what it has been for the previous decade. What's your guess?
Yeah, it's a great... It's a little bit of a loaded question, I get that.
I recognize that.
Yeah. N o, I mean, this industry has demonstrated at some point, and now again, we're only talking AWP- . which is only a portion of Terex. But at some point in our past, we've seen a peak to trough from +50 to -50.
I mean, this has been a 100% swing. It's been insane. You know, I do see... I forgot the point that I was gonna make. Oh, you are asking whether we see that kind of taper off and whether we see that improve?
You know, whether it's like the worst, best case is +15 and best case is down 15, which is way better than +50 and -50 from a managing perspective.
I remember the point that I was gonna make, and so, that, that's kind of what this industry had to deal with many years ago, that kind of volatility. And I think we definitely, I think we've come to realize that, that's just the kind of it doesn't work for our customers, it doesn't work for us, if you know, that kind of cyclicality. And so I definitely see that the way we're communicating now is gonna. And that's where the long-term arising is coming from, is kind, how can we kind of smoothen that out going forward? Because again, it's in everyone's interest. It's in the interest of our rental partners, and it's in our own interest.
But I would say there's another thing that's come to play now, and that is, we know exactly what we have shipped in 2018, five years ago. We know exactly what we've shipped 10 years ago, and so we know exactly what needs to come off in 2023, in 2024, in 2025, in terms of rental rollouts. And our rental companies know that we know, and we know that they know, and so we can be a lot more transparent in just managing fleet age, and, you know, what needs to come on and come off. So we, with a much higher probability, can say what the industry is gonna need in 2024 than we were five years ago or even 10 years ago. So that we have way more forward visibility now.
-than we had five years ago. So that is another piece. Besides the communication and the collaboration, it's also just the accuracy of the data that allows us to be much more accurate on where this thing is gonna go. So I think both of those will smoothen the cycles out pretty significantly.
You're not gonna hazard a guess as peak and trough then?
I'm sorry. No, I don't think we're gonna have... unless something like 2008 happens again-
Different issue.
You know, then all bets are off. But I, I don't expect the same type of volatility going forward. No, I don't. I really don't.
Thank you.
I mean, I speak to all our large rental companies and their CEOs, and they're all, they're all telling me the same story. They're incredibly optimistic about not just 2024, but 2025, and they see what we're seeing, is that there's a lot of demand. And we just, as an industry, we just need to make sure we take some of that maniacal, you know, volatility out, and I think we are.
Perfect. Thank you.
So we've seen, sticking to that theme in the AWP space, we've seen a lot of players building capacity in North America, and then also some newer entrants into the North American market building capacity as well. How do you think that plays into the industry's ability to manage supply and demand as some of that capacity ramps up?
Yeah. Would be a great question to ask John Pfeifer as well, if you go see him. But, I can only comment on behalf of Terex. First of all, we're not increasing capacity. We're taking high-cost capacity offline, and we're replacing it with low-cost capacity. I should have done a better job explaining that on the earnings call, by the way, so I appreciate the question, and I appreciate the opportunity to clarify it. But, we retired high-cost capacity in Oklahoma City and Rock Hill and Redmond to the tune of 780,000 squre feet, and we're replacing it with just a little over 500,000 square feet at the moment in Monterrey, Mexico.
But secondly, we do have an option to take that up to about 900,000 square feet. So, you know, pretty much a wash in terms of capacity. But we're not even yet at the levels where we were volume-wise in 2018 or 2015 in terms of our supply. So we're not building incremental capacity. Now, I'm aware of all the headlines. Quite frankly, some of it I don't know exactly how to place, because I think some of our Western competitors might be looking at other product lines as well, other verticals, other segments. So I can't really comment on what they're doing. I've seen the headlines of the non-Western competitors.
I would just caution everyone a little bit, because some of that is, and I hate to use the term fake news, because it's such politically charged, but it, some of it is a little bit fake news, because some of these headlines are used to build a narrative, to get additional investments from, whatever sponsors that some of these competitors have. We go by what we see. We obviously have our intelligence. We know exactly what's being built where, by who. And we just feel very comfortable with where we are. We feel very comfortable with our value prop. We feel very comfortable with our capacity. We feel very comfortable with our through-cycle margin kinda layout, so that, you know, we don't go into this with our eyes closed.
I know I'm not directly answering your question, but I can only comment for us, and in our case, we're not doing any crazy things in terms of capacity.
Thank you. So I was wondering if we could talk a bit more about Monterrey. I know you guys got a couple of your competitors that are also moving in there, and so I was wondering if you could talk a bit about the labor availability and also what type of turnover you're seeing over there. Thank you.
Turnover has been extremely reasonable. We, we're now approaching 600-700 people- in Monterrey. We actually picked Monterrey because it's known for its fabrications. You know, it's a place in Mexico where just a lot of know-how exists in terms of fabrications and metal shops, and so we've had no issue in attracting very talented talented team members. We're very pleased with the people that we've been able to attract. Again, it's the largest facility we've ever built. Now, I know this is gonna go right against the question I got here right before, but just in context, it's replacing other capacity. We actually see lower attrition in Mexico than we see in some of our mature plants, which is very encouraging. The average tenure of the people, of the leadership team, is 20+ years, so very tenured leadership team.
We're doing extremely well on our safety performance, which is another indicator that it's really a smooth-running facility for us at the moment. I'm aware of some of the competitive activity in the region. I don't think it's anywhere near of what we're doing. I'm not bothered by it, to be very honest with you. I believe in our own ability to provide value to our customers. They know what to expect from us. They know exactly what kind of residual values they're gonna get. They know what kind of parts support they're gonna get, what kind of service support they're gonna get. They know exactly what kind of total cost of ownership they're gonna get. Quite frankly, we could have taken more orders than what we currently have in our backlog.
We feel that we're in a very good shape with our value proposition and the demand for our products. I'm not bothered by what others are doing, and I'm not bothered by the labor situation in Monterrey either.
Maybe just sticking with AWP on the 14% operating margin target that was outlined, one of the big sources of margin improvement was from just what we're talking about- kind of the shifting of the manufacturing base. How much of that is still to come in terms of from a margin dollar perspective? You know, that—presumably, a lot of that's still in front of us, but-
Yeah.
Yeah, so we still ... stick by our commitment to improve 200 basis points by 2025 because of the Monterrey facility, and that will be totally accretive to AWP.
Now, if it will be a net bolt-on of 200 basis points on top of what we're doing today, I can't say, because there's the, b ut net-net, the benefit of Monterrey is 200 basis points. You have any additional?
No, it's correct. And then, of course, you know, we have you know, we've talked about some of the inefficiencies, because when you start up a new plant, it's not fully, it's, you know, you build up capacity over time, and so we've been running some of those inefficiencies, and we'll see improvement in that as we go through the year.
We'll still experience that in the first half of the year, and in the second half of the year, it starts to gradually improve on, on that as well, and that's part of that, too.
Maybe talk through the utilities with the remaining time we have here. You know, a lot of nice tailwinds from an end demand perspective.
You know, you've battled some supply chain issues there. Just where are we in terms of, you know, activity levels and what's baked into the outlook here in 2024 from utilities specifically?
Yeah, still very much, a function of supply than demand. So obviously, my focus is to make sure that that facility continues to ramp up, and continues to improve throughput overall. In terms of... That's just for 2024. We also want them to improve their bottom-line performance. In terms of overall, you know, where that business is, we feel that, you know, utility business obviously is benefiting from the mega trends in North America, electrification and so on, the upgrades to the grid that needs to take place in the years to come, but also because we believe there are multiple applications that are moving from non-insulated to insulated. Think about all the broadband investments, the 5G investments. They're slowly moving from non-insulated to insulated, and that's our sweet spot.
It's a little bit like the mobile crushers and the stationary crushers. We think, we think that in this business, some of the applications are coming our way.
Now, it's very North America-centric. However, we do see some pockets of demand that start to take off in China. We actually built some utility trucks in China. We see some demand coming in in Saudi, in Latin America, and Southeast Asia, and Thailand. So there are some pockets outside of North America. Europe is a completely different type of technology, different type of play. We're not in Europe, but we do see Mexico, we do see some other markets where we can replicate our business model. But it's kind of niche-y still. North America is the mainstream. But yeah, a lot of upside for us for 2024. It's mostly just helping the team with their throughput.
Yeah.
That's the number one topic.
Excellent. A great discussion. Thank you.
Yeah, thank you.
Thanks for being here.
Thanks for having us.
Yeah, thank you.
Thank you.