Greetings. Welcome to the conference call to discuss Titan Machinery's acquisition of Heartland AG Systems. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Jeff Sonnek of ICR. Thank you. You may now begin.
Thank you. Good morning, and welcome to Titan Machinery's special conference call announcing the acquisition of Heartland AG Systems. On the call today from the company are David Meyer, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Bryan Knutson, Chief Operating Officer, and Mark Kalvoda, Chief Financial Officer. We've issued a press release this morning at approximately 7:30 A.M. Eastern Time. If you have not received the release, it's available on the IR page of Titan's website, ir.titanmachinery.com. This call is being webcast and a replay will be available on the company's website as well. In addition, we've provided a supplemental presentation to accompany today's prepared remarks. You may access the presentation by going to Titan's website, again, at ir.titanmachinery.com. The presentation is available directly below the webcast information in the middle of the page.
You'll see on slide 2 of the presentation our safe harbor. We'd like to remind everyone that the prepared remarks contain forward-looking statements and management may make additional forward-looking statements in response to your questions. These statements do not guarantee future performance and therefore undue reliance should not be placed upon them. These forward-looking statements are based on current expectations of management and involve inherent risks and uncertainties, including those identified in the Risk Factors section of Titan's most recently filed annual report on Form 10-K, as updated in subsequently filed quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. These risk factors contain a more detailed discussion of the factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected in any forward-looking statements. Except as may be required by applicable law, Titan assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements that may be made in today's release or call.
Please note that during today's call, we'll discuss non-GAAP financial measures, including results on an adjusted basis. We believe these adjusted financial measures can facilitate a more complete analysis and provide greater transparency into Titan's ongoing financial performance, particularly when comparing underlying results from period to period. We've included reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures to their most directly comparable GAAP financial measure in today's release. Now, with that, I'd like to introduce the company's Chairman and CEO, Mr. David Meyer. Go ahead, David.
Thank you, Jeff. Good morning to everyone on the call with us today. I'll start by sharing some summary remarks about this transaction. Bryan Knutson will share some insights around the strategic rationale. We'll wrap up with Mark Kalvoda providing his financial commentary, including forecasted synergies and how this impacts our modeling assumptions for fiscal 2023. Following our prepared remarks, we'll open up the call for Q&A. We are very excited to announce our definitive agreement to acquire Heartland AG Systems today. Heartland is the largest Case IH application equipment distributorship in North America, providing application-focused solutions for commercial applicators such as co-ops, elevators, crop input retailers, and other specialized commercial applicators. This transaction is significant both in size and strategic fit.
For the full year ended December 2021, Heartland generated revenues of $214 million and an EBITDA of $15.3 million. Strategically, Heartland provides us access to the commercial application segment of the market, which we previously weren't able to participate in due to OEM distribution agreements. The commercial application customer accounts for approximately 40% of the self-propelled sprayer industry today. For added perspective, note that the North America self-propelled sprayer industry is slightly larger than the four-wheel drive tractor industry on a unit basis. Due to the capital investment of self-propelled sprayers and floaters, regulations and licensing around crop protection products and fertilizer application and labor expertise, demand for custom commercial chemical and fertilizer application continues to grow.
Simply put, this transaction creates full alignment across all sales channels and end markets for Titan Machinery to participate within our current ag footprint and allows us to leverage our expansive store network. With this acquisition, Titan Machinery now has the distribution rights for the entire North American Case IH, New Holland, and CASE Construction product portfolio, which Bryan will discuss in further detail in his commentary. Additionally, Heartland brings short line manufacturing expertise through its vertical integration of proprietary specialized equipment for the commercial customer. This covers equipment such as fertilizer toolbars, spreaders, tenders, tanks, and various application-specific trailers. Currently, this portfolio represents about 11% of their total equipment sales and has a margin profile similar to our existing business.
While we don't intend to stray from our core competencies, the manufacturing business reflects the unique needs of the commercial applicator, and we look forward to supporting its growth as this product line is well accepted by the commercial application customer and increasingly utilized by our farmer/rancher customer. In terms of consideration, we are paying approximately $110 million for the Heartland business, which we intend to fund predominantly from our balance sheet cash. We expect the transaction to close in August of 2022. We're excited to add Heartland's experienced leadership team and look forward to a bright future together as we welcome the entire Heartland organization to the Titan Machinery family. With that, I'll turn the call over to Bryan Knutson.
Thank you, David. Heartland AG Systems is a great business, is one that we are very familiar with, and is an ideal fit for Titan Machinery. Additionally, we believe we are the only Case IH dealership network in the country capable of integrating this business and customer base. Heartland has been focused on the commercial application business since 1966, and through their own growth and consolidation, they expanded to 12 store locations with distribution covering 17 Midwestern and Northwestern states from the Pacific Northwest to the Great Lakes. Most importantly, Heartland's core upper Midwest markets overlap very nicely with our existing Titan footprint. Beyond the footprint, we also have similarly strong parts and service businesses with comparable margin profiles. Heartland's gross margins were 23.5% and pre-tax margins were 4.2% for the 12-month period ended December 2021.
The parts and service business has long been a key element of our strategy as it is theirs, comprising approximately 30% of Heartland's sales mix and is anchored by the quite consistent application cycle, largely independent of commodity prices, which minimizes the cyclicality that lies within the broader farm economy. We expect this will be an area we can further leverage in the future as we bring our larger service network to their commercial application customer base, especially within our core ag footprint in the upper Midwest. This transaction creates several opportunities for us. David mentioned the channel alignment in his remarks, and I'll emphasize that again here.
The ability for us to package a full line of equipment within our current footprint, both agriculture and construction, across all facets of the commercial customer's enterprise, is a step change in our ability to compete with other OEMs and their respective dealership networks, and this cannot be stressed enough. The application market has evolved over the last several decades as farmers have consolidated and grown more sophisticated. Yet the commercial application business continues to grow as we see continued environmental regulations, an increasing amount of environmentally conscientious minimum till and no-till planting practices, hybrid seed technology, and increased farmer demand for custom tillage services as well as custom crop protection and crop nutrient applications. There is a significant amount of product and service expertise within the traditional dealer channel such as ours, making now the time to integrate these two channels.
The outcome of this integration is the creation of a distribution model for Titan Machinery that is more competitive with other industry players within our upper Midwest footprint who currently have the distribution rights to sell to both customer segments. We believe customer service and distribution are maximized at the local level via leveraging existing relationships within our communities, while also allowing us to build new relationships through this expanded set of capabilities. It is estimated that there are currently more than 400 commercial application customers within our legacy Titan footprint, which represents an attractive opportunity for us to aggressively target. Additionally, this acquisition now allows us access to the full product portfolio of Case IH's application equipment to sell to our current farmer and rancher customers through our existing network of dealership locations.
Furthermore, our existing Titan locations are also a natural outlet for the commercial customers' used application equipment trade-ins to market to our current farmer and rancher customers. We already have the farmer and rancher customer base, as well as the demand for these late model used application equipment trade-ins, which creates an efficient channel where our collective interests are now aligned. Beyond the operational synergy opportunities and the immediate positive impact that we see for parts and service within our existing footprint, we believe this transaction can also expand our M&A strategy. With this new channel alignment, our competitive position is further enhanced, which we believe may result in additional full line dealership acquisition opportunities for us in newly acquired Heartland markets.
While this transaction expands our footprint beyond our current upper Midwest operations, we will be working collaboratively with Case IH and select Case IH dealership groups outside of Titan's core footprint on joint retail transactions for these multi-unit sales opportunities, along with ongoing distribution optimization to drive growth and maintain the pre-tax momentum we've produced as our operations have become more efficient while we comply with the terms of our forthcoming agreements with Case IH regarding the commercial application business. With that, I will turn the call over to Mark to review the synergies we see from this transaction and how this impacts our modeling assumptions for fiscal 2023. Mark?
Thanks, Bryan. Beyond the strategic merits of the transaction, there's a lot to like here from a financial perspective. As David and Bryan discussed, the channel alignment creates a very clear revenue synergy for us to capitalize on as we will now be able to package other products such as tractors, skid steers, forklifts, telehandlers, and wheel loaders with sprayers and fertilizer applicators to these commercial customers within our existing footprint. We believe there's approximately $60 million of incremental annual run rate revenue synergies in our first full fiscal year of ownership that we will realize through our new access to this commercial application customer, along with our new access to the complete line of application equipment to sell to our existing farmer and rancher customers. This incremental equipment revenue has a similar gross margin profile to what we experience in our ag segment today.
Given our ability to leverage this revenue over our existing cost structure that's already in place, the contribution to pre-tax earnings is rather significant. The $60 million in incremental revenue translates to approximately $0.13 per diluted share, or about $4.2 million in EBITDA. Building this onto Heartland's base business, which in 2021 had a solid pre-tax margin of 4.2%, equates to approximately $274 million of revenue, $0.43 of diluted earnings per share, and approximately $19.5 million of EBITDA. Using this as the basis for valuation and estimating a purchase price of $110 million, we would pay a multiple of approximately 5.6x synergized EBITDA, which we believe is attractive for a highly accretive and strategically important business such as Heartland.
Additionally, we believe that there are other synergies to be realized with this transaction that have not been quantified here. Some will be in the near term, such as an increase in parts and service revenue due to the added convenience of our existing Titan stores proximity to many of these commercial customers. Longer term, we expect to see some expense opportunities in asset consolidation and organizational structure. These expense opportunities, combined with growing market share in equipment sales and additional focus on parts and service, provide us a pathway to achieve 5% pre-tax margin for Heartland before considering synergies and approach 6% margin with synergies. In terms of its impact on fiscal 2023 and our existing modeling assumptions, I would note a couple important considerations.
First, seasonality is different than what you would traditionally expect from us, and this comes back to the types of customers that exist on the commercial side. These are larger organizations who tend to operate on a more formal budget planning process to deploy capital on an annual basis before the growing season and have less late season tax buying than what we see in the individual farmer and rancher level. Second is the seasonal nature of the application season, which is primarily spring and summer-focused. Thus, commercial application customers want equipment such as sprayers early in the year prior to the spring and summer application seasons. The parts and service business for Heartland also corresponds with the spring and summer high usage periods and complements Titan's seasonally high fall parts and service business, which is driven by harvesting activities.
Due to the seasonality, however, the accretion to our fiscal 2023 results is correspondingly lower, which at this stage really reflects the second half of the fiscal year, given our estimated closing in August. We also do not expect to capitalize on the synergies I just mentioned until fiscal 2024, as we do not have the inventory to supply this opportunity in the current year. Therefore, we expect that we will only capture approximately $0.05 of earnings per share in the balance of fiscal 2023. As a result of this acquisition, we are raising our fiscal 2023 agriculture segment revenue assumption by 10 percentage points to a new range of up 37%-42% and raising our diluted EPS to a new range of $2.90-$3.20.
Beyond these explicit updates associated with the transaction, our underlying assumptions for the agriculture segment remain intact, and we are not updating any of our other modeling assumptions at this time. As we always do, we will provide a fresh update on the complete business and our outlook when we provide our fiscal second quarter earnings results in August. This concludes our prepared remarks. Operator, we are now ready for the question-and-answer session of our call.
Thank you. We'll now be conducting a question-and-answer session. If you'd like to ask a question today, please press star one from your telephone keypad and a confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment please while we poll for questions. Thank you. Our first question will be coming from the line of Larry De Maria with William Blair. Please proceed with your question.
Thanks, good morning, everybody.
Good morning, Larry.
A couple questions. First off, hi, guys. Can you talk about obviously this, like, you know, the seasonality of the business, but probably presumably early order programs are open for this kind of equipment for next year. Can you talk about or let us know what the early indications are for this kind of equipment into next year?
Okay. I can start with the allocation and the equipment. This is David. I'll start with the allocation and the equipment, and then I'll probably let Brian hand over to Mark here for some modeling. Right now, you know, as we look into the equipment availability, Heartland AG Systems, you know, similar to how Titan was with our, you know, order bank and having the orders in place to meet the customer demand, I think have been doing a really good job at that. You know, they are the largest retailer of the Case IH self-propelled sprayers and the fertilizer equipment, some applicators, which some people call floaters. You know, they they've got orders in place. Also, as we're looking at the allocation into calendar year 2023, you know, have a good number of orders, you know, coming at them. That's gonna be a real positive. You know, Mark, you can maybe talk about how you're modeling this .
Yeah. Again, I think just on the seasonality, it's very much different than our existing business. Very much more so first half, focused both on the equipment side and on the parts and service side. Even heavier kind of in what falls into our first quarter as opposed to the second quarter even. Just with the nature of that business, where the usage of the equipment is, the type of customers with wanting that equipment prior to the annual usage of that equipment, lends itself and actually complements the rest of our business well for that first half and particularly first quarter.
Okay, thanks. Then, two other quick things. Well, you talked about the reduced cyclicality. Can you kind of maybe talk us through a cycle or, you know, how the equipment played out? We see a lot of obviously tractor volumes, but this is presumably less cyclical. Can you talk about that? Secondly, does this get you more into the contractor market? Are there any implications for that? Thank you.
Talking about the cyclicality. Okay. If you look at, you know, our normal business, you know, a lot of that depends on, you know, on the farmer work cycle. You're looking at yields. You're looking at commodity prices and some things like that really impacts the, you know, cyclicality of our business. You know, if you have a late spring or early spring or early fall, late fall with tough harvesting conditions or even the timing of harvest, right? Well, if you look at this business, we're doing business with some really large commercial application companies. You know, multi-state, you know, very mature, sophisticated companies who, you know, they're working with a CapEx budgets. You know, they're gonna lay out their sprayer needs for a long period of time. Whether you've got $2 corn or $8 corn, you know, all the corn still gets sprayed, all the fertilizer still gets applied. You know, that takes out that cyclical piece of that, Larry. The second part of your question?
Well, does this open, you know, on the contractor, does this move you more into the contractor business? Did you underperform there previously or-
When you talk about contractors, these are commercial applicators, right? They do custom tillage. You know, a lot of them are crop inputs companies who are handling the chemical and the fertilizer. You know, some of this involves from a contractor standpoint. I think we mentioned we are gonna have some synergies of adding construction equipment to them. They're looking at having, you know, wheel loaders, you know, forklifts, skid steer loaders. We think that's gonna be an opportunity. They are actually contractors for the fact that they're doing custom work, commercial work for the farmers, and the farmer's gonna pay them so much an acre. They're gonna pay them, you know, to apply the, you know, fertilizer, chemical and stuff on their field. In a sense, they are contractors that way, and they need material handling construction equipment to handle that. Hopefully that answers your question there.
Yeah. I was talking about the contractors on the ag side. Yes, that's helpful. Thank you and good luck.
Our next question is from the line of Mircea Dobre with Baird. Please proceed with your questions.
Good morning, Mircea.
Yeah. Good morning to you, gentlemen, and congrats on this deal. I actually have quite a few questions here, if you'll humor me. I wanna start where kinda Larry left off with the cyclicality of this business. It's not entirely obvious to me as to why this business would be less cyclical than your base business. I understand that you spray whether corn is at $2 or $8, but you also, you know, plant and harvest, whether it's $2 or $8. Why is it that sprayers are different than tractors or combines or any other piece of ag equipment in that regard?
Well, I think some of your farmer purchasers are probably a little bit more short-term. You know, they're saying maybe, "Hey, what's our tax situation?" They may make a purchase decision, say, in August for a December purchase, depending on their tax situation, right? Depending on their yield, you know, depending on what the client prices are. You're probably looking at, what, three, four, or five-month windows a lot of times when farmers are making that purchase decision, sometimes a little more spontaneous. Where you're looking at these, really large, commercial, y ou know, crop input companies like, you know, Cenex Harvest States, some of these things, you know, they're working on, five-year plans. They're working on their CapEx budgets.
They're taking these sprayers to go out and do a service for their customers. The uptime is so important, so they're gonna do more, "Hey, we don't want one of these self-propelled sprayers to get over 1,000 hours or 1,500 hours, or they need to be less than five years old," and things like that. They're planning these purchases over a period of time. They're doing their budgets, and they pretty much know what their capital needs are for these for this equipment to really help them in their operations, right? That's why as we look at these, you know, shorter windows, it becomes a little more cyclical. We're at these longer terms now. From a macro environment, yeah, granted, if we go into a, you know, a five-year down cycle in ag, yeah, you know, probably all the ag-related businesses might pull back a little bit, you know. But probably not near as much as what you're gonna see the farmer, the grower pull back.
Okay. That makes sense. Maybe a sort of clarification for me here since this is kind of new territory for me. The Harvest folks are entirely exposed to commercial applications. Is that how I'm supposed to understand this? Or do they also sell product to, you know, farmer ranchers and the like?
You know, probably need to do a little bit of education here. What happened, this is all. If you take the self-propelled sprayers, you take the application equipment, you know, as you look at your farm equipment OEMs, right, you're looking at tractors, combines. This is a probably fairly new product line that you're seeing all of a sudden the OEMs, you know, start adapting. You know, I'll give you an example. Case IH, they acquired Tyler back in 1996. Ag-Chem, they acquired- o r AGCO acquired Ag-Chem. I'd say that probably happened right around that 2001. Deere introduced their 4700 self-propelled sprayer in 1996, you know.
That's all, you know, in relative terms at the time, you know, fairly new. New Holland acquired Miller in 2014. Deere acquired Hagie in 2016. Fairly new product line. As you look at the dealer agreements, I know back when the Ag-Chem days or when AGCO acquired Ag-Chem, you know, everything was being sold direct right from the manufacturer. There were no dealer groups. When Case IH acquired Tyler, what they did is they set up. At that time that Case IH acquired Tyler, very few farmers had a self-propelled sprayer. Very few farmers had a fertilizer applicator or floater. Basically 100% of that business was done through your commercial applicators.
Case IH set up basically parallel distribution channels or contracts, you know. You had your regular full line dealers that had tractors, combines, tillage equipment, and so on, planters, seeders, air seeders and all that. Your commercial application equipment contracts were really just limited to self-propelled sprayers and fertilizer applicators, right? As the industry set out, you know, like Titan Machinery, for example, now, you know, we can sell self-propelled sprayers to farmers, but we don't have the fertilizer applicator or the floaters in our product line. We're pretty much limited to selling self-propelled sprayers to farmers, and we've done a really good job with that, but that's to the extent of the business. Now the commercial application contract, that's pretty much exclusive to be sold to the commercial application customers.
Now as the industry's evolved a little bit, what's happened, if you look over the last 20 years, is that, with the farming practices, you're looking at a minimum till, no-till. You're looking at the seed hybrids. You're looking at that all the farmers are starting to buy self-propelled sprayers. If you look across the footprint, especially in the Corn Belt and some of the bigger farming areas, almost every farmer has a self-propelled sprayer. It's a tool that's used a lot in the season. It starts almost every day, and it's really an important product in today's farming world, okay? What's happened is you're looking at the very, you know, the industry's growing.
You know, I'd say right now it's from a North American industry, it's over 4,500 units, which is actually higher than the North American four-wheel drive industry. It's a big industry, and 40% of this business goes to the commercial applicator. What's happening, you know, from a channel standpoint is it's kind of an inefficient thing, and we're selling the, you know, the parts and the service and the sprayers to the farmer or the commercial contractor selling it to the, you know, to the elevators and the co-ops. In a lot of the markets you've got, you know, independent applicators, commercial applicators. You've got, you know, local elevators, you know, local co-ops, you know.
A lot of times they wanna buy that equipment from the local dealer, you know. It's just a little bit of an inefficient channel out there right now. What this really does is it gives us the ability to put this into one channel. You know, one place of contact for farmers is very efficient and but it's how this industry has changed and evolved, you know, over the last 20 years has really got us to this point. This is from a strategic point, this is gonna be not only good for the industry, it's gonna be good for Case IH. It's gonna be good for both the farmer, you know, rancher, and also good for that commercial applicator out there. Because what it does right now is it takes all our existing parts and service locations we have in our core footprint, all of a sudden you've got that many touch points, then for the customer, you know, this parts and service support. In a nutshell, it's a little bit of history, a little background, but that's really got us to the point we are today, Mircea.
No, that was hugely helpful for me because I guess I did not fully understand this nuance here. Again, it does sound like this acquisition is allowing you to access that specific channel, that commercial channel that you were simply not able to touch previously. And that's where these folks' revenues and
If you take our existing footprint, our, you know, our five-six state area, you know, we've got, you know, Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, North and South Dakota, the eastern part of, you know, Wyoming, just highly productive, huge farm. You know, we've got these, you know. That's where our core footprint is for our Case IH and, you know, locations, right? We were not able to sell these self-propelled sprayers to the local elevators and stuff. Again, all of a sudden, we've got access to not only that important customer segment, which is 40% of basically the industry, you know. It also gives us some, you know, expanded product line with the fertilizer applicator and some people call them floaters, fertilizer applicators, you know, in addition then to the self-propelled sprayer.
Understood. When I'm looking at the margin profile and then sort of the revenue and mix profile, I mean, the gross margins for Heartland a little bit better than yours. I'm sort of curious if this is just primarily a function of mix since, you know, they have a little more parts and service than you do, or if there's something else in here that's kind of specific to their business that generates, call it an extra 300 basis points or so of gross margin.
Yeah. Yeah, good question. You know, there's a few moves, you know, dynamics of this here. I'm gonna let Mark answer this. You know, maybe Bryan, you may want to, you know, chime in here too then.
Yeah. As far as the higher gross margin, two things primarily I would say. You mentioned one of them with the mix, with it being 30% parts and service. Our last year was more like 25%. That's gonna cause the, you know, enhancement in gross margin. Then on the equipment side, there is a little bit, they have been able to achieve a little bit higher level of margins on the equipment side as well. The combination of the two bring in that higher gross margin percentage than a little bit higher than what we have.
Okay. Do you know, is there anything unusual with current gross margins for this business? I mean, are they higher than normal, or is this something that over time you've seen gross margins north of 20% on a pretty sustained basis?
Yeah, we have seen it in their business. Just you know as we look through their past results, it has been consistently over that 20%. I would say it's been growing over you know what we looked at over the last you know few years. I think some of that is as they bring in some of these. 'Cause they've been acquiring. They've been acquisitive here in the last several years. As they've been able to go in and improve some of the operations of these acquired entities, they've been able to improve some of those call it you know on the parts and service side as they you know get things cleaned up, get them operating efficiently, that type of thing. It's up, but I think it's up on a sustainable level.
Okay.
You know, add onto that too, Mircea, a little bit too. You know, these self-propelled sprayers are, you know, highly technical, right? I think Heartland AG Systems, you know, has some really excellent technicians, very, really technical is that to have that type of support and that value proposition to the end commercial applicator has been really good, and, you know, it can drive that type of margin, so.
Okay. Two more questions and I'm done. In the revenue mix here, the new equipment, 28% is other brands. I'm curious as to what's all in there. It's clear what manufactured products are, but what exactly is other brands and how does that sort of fit or maybe open up some new opportunities for you longer term?
Bryan, can you comment from operations side, you know, a few of those?
Sure.
Short line?
Yeah. Mircea, so very similar to us, they have short lines or non-CNH brands that they've identified and taken on over the years, just like we have in our business. So some really strong brands such as RBR and Salford, just to name a couple. Some of those we already have relationships with it as well. Again, like the manufactured products, as David mentioned, this customer, you know, very planned, very professional customer, a bit of a niche business in some of the things that they do. You know, they sometimes need those complementary products to fill some of the things that the major OEMs don't cover. Again, just like we do in our business, they've just got a little bit heavier or higher mix of it than we do.
Okay. Understood. Final question. Revenue synergies. I'll be candid with you gentlemen. Whenever I see revenue synergies being presented by anyone, I'm a lot more skeptical than when it comes to cost synergies. So maybe we can dive a little deeper here in terms of what gives you the confidence that you can hit these synergies? More importantly, how are they generated? You know, why is there an opportunity now versus the way you were operating previously?
I'll give you a good example here. Right now, if you take these commercial applicators, and like I said earlier, is that not only do they go out and, you know, and apply fertilizer, they also- you know, and spray chemical on the farmers' fields. What they do is many of them have fleets of tractors, and they'll go out and do custom tillage for the farmers, or they're doing the tillage or the fertilizer application or strip till, you know, that person. It's a fairly big market. A lot of this is four-wheel drive tractors and tillage equipment, right?
Right now, when we go out to the elevator, well, we can quote the tractors, but then Heartland AG Systems, you know, they're quoting the sprayers, you know. All of a sudden, if you look at our competition, you know, Deere & Co, they can go out and that dealer can package or bundle the tractors with the sprayers, you know, get, you know, large multiple unit discounts. Go in you know this one contact where we're needing to call up Heartland AG Systems, they're calling us up.
Hey, you guys do the tractors, we'll do the sprayers and the fertilizer applicators. Becomes a little bit inefficient out there right now, and then especially when it comes into the discounting and relationships with the customers, so. We've got the ability to go in, into, like we were talking about our five-six state really highly productive area. We're able to go out to every elevator, every co-op, every commercial applicator right now, and we can go out to them, and we can bundle four-wheel drive tractors with the sprayers, with the floaters, with our construction equipment, and our tillage equipment as in a one transaction deal. That's huge, you know. It's a legitimate.
'Cause right now we've got, you know, a customer tell us, "Hey, you know, we just bought these sprayers from John Deere. We would like to buy them from you, but we couldn't. You know, we'd like to buy your tractors, but we've got John Deere sprayers. How are we gonna get the tractors so all the GPS matches, right?" Yeah, it's a problem. To be able to bundle these and go all these together in a one-stop shop. We've got a lot of good, you know, customers that are on boards of directors at elevators that want to buy our product. The fact that we weren't able to bundle or package the sprayers with the tractors together is just a huge competitive disadvantage out there. Now this fixes all that. This is huge, Mircea. I'll guarantee you there are huge synergies with this.
Okay.
Yeah. Mircea , I'll just add to what Dave mentioned, you know, like he said, some of those opportunities with the bundling of the tractors or the construction equipment, the skid steers, wheel loaders as examples. As he mentioned earlier, the floaters to farmers or the fertilizer applicators, we never had the opportunity to sell those before. We've got the relationships with the farmers and ranchers. You know, as they get bigger and they get more sophisticated, their desire for those products is growing. That ability for us to be able to sell those is really important here.
Finally, I'll add, you know, the more efficient channel that Dave talked about and the one point of contact. You know, us going from in the Midwest in our footprint as an example, six service locations to 79 service locations. You know, just the reaction time that we can have for customers and the lower downtime that we anticipate and the more service points and touch points going from 100 technicians to 700 technicians in that same footprint. You know, we see some opportunities there as you know, we better serve the customer for you know, share growth opportunities as well. I would note though, you know, as Mark pointed out and as Larry had touched on in his question, you know, there is that tempering that a bit both with the seasonality and with the inventory supply challenges here.
All right. Appreciate all the color. Thank you.
Okay. Thanks, Mircea.
Our next question comes from the line of Daniel Imbro with Stephens. Please proceed with your questions.
Yep. Hey, good morning, guys, and congrats on the acquisition.
Yeah. Morning, Dan.
David, I want to follow up on one of your last comments during the last Q&A around the technical aspect of parts and service. You know, Mark I think mentioned that longer term there was an opportunity to leverage your existing Titan locations to provide parts and service. Just curious, can the existing stores provide that service today given the highly technical nature? Just thinking through if there's any necessary investments to capture that long-term parts and service synergy you talked about.
Yeah. So right now, if you look at that self-propelled sprayer that our stores are selling it successfully, selling the Case IH self-propelled sprayer to the local farmers, right? With that, we need all the technical expertise and the training to do that. In addition, you know, with the Raven product, which is a lot of their products are included that, you know, in these sprayers. We've got the training and the background and to do this. Likewise, Heartland AG Systems, same thing. You know, they're highly technical, and they've been doing that job and providing that type of service.
This is why this is such a nice fit right now because, you know, since the farmers have started to buy, you know, these new self-propelled sprayers and we're selling them, and we're the largest. You know, I'd say full line ag, Case IH Group for selling sprayer. That's really done a good job of that. You know, we've got fully capable stores, and then our parts department stocks parts for the self-propelled sprayers, and our technicians are trained on them, and we do a good job with that. It's just really a nice fit.
Got it. That's helpful. Second kind of just follow-up question is on the seasonality of the business. You guys have mentioned it's obviously first half weighted. How should we think about the working capital, the demands and cash flow impacts of the seasonality? And then what's it gonna mean for inventory turns and efficiency? It's something you guys have talked a lot about in recent quarters. Just kinda understand the impact this acquisition will have on that.
Mark, can you grab this one?
Sure. I think, you know, from a working capital standpoint, cash flow, I think, you know, other than the timing of this, you know, the seasonality being a little bit different, I think, you know, from a turn standpoint, working capital levels, it's very similar. I think the times that we're in today, it's, you know, higher turns. It's, you know, quick movement on it. One thing I would say that's maybe a little bit different in this business compared to ours, the level of used is down, you know, somewhat from our business to the farmer rancher customer. There's not as much used in this business. From a working capital requirement standpoint on the new side, on the parts side, very similar, except the timing just kind of shifted a little bit earlier in the year as opposed to later in the year.
Got it. That's helpful. Last one. In the slides, you mentioned the transaction opened up additional M&A opportunities. I'm curious, you know, one, how many other assets of scale are there out there in this market that you would, you know, potentially look to acquire? Two, with the deal set to close in August, how long do you anticipate integration will take before you'd be back in the market for another acquisition?
Let's start, you know, on the M&A side. Really as we're looking at the all of a sudden, you know, within our footprint, you know, there's a number of, you know, full line Case IH dealerships that we have discussions with that now all of a sudden, you know, we're in this market with the commercial application equipment contract in some of their markets, and all of a sudden, you know, we can come and, you know, acquire them. You've got some immediate synergies there, right? And then some, you know, I think some potentially motivated sellers that say, "Hey, how does that work?" And then in some of this footprint, then that's outside of our current footprint, right?
That all of a sudden we're gonna have this contract and that's gonna open up some new, you know, to some adjacent markets to our current footprint, where you've got existing full line Case IH dealerships where we'll have this commercial application equipment contract, and then some other dealer will have the combines and the tractors and the full line dealership, you know, and those are really, you know, attractive acquisitions for us to do like that. When you're talking about the timing, this is, you know, the negotiations on this transaction has been going on some time and, but at the same time, I can see that concurrently to that we continue to work the acquisition pipeline. We acquired the Jaycox Group in December. You know, at the same time we were in discussions with Heartland AG Systems. Just most recently Mark's Machinery.
I think we've got the ability to integrate this group. I think to start with, you know, this is a really well-run, good accretive acquisition. It's gonna be a division up through our ag segment, you know, that let them kind of business as usual, you know. It isn't like a, it's a totally full integration right now. We're gonna let them, you know, in the relationships with the commercial application customer that the Heartland AG Systems has some excellent relationships there. I think they're gonna look at this as a little bit, you know, longer over time for a full integration and really let the business do what it does really well right now. At the same time, you know, we've got the ability to do acquisitions as we get through this. Like you say, just like what we just did with Jaycox. The Jaycox group, that three-store group and the two-store group in Yankton with Mark's Machinery. If that makes sense.
Yep, nope, it does. Congrats again on the closing or announcement of the deal and best of luck.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. We've reached the end of the question and answer session. I'll hand the call over to Mr. Meyer for closing remarks.
Okay. Thank you everyone for your time being on the call today, and we look forward to talking to you more, and we're gonna have our, you know, Q2 earnings release sometime in August. We look again to catch up with you at that point in time. Thank you and have a great day.
This will conclude today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.