Tennant Company (TNC)
NYSE: TNC · Real-Time Price · USD
81.52
+1.36 (1.70%)
Apr 24, 2026, 4:00 PM EDT - Market closed
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Small-Cap Virtual Conference

Sep 18, 2025

Steve Ferazani
Senior Equity Analyst, Sidoti

Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome back to Sidoti's virtual investor conference. I see some people still coming into the room. I'm Steve Ferazani, an analyst at Sidoti. As we let people still stream in, I'll take this time to remind you we should have some time left for questions after what I think will be an interesting presentation this afternoon. If you do have questions at any time, you can press the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen and type them in. Type it in. We'll get to as many as possible over the next 30 minutes. I don't want to take any more time. It looks like the counter has slowly stopped moving here. With that, I'll take advantage and turn it over to Tennant Company. We're joined by CEO David Huml and Lorenzo Bassi, Investor Relations. With that, let me turn it over to you, David.

David Huml
President and CEO, Tennant Company

Thanks a lot, Steve. And thank you all for joining today. I thought I'd use our time up to take a few minutes at the beginning to just introduce the company and overview the company from an investor perspective, and then certainly want to leave ample time for whatever questions you have for us. Really excited to be here and excited to be leading this now 155-year-old business that has operated continuously since ten years after the Civil War. And the reason I bring that up is not because being old is kind of cool and compelling, but I think the really interesting part is this company has continually reinvented itself to stay relevant across that 155-year history. And I would argue we are on the cusp of our next reinvention as a business with our move into robotic cleaning equipment.

But before I get there, you know, when you think about Tennant Company from a value proposition, investment thesis perspective, we are a global leader in a $9 billion TAM. It's a growth market, and we've got growth aspirations. Our growth opportunities are underpinned by global mega trends that give tailwinds to our investments in growth initiatives. One of the really unique and compelling aspects of this business is our aftermarket capabilities. We have a world-class service model, which not only drives incremental profitable revenue and customer stickiness, but creates a significant competitive moat between us and our competition. I mentioned robotics earlier. We have invested and have made significant progress in our disruption of our core cleaning equipment market. We think we've got a significant opportunity, and we're well positioned to win as robotics take over more substantially within the cleaning and equipment space.

Underneath it all, we have a very disciplined, a strong and disciplined financial position and approach to maximizing shareholder value through disciplined capital allocation. I'll touch a bit on how we think about that. I mentioned the $9 billion TAM. We've got about a 14% share globally that varies by geography. A higher share position, in the Americas, 25%, about a 10% share in EMEA. Upside for growth from just a starting position, but a significant toehold in the EMEA geography and about a 4% share of the Asia-Pacific geography. The takeaway really is, we've got a strong foothold in each of the geographies of consequence and upside for growth from a market perspective in an attractive and growing space. I mentioned the mega trends earlier.

I'll just highlight these, and how they impact our TAM and our business, and what we're doing about them. The four I would highlight from a mega trend perspective, one is automation. Automation in floor cleaning equipment is driven by the need for it. It's a very labor-intensive process, and equipment improves productivity. Robotic equipment reduces and eliminates the need for labor altogether. We increasingly see that managing for labor challenges is one of our customers' top operational challenges, so we've moved from kind of just selling productivity-enhancing equipment and tools and service into helping our customers solve one of their major, major enterprise problems in terms of the availability, the reliability, and the cost of labor.

Modernization and a higher expectation for clean. We've continued to see a trend, and it's accelerated post-pandemic, a trend towards desire for cleaner spaces, visibility of clean. And certainly, as emerging markets improve and grow, they're looking for more consistently clean shared spaces in those geographies. We think that provides a tailwind for equipment in general, across the world. Electrification, enabled by the improvements in battery technology, and but a desire on many customers' parts to move away from internal combustion engines and not have gasoline stored on site, not have to deal with the exhaust and achieve their own net zero goals as they move through looking at every aspect of their operation. We think we can help customers solve their net zero and sustainability challenges and help meet targets over the long haul.

And so sustainability is an important component and an important mega trend that we think plays to our strengths as a business. And we're positioned to help our customers achieve their goals from a sustainability perspective. So we think we're a really attractive, long-term model. We've committed to 3%-5% top-line growth. Our market grows on a global basis, kind of at or just below GDP-type rates, which we peg in the kind of one and a half to two up to 2%, over the long term. So we're going to outpace market growth, drive 3%-5% organic top-line sales growth. We committed to 50-100 basis points of bottom-line EBITDA expansion. We have delivered on that commitment over the prior, you know, four years, and we think there's still a significant upside opportunity.

A combination of both improvements, about 30 basis points coming from the gross margin line and then 40 basis points coming from S&A leverage. So we think that's within reach to grow and improve our bottom-line margins. We're a strong cash generator. We want to convert that cash at a high level. So, we're targeting 100% free cash flow conversion from net income. From an M&A perspective, we've got a very well-defined, I'll touch on it in the next slide, a well-defined acquisition strategy, and we're actively working on a funnel of candidates. From a quantification perspective, we aspire to add about $150 million of top-line net sales through acquisition over the three years, 2024, 2025, and 2026. So I mentioned robotics earlier, and but let me open the aperture a little bit and just talk about new products in general. New products are one of our growth levers.

So when I talk about delivering on 3%-5% top-line growth, we have strategic pricing, and we have go-to-market investments, which contribute to growth. But the big mover is really around our new product innovation. And we expect to drive innovations in these three vectors: AMR and robotics, small space cleaning, and what we call product line extensions. And product line extensions are taking product platforms that are designed at a lower cost basis, excuse me, and moving them into brands and geographies so that we can compete at more competitive price points and maintain pricing on the premium product in those spaces as well. So these are three really attractive global opportunities, and we're actively launching products into these spaces to drive growth through new product innovation. You know, I think when you think about winning with new products, we've got significant assets and capabilities to leverage.

It's not just building a better product or coming with a robot. We have the go-to-market coverage. We have the channels to market so we can reach customers. We have the aftermarket service capability I talked about earlier. We have the industry's largest factory-direct service organization, a service organization. That means over 900 service technicians globally that are out servicing our customer and keeping the machine in good operating order so that the customer can achieve their ROI on the investment, and we got multiple brands to go-to-market as well so that we can fully penetrate channels and vertical market segments and manage for channel conflict. So I think we've got the ecosystem around that new product innovation engine so that we can reap the rewards of the investments from a new product perspective. I mentioned M&A.

I'll take a little bit of time because this is a newer aspect of our capital allocation priorities, and we think it's important to note we think of M&A as having to be driven by strategy first. You know, we do have a set of strategic financial and operational thresholds that we manage to that are articulated at the bottom of the slide, but that's more around the discipline of how we move into specific deals. When we think about where we're looking to acquire, our number one priority is to defend and grow our core mechanized cleaning equipment space, that $9 billion TAM. I mentioned the product vectors where we think there's opportunity to grow, and acquisition should be one of our levers we can pull on small space, robotics, and mid-tier.

But in addition to that, we also want to look at adjacent categories like vacuums and carpet care, where we're not as legacy-strong in that space. It's a $1 billion global TAM. And also channel expansion. Buying distributors to establish a more direct presence in the marketplace can help us grow faster, reach more customers, and make better margin over the long haul. So priority number one is we're working to funnel opportunity within that, defend and grow our core. Close adjacency is robotics and connected autonomy. And so we're looking at everything from pure-play manufacturers of robots that we think may have a good machine that operates well but would benefit from our brand and our channel reach and our aftermarket service. We could be a more rightful owner of that business.

In addition to that, we're looking at the software component of robotics, not only as core to the capability but also an interesting and attractive recurring revenue stream. Navigation software is sold on a subscription basis. And so, we like the idea of controlling, you know, controlling our own destiny from a software perspective, but then capturing also the value of that recurring revenue stream. And then beyond the robotics, you know, the robot itself, there's data and reporting and the apps and telemetry that enable robotics and allow what a robot can do on the ground to derive value for the end customer.

So we're looking beyond just the robot itself and the software that navigates the robot, but looking at the ecosystem around it and are there opportunities to acquire in that space that would help us deliver more value to the end customer and grow the business and disrupt the industry. Last but not least, we're opportunistically looking at other mobile equipment adjacencies. This is a more loosely defined space, but, you know, when you're going to stand up a funnel, M&A is awfully hard to predict. And so you've got to be out talking to a lot of people. And you think about what Tennant does is really good at. We make mobile equipment that does work. And so there could be other mobile equipment adjacencies that could be interesting.

I don't have anything specific to name from a sort of a product set, and it's opportunistic at best, but we wanted to articulate it so that investors weren't surprised. If we found something that was interesting and hit our thresholds, we would thoughtfully consider it. Okay. So with that, I think I'll turn it back to you, Steve, when you can take questions from the group.

Steve Ferazani
Senior Equity Analyst, Sidoti

Great. Thanks so much, Dave. Appreciate the overview this afternoon. As a reminder, if you do have questions, press that Q&A button at the bottom of your screen. Type in the question, and we'll get to as many as we can with time permitting. I did want to ask first, Dave, through the first half of the year, you reported pretty significant order growth in an economy that's challenging, I think, uncertain, to be fair. I generally think of your end markets as not necessarily GDP dependent, but certainly correlated. How do you get the order growth in what's clearly a difficult environment?

David Huml
President and CEO, Tennant Company

Yeah. We're really pleased with the performance coming through the first half. Just to quantify for the audience, order rates in the first quarter were up 13%. Order rates were up 4% in the second quarter. Some of that was the quarter we were lapping. To come through the first half of 2025 with incoming order rates in the 7% range feels really good.

And when I look at the underpinnings of the order growth, it's all the investments we've made in growth. So I'm comfortable and confident that's not just windfall or, you know, something that happened to us. We're out actually driving the growth and getting the return on the investment. And there's upside. We're not hitting on all the cylinders that we need to yet from a growth perspective. So I feel like much of our performance is within our control, and we demonstrated what we're capable of in the first half. There is no shortage of, I would say, cautiousness and conservatism, and uncertainty in the marketplace. I think the big topic for us in our industry is around tariffs. You know, we sell to customers in a broad range of vertical markets.

So, on the manufacturing end of our spectrum, they're trying to deal with the tariff impact in their core business on their COGS line. On the retail end of the line of our customers, they're trying to understand the impact on the products they have on the shelf and how they're going to have to balance volume and price to, you know, pay themselves back. So the solves are different, but a lot of conversation around tariff and the tariff uncertainty and the tariff outlook. And the reality is, Steve, nobody knows. And so I think the challenge is not, to in my mind, just tariffs, but if we could get some stability in tariffs, they'd be predictable, and then we could get to work planning for them.

When people want to know what the second half looks like, our landscape would be known from a tariff perspective. Right now, we don't know. The last six months has taught us anything. It's that the tariff landscape will continue to evolve. We're going to have to be agile. We set up a discipline to manage tariffs in our own business, quantify impact as we understand what they are, and get to work trying to solve for them both through price and through tariff-free engineering.

And we're staying really close to our customers, and asking, so I think some of you get tired of us asking, but any of our customers that are willing to tell us how they're thinking about the future, the second half, 2026, how they're planning for it in their business, how they're managing and mitigating tariffs or what their outlook is, we're asking them so that we can get the earliest possible demand signal if something is going to tip or something's going to soften. But you know, coming through second quarter, we didn't get any softening demand signals, you know, either in our order rates or in conversations with end customers. But it is the topic with customers. And we talk to the biggest customers in every vertical market we serve. It's the topic.

And everyone is trying to figure out, well, how do you plan in this environment, right? What are you seeing? And they're trying to correlate. And I don't. I didn't find anyone that has any really meaningful insights into how to think or plan about it. So I think agility is key. Do you think they're easing though? Do you think the concerns are easing at this point where no, you don't think they are? I don't. And I again, I'm biased by the people we talk to in our vertical market. I think the uncertainty is amplifying, because of the change in tariffs, the depth of tariffs, the cumulative effect of tariffs. So you've got country-level tariffs, and then you've got sort of derivative tariffs coming in on top of it.

I've got companies coming through if their fiscal is on the calendar. Now they've got a half year in the bag. People want to know what the second half looks like. They're just now swallowing the cumulative effect of all these tariffs and trying to figure out now I've only got five months or four months to solve for it, right? Yeah. I actually think the tariff concern and uncertainty has heightened.

Steve Ferazani
Senior Equity Analyst, Sidoti

Okay. Okay. The flip side is we're waiting for a big Fed announcement in an hour and a half. Historically, has easing from the Fed helped demand for Tennant? Has it made a big difference?

David Huml
President and CEO, Tennant Company

Well, it certainly doesn't hurt demand, but we don't see a one-to-one correlation on, you know, a 25-50 basis points on it creates a better operating environment. You know, I think as companies look at what they want to do from a CapEx perspective and run their P&L and kind of see how bullish they want to be on their investment, it helps from that standpoint, but we don't see a correlation between a Fed rate drop and then a, you know, a spike or an increase in sales. To us, the continuing tariff uncertainty is a much bigger challenge and risk to us than the Fed rates.

Steve Ferazani
Senior Equity Analyst, Sidoti

Got it. To pull back for a minute as I start looking at some of the questions we see streaming in, someone wants to know just about your moat, your business barriers to entry in the industry.

David Huml
President and CEO, Tennant Company

Yeah. So, I mentioned, and I'll say this: don't read into this that we're arrogant or that we're resting on our laurels. But if I just listen to what our customers tell us, you know, I think our legacy of building machines that work really well on the ground in the application, and being a trusted brand, is a bit of a competitive moat. Customers are a little hesitant to place trust in a brand they don't trust and recognize and, unsure if it'll work over, you know, when a customer owns our machine for 10 years and it's worked great, that's a pretty strong proof point, so I think our installed base and our brand reputation are important.

Our aftermarket service capability, I mentioned earlier in the prepared presentation, having factory-direct service organizations that have in some cases decades-long relationships with our end customers is a significant competitive moat. And even in large customer deployments, in moments of honesty, they tell us, "Hey, listen, you guys are not the cheapest game in town. We know your equipment works really well, but your service is unparalleled." And so we know that even if the machine breaks down or our people don't know how to use it, you can get somebody there 24/7, and that's important to us. So our customers tell us that service organization, factory-direct, you know, commitment to uptime is a really important, you know, component of competitive moat. And then lastly, you know, I think just as a business, we are, we got a strong balance sheet.

We're very fiscally disciplined, financially disciplined. We do take risks and place bets, but more often than not, we were, you know, we achieve the target. So I think that we're, you know, we're not overly leveraged. We're not beholden to an owner. You know, our shareholders understand our investment thesis, and they're in it for the long haul, largely speaking. And so, you know, I think that we've got a very supportive board. I think we've got the financial discipline and firepower to kind of control our own destiny. So I think that removes some of the worries. I think some of our competitors have different concerns when they think about running their business and competing in the marketplace. It's harder for them to place a bet like robotics.

You know, we can lean into robotics and launch a full line and hire the deployment specialists and train our service organization. And these are big multi-year investments. I'm not sure that some of our competitors are in the financial position to do that. Yep.

Steve Ferazani
Senior Equity Analyst, Sidoti

Speaking of robotics, if we can talk a little bit about how that market has been developing. You released your second next-gen, autonomous cleaner in 2Q. Can you talk a little bit about what you're seeing in trends? And also, right now, it's about 6% of sales. Any kind of. I'm sure you don't want to throw short-term targets out there, but where you think that market goes over the next three, 5, 10 years? So two sort of different questions there. Yeah.

David Huml
President and CEO, Tennant Company

So the X6 is, you know, kind of the big brother to the X4. This is built on our what we call our generation 3 platform. That means NVIDIA chip on board. That means 3D LiDAR. That means high-depth camera. These things really perform. And when you see how quickly they it's not just being able to clean really well and reliably. One of the key selling points is obstacle detection and avoidance. So the machines now have the computing power on board to take in sensing signals and say, "Hey, that's actually Steve in the aisle shopping for soup. I'm going to wait until he's done shopping and then keep cleaning because my data says he's going to be done in 12 seconds," right? Or they come down and say, "That's a pallet full of something soup cans that have to be unloaded.

I'm going to turn around and go clean somewhere else in the floor, and I'll come back to this point." They can do that. Yeah. Wow. They remember what they cleaned and didn't clean. So we had that capability in generation 2, but they were taking the signal, sending it to the cloud, getting the response back, and then acting. It was not as fast. It was reliable. It was pretty good. But now the computing's on board. It's very fast in decision-making. We've got the 10,000 units deployed. We're pulling data off of all 10,000 machines that help us inform the next enhancement to software. As we enhance the software, we push it back into every machine deployed. When you own a Tennant robot, your machine gets smarter as you own it.

It's not. You don't have to worry about investing in a machine and, boy, is it going to be obsolete a year from now. It's going to continue to benefit from all the other units, deployed out in the marketplace. So we mentioned the, you know, the 6% of revenue. We've sold over $300 million in robots in the last, what, four and a half, five years, 10,000 machines. So I would say we're really proud of the progress, but our appetite is big here because we think the opportunity is really compelling. I don't yet have a forward-looking projection. It's not because I'm holding it close to the vest. We are pushing like hell on this, and talking to anybody that's interested. I think the X4 and X6, the new Gen 3 platform, give us a differentiated demo.

So when we go out and demonstrate the product, the purpose-built. So they're very the form factor is very tight. They can navigate tighter spaces. So I'm optimistic about the traction we can get with X4 and X6. And we got a really robust pipeline coming on the heels of X4, X6. And I would like to be in a position where we've got enough of an adoption curve that I can map it out and answer your question specifically about how big this can be. I just don't have the data points to reliably map it yet. I will tell you this. We are investing both time, effort, R&D, and go-to-market sales as if this can be a significant part of our company.

Steve Ferazani
Senior Equity Analyst, Sidoti

Product development has been such a big part of the. We have questions both on product development and geographic expansion and how they can drive growth. So why don't we start with product expansion? Because you're not just robotics. I mean, you've been investing and you rolled out a lot of products that are traditional mechanized. You introduced the third-party outdoor cleaner. Can you talk about how much expanding the product suite can be a driver to revenue and why, that's why you're investing so much in development?

David Huml
President and CEO, Tennant Company

Yeah. I think history has shown we are capable of solving customer problems through innovation. We're very targeted in which areas and which customer problems we want to solve. And I say customer problems. We go out and identify a problem by talking to the customer and watching how they work. Then we say, "Are we the right person to solve this? Can we do it profitably? And can we give a good ROI to the customer?" And we ask all those questions before we start building prototypes of something. And in some cases, the solve is not something we need to invent and develop. We can partner with somebody else like we did on Outdoor. Found an opportunity in Outdoor. It wasn't interesting enough. Wouldn't hit the threshold for us to invest directly. Found a partner with a good product that could build it to our spec. That's a faster path. So we don't have to build it. We can borrow it or partner for it as well. And it's not always product. I mean, we build great innovative products to solve customer problems. Sometimes it's how they buy.

Sometimes it's a feature on the product or an attachment to a product or an option on a product. So we're very open-minded about what innovation means, and we make sure it's how the customer defines it. I believe that, when you think about our growth levers, we have price, new product, and go-to-market. History has shown that new product is very attractive. It gives us some new reason to go in on call and new and existing customers. It gives us an opportunity to drive out cost and expand margins. It gives us an opportunity to grow our TAM and attack new places, and it's, I say this all the time. It's probably the lowest risk, highest return investment we can make because much of it's within our control, right?

Versus when you push price, it's kind of uninteresting because you can push it. It's got it might have an impact on volume. You got to check your price positioning in the marketplace. So it's not without risk. Go-to-market. We make investments there to add channel, hire people out of the speed on the street, add service technicians. Those are great. You still have to have the product to put through those channels to go reach the customer, and so it's kind of a one-two punch. I just think innovation is such a new products are such an integral part of our growth strategy, and we have invested heavily. We've amped up our investment in R&D the last two years, and I expect to continue that.

Steve Ferazani
Senior Equity Analyst, Sidoti

Excellent. Then the other one I wanted to touch on because we see some questions on potential geographic expansion. Obviously, the high-profile move was buying the Central European distributor last year. Are there markets? I think at that time, you talked about potential further growth in Eastern Europe, even Middle East. Can you talk about potential for geographic expansion generating further revenue growth?

David Huml
President and CEO, Tennant Company

Yeah. I think, you know, geographic expansion is one of our first pillars of strategy within M&A. There's a product, you know, filling product gaps is interesting. Then there's adding channel, channel expansion. That can look like buying distributors like we did with TCS. That was the Eastern European distributor that now gives us a direct footprint in Romania and Czech Republic and Hungary. There's additional opportunities in Eastern Europe.

And we're, you know, we're exploring options there. Middle East, we're only just through distribution today. And so when you think about those geographies, the need for clean, and those are growth geographies, right? So those can be interesting. And you have to find attractive candidates that they're interested in acquiring. But I think those are spaces we're also looking. I would also point at Southeast Asia, some of the markets beyond sort of China, Japan, Australia. There's some interesting markets there where we have presence through distribution. And there may be an opportunity to establish a direct presence.

Steve Ferazani
Senior Equity Analyst, Sidoti

Particularly with the, and I've heard this from other industrial companies we cover. Given the tariffs in China, so much industry has moved to other parts of Southeast Asia, and their tech and companies are pursuing those growth opportunities to reach those customers.

David Huml
President and CEO, Tennant Company

Yeah. That dynamic is aiding those markets and the expansion of industrial, you know, manufacturing square footage in those geographies, which all have to be cleaned.

Steve Ferazani
Senior Equity Analyst, Sidoti

Can we talk a little bit about, you know, when you talk your guidance, which implies and I don't want to get too in the weeds on this, but a second half that's better than the first half. You've said multiple times part of that is from cost outs. Can you talk about progress on cost outs and what you're doing to try to help out there?

David Huml
President and CEO, Tennant Company

Yeah. So we've got this robust muscle around cost out, and it's an evergreen process. So we're always populating with a pipeline of ideas. The team racks and stacks the ideas. It's a cross-functional team. So it's not just supply chain, calling suppliers or changing. It's supply chain. It's operations, manufacturing. It's logistics. It's R&D, engineering. It's product management. They come together and say, "Yeah, that cost out is real, and it's going to actually help us with the customer, at least not hurt us." And, you know, it's viable. And so we rack and stack on kind of a total cost basis. And then we get to work. And so when you look at the impact within a given year, we have a funnel. The funnel moves through to actualizing. And then we bleed down the old inventory, bring in the new inventory, and we harness the benefit.

We've had it running for the better part of the last four years, and we get a nice carryover benefit from work that was already done, which is nice because now you've got a predictable COGS improvement year over year from work you already did last year, as well as new funnel opportunities to come through. Now, having said that, overcoming these tariff challenges, part of the tariff challenges is tariff-free engineering and working the same exact, in some cases, supply base and supplier set that we were working on cost reduction.

Now, we've also got to look at it through the lens of tariff avoidance or tariff reduction. So it adds a bit of a wrinkle in it. And then how you scorekeep it. Is it really cost out, or is it tariff avoidance, or is it tariff reduction? That becomes a little cumbersome. But the muscle has served us really well. We think that's an important part of delivering the EBITDA expansion we've committed to over the long term.

Steve Ferazani
Senior Equity Analyst, Sidoti

You have largely been able to offset tariffs through the first half of the year. We keep seeing new ones popping up, changing, evolving. Are you comfortable that you can stay ahead of that?

David Huml
President and CEO, Tennant Company

So we have done a really good job. I will tell you, there's a lead lag on tariff announced versus tariff implemented and then us bleeding down inventory and having to take the tariff in. So, yeah, the first half was kind of a small sampling. Am I confident and comfortable? No, because I don't know what the tariff environment should be.

Steve Ferazani
Senior Equity Analyst, Sidoti

I'm being honest with you. That's fair.

David Huml
President and CEO, Tennant Company

I don't know how you can answer that. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know any other way to answer that. And if I sound frustrated, it's because I am because, you know, what you want what I want is certainty in my operating environment so that we can get to work serving customers. And this tariff, it's not just the tariff, the raw amount of tariffs. It's the uncertainty over time. And I think, if anything, I think this uncertainty, the rhetoric around it and how it's going to impact decision-making is accelerating. And we talk to a lot of customers across a lot of vertical markets. I get the pleasure of talking to a lot of them. And they're worried. And not because they know something today. It's because they don't know what to do.

Steve Ferazani
Senior Equity Analyst, Sidoti

Don't know. Yeah. How to plan, right?

David Huml
President and CEO, Tennant Company

How do you plan? And, you know, if you read the headlines, you can assume the worst. I tend to think that we're more in control of our own destiny than we sometimes give ourselves credit. But, yeah, having some level of certainty around tariffs would be a tremendous help to us and our customers as we enter second half here.

Steve Ferazani
Senior Equity Analyst, Sidoti

Before we wrap up, it's always worth reminding folks, particularly if they're new to the story, what's been playing out over the last few quarters. So just so people understand, because your guidance range is for an EPS decline this year, but that's really masked by if you can just walk through for folks to understand what happened with backlog conversion that took place over multiple quarters till the end of 2024. And you're almost lapped. You've lapped most the largest portion now.

David Huml
President and CEO, Tennant Company

Yeah. It's a backlog unwind story. So we unwound about $125 million of backlog in calendar year 2024. $75 million of that was in the first half of 2024. So we've been up against that from a sales perspective, net sales perspective, as we move through the first two quarters. That's why you see the optics of a declining revenue trend. Underneath that, our order rates are really healthy. Right. Up 13% Q1, up 4% Q2. So first half of 2025, order rates, incoming order demand up about 7%. So we feel good about the incoming order rate. For the remainder of 2025, we got another $50 million of backlog to lap, and it decreases Q3. It's decreased every quarter since Q1. Yeah. And then next year, we'll be anxious to talk about the business and innovations and stop talking about backlog reduction.

Steve Ferazani
Senior Equity Analyst, Sidoti

Fair. I figured we needed. We had a half hour. I needed to touch on it somewhere.

David Huml
President and CEO, Tennant Company

I'm glad you brought it up.

Steve Ferazani
Senior Equity Analyst, Sidoti

With that, we are just about out of time, Dave, if you want to provide any kind of closing comments.

David Huml
President and CEO, Tennant Company

Yeah. I just thank you for your time, Steve. Always a pleasure to chat with you and for the questions from the group. Appreciate that. Listen, I think we've got a really interesting investment thesis here as a business. I think our future is bright. We talked a lot about kind of some of the short-term challenges. But when you look at the bones of this business, our service TAM, our current position, our right to win, and our ability to control our own destiny from a growth perspective, from a margin perspective, and the robotics disruption opportunity we have as a business, I think it's really a compelling opportunity. I'm excited to be here, and I'm closest to it. So I appreciate your interest. The only thing I would say is if anyone would like a one-off conversation, we're always happy to make time for investor conversations. Just reach out to through Steve, and/or direct to Lorenzo. We can get it scheduled.

Steve Ferazani
Senior Equity Analyst, Sidoti

Happy to set it up. Dave Huml, CEO of Tennant Company. Thanks so much, Dave. Appreciate the time today.

David Huml
President and CEO, Tennant Company

Thank you.

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