Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Curt Nagle, Senior Business and Information Services Analyst here at BofA. The session is UL Solutions. Really pleased to have Jennifer Scanlon, the President and CEO, and Ryan Robinson, the Chief Financial Officer, with us. We're gonna start out with a few prepared remarks and a quick presentation from UL, and then we'll go into some fireside questions, and then, time permitting, anything from the audience.
Terrific. Thanks, Curtis.
Thank you so much.
We're gonna do a rapid-fire round of what's available out on our investor site. Just to ground people in who we are and what our industry is, because we really don't have peers here in the United States. Let's go safe harbor. There's five key messages that we'd like to deliver to prospective shareholders about our company. The most important one to start with is we are mission-driven. Our mission started in 1894 as a not-for-profit, focused on addressing the safety science of the new technology of the day, which was electricity. That continues today. It's a global industry. It is fragmented, it is large, and it is consolidating, and our mission distinguishes us in that industry.
That mission results in us remaining dedicated to applied safety science, as well as sustainability, and our customers tend to call us first when they have a safety science issue of some type of technology that is new and different and innovative, or old technologies that can continue to present safety challenges. Our customer relationships run deep and last a very long time. My former company, USG Corporation, has been a UL customer since 1913, and we have many customers who have celebrated 50-plus years of working with us. That matters because that delivers our recurring revenue streams, as well as brings in recurring revenue when they build new product innovations and need those tested for safety, security, or sustainability. We're global. We've got great scale and operating leverage. We are close to the world's manufacturers, and we've got a great balance sheet.
It is healthy, investment grade with strong cash flow and a very disciplined capital allocation strategy. You've seen the mark, you've seen it everywhere. Go home and have your kids count if you need to distract them. They will find dozens and dozens. This mark represents that those products are safer than they would otherwise be and that those products have passed important safety certifications. Last year, we did $3.1 billion in revenue around the world with just shy of 15,000 employees, 14,500. We are the leader in product safety testing. We do this in three segments, industrial products, consumer products, and then software services, software and advisory services that focus on the needs of those product tech manufacturers. We measure our revenue by customer geography. This is not where we do the testing work.
This is where our customers are headquartered. 41% of that headquartered here in the United States, 25% last year headquartered across Greater China, which includes Hong Kong and Taiwan, and then Europe, Middle East, Africa, largely Europe on that 17%, and then Asia Pac and the rest of the world. We have four major service categories, and Ryan's gonna take us through those.
Great. We group our services into four primary categories. First is Certification Testing. That's largely driven by regulatory requirements, and it occurs before a product goes to market. Often there's a requirement to be lawfully sold or imported. Some authority that has jurisdiction requires an independent accredited laboratory to test and certify products to make sure they meet applicable standards. That's 28% of our revenue, but it doesn't stop there. 33% of our revenue, a third of our revenue, is a recurring revenue stream called Ongoing Certification Services, and there needs to be a process to make sure the products continue to be manufactured in a manner that's reasonably consistent with the original samples we tested.
We send field engineers to every location where a product is manufactured, typically at least four times a year on an unannounced basis, to observe the manufacturing process, look in the stockroom for the components, pull supporting documentation regarding the manufacturing processes to help ensure the original product quality, safety, integrity, and compliance is maintained. Part of that process is we license the UL Mark to the customer to put on their products so they can communicate quality, safety, and compliance to their customers and to those authorities that have jurisdiction so their products can be sold in those markets. Construction projects can be completed, so certificates of occupancy can be granted in the construction process. Another 30% of our revenue we call Non-certification Testing and other services. This can include performance or quality testing that may not be regulatory-driven.
It includes soft lines and hard lines testing, things like toys or apparel, private label products for the world's largest retailers. Also, this revenue category includes wireless product testing, and there are a lot of wireless devices connected to the Internet where governmental authorities, including in the U.S., the FCC or other authorities in other countries, require wireless products to be tested to make sure they don't inadvertently interfere with other wireless products. Finally, about 9% of our revenue is enterprise software, focusing on helping our customers reduce risk and enhance compliance in important areas, including their supply chain insights and their sustainability objectives. A bit about the global testing, inspection, and certification industry. It is a large and diverse industry. It's a broad term. In total, over $240 billion.
A portion of that is done within the manufacturer's product design processes themselves and is in-house. $99 billion on an estimated basis is outsourced. Of that, about $38 billion is specifically product and component testing, inspection, and certification. This is where we focus, and we are the world's leader in product and component testing, inspection, and certification. We feel we have approximately 7% global market share, and we continue to focus in this area. There is increasing globalization of where products are sold. There is a regulatory environment that often is requiring products and components to be tested and inspected. Increasingly, customers have sustainability objectives that require more and more information about the products that they develop.
Very quickly, how does this all fit together? Standards are developed by standards development organizations all over the world. We test to 4,000 standards. 1,500 of those were written by our affiliated parent company, UL Standards & Engagement. But we sit on technical panels and advise, many, many standards development organizations. When a standard's been written, you need an accreditation. That accreditation comes from, again, a myriad of accreditors globally, including OSHA or FDA or ANSI. When you're accredited to test to a standard, you then have a service. This is the moat that we've built, the 4,000 standards, the 650 technical accreditations, and the over 350 independent services that can be combined into various testing protocols and packages to fulfill the needs of a specific innovation.
Then finally, to wrap up, we have megatrends that are propelling our growth. The energy transition, the electrification of everything, the move to new sources of energy, and the ways in which generation, transmission, storage, and usage of energy is all shifting is driving a tremendous amount of innovation all over the world. That is propelled by a lot of the needs of AI data centers, but that is not the only demand driver for that energy transition. There's shifts in mobility, electric vehicles, but not just cars, agricultural products, buses, micro-mobility, scooters, bikes. A lot of that is also being driven by sustainability requirements. The reality that there needs to be different uses of product, different sources of raw materials, and different considerations about products at end of life.
Digitalization and AI are changing the ways in which everything is used. AI embedded in products is an important consideration for us and what is the safety of that. We've seen with tariff shifts through the years, not just the last couple of years, but the risks of supply chain and seizures of that supply chain and how our customers need to adapt and change their supply chains. Frequently, that results in retesting of products. Of course, the myriad of regulations all over the world at federal and local levels, where products need to comply with the regulations that an authority having jurisdiction has put forth. This is the exciting power of our business. We're happy to be here, and we look forward to taking questions.
Great. Thanks very much, Jenny and Ryan. Maybe the first one I wanna focus on a point you made at the beginning of your presentation on consolidation? Large market, where I think share is about 7%. So I guess, you know, one, just, you know, fragmentation of the market? Number two, you know, how does UL fit into that consolidation theme? Is it accelerating, you know, maybe with, you know, standards becoming more complex and innovation, you know, increasing? And is there an angle in terms of, you know, maybe outsourcing, right, some of that market where you're seeing internal testing?
Yeah. It is a consolidating industry, and there are tens of thousands of, you know, testing, inspection or certification labs all over the world. We are disciplined in our approach to that consolidation.
Mm-hmm.
Our number one criteria is focusing on product tech and ensuring that any, you know, tuck-in or bolt-on acquisition that we would do continues to expand our set of offerings for our product tech customers or deepen our operational footprint, for services that we already have. That said, there are also just new areas that customers have needs. We're always interested in understanding, you know, what kind of software is out there, data sources that are being evaluated, that our customers need, and how do we build that into our risk and compliance software business.
Okay. Very good. Megatrends, I think, you know, pretty important here. You know, I guess how are you know, whether we're talking about an energy transition, digitization, you know, driving, I think, double-digit growth at the moment? How are you aligning with that internally in terms of, you know, building capacity, leverage you're pulling, you know, to basically stay ahead of demand and, you know, capitalize on, you know, what is a powerful and multi-year opportunity?
Yeah. The great news is that those long-term customer relationships give us a lot of insight into their product roadmaps, the opportunities that they're chasing and the challenges that they may face. Even, like, in the energy transition, we started down our global battery, large-scale battery testing strategy by first opening a lab in Hangzhou, China. I believe that was 2020, followed by Korea, Japan, into Auburn Hills in the United States. That opened two years, 18 months ago, and then into an acquisition that we made in Europe, in Germany, BatterieIngenieure.
In all of these cases, the customers were looking at both the effect of what could happen with EVs and, you know, vehicle batteries, as well as how were batteries and energy storage systems going to be evolving with the energy needs in the industrial environment. So it's just a great example of us choosing, you know, capital and M&A, we did both, staying ahead of the trends that our customers have, making sure that we have the capacity that they need. You know, even in some cases, like in Korea, a customer called us up and said, "We have faster plans. We need more battery capacity. How can you help us?" We always tell our customers, we're happy to step up if there's a good ROI.
Okay. Very good. Somewhat systematic supply chains are becoming broader and maybe more complex. In terms of, you know, maybe regional realignments you've seen or, you know, realignments that could come, you know, how does that impact your footprint? Does that create a multiplier effect at all in terms of your own volumes?
Yeah. Going back to an overview of UL, I would say our geographic distribution now is an outcome of decades and decades of global trade, where products are developed, where they're manufactured, and the trading partners between countries. Over time, we have evolved. We will continue to evolve to support our customers. Fortunately, it's much easier for us to evolve the location of where our field engineers visit factories, or do we expand laboratory capacity. It's easy for us than it is for our manufacturing customers to build new factories or to evolve their supply chain. For many years, we have seen changes in trade patterns. Some companies have adopted China Plus One strategies where they supplement perhaps a dependent manufacturing supply chain strategy with an additional location.
We've expanded capacity in countries like Vietnam, both in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi, in Southeast Asia, in India, in Singapore, in Mexico, as well as additional capacity in the United States. All of our regions grew last year in a period of a lot of trade uncertainty, and I think that speaks to the resilience of our business model and how we support multi-directional trade.
Okay. Very good. Industrial segment, really, really strong Q4, I think led by automation energy. Looking ahead, let's define it, I don't know, the next, you know, maybe one to three years. You know, are there particularly any markets where you think at least you're positioning or maybe your opportunity set are in early innings? Then maybe just kind of a shorter term question in terms of, you know, potential pullback in industrial activity given, let's just call it a more volatile geopolitical environment, how would that affect you?
Yeah. The good news, I'll take the second part first. The good news is our business isn't driven by GDP growth or driven by number volume of products that are out in the marketplace. Our business is driven by innovation and number of SKUs in the marketplace. Because if you are manufacturing a single widget or 10,000 widgets at a plant, we will visit that plant four times a year and charge you for that inspection. That's, you know, we've been resilient. When you look at our CAGR for those, I think we published it since 2012, it is steady and growing, you know, 6.8% there. With regard to industrial, those megatrends, you know, I keep saying they're real.
The electrification of everything, you know, energy and automation, different sources of energy, different uses of energy. You know, I use the AI data center example all the time, a shift to 800-volt DC, direct current. It is a lot more power and it is a lot less safe, and you have to change out just about every connector, every control panel, every wire, different, you know, different size of wire and cable goes into that data center because of it. Then the thermodynamics of a data center, those chips are stacked closer, they're turned on their side, they burn, you know, they just run hotter, and they need a different type of cooling.
All of that type of innovation that we're seeing from our industrial customers around how do we do a better job around energy usage and data demands in data centers also carries into broader industrial, commercial, residential needs. It's one of the powers of innovation. You invent something and create something for one use, it does get moved into others over time. We love this industrial business. We love all our businesses, but industrial is those megatrends are really propelling strong new product growth.
Yeah. No, interesting point, you know, just at a point in time now and then in terms of, I guess you could say second quarter deployment, hopefully, you know, I would imagine.
Yeah.
That would be an opportunity too. Okay. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, big focus for the past few years, a lot of investment in specialized facilities and labs, auto testing, you know, I think is one, and you built new capacity there. In terms of those target investments, I guess, how does that change perhaps the strategic conversations you're having with your larger OEM clients today, you know, strengthen them, deepen them, you know, I guess, what's the opportunity there?
Yeah. The good news is, I mean, we're exposed to 35 different industries, and we focus really on our largest. We have 80,000 customers, but, you know, our global and strategic accounts are really driving the supply chains down to those other 80,000 customers. You know, in the auto industry, the areas where we've focused have been in the EV battery space and in the embedded software around functional safety. You don't wanna, you know, have software powering your car, and when you turn on the radio, your brakes slam on or something. You know, that could be very dangerous. That business has ebbed and flowed, particularly in Europe right now.
The good news is, as a battery manufacturer is seeing maybe a slowdown in their volume of EV batteries, they've got a plant ready to go, so now they're ramping up the industrial scale battery production, and they're, you know, that may be going into, you know, the industrial supply chain, you know, manufacturing plants, or even into AI data centers.
Okay. Kind of very somewhat of a broad AI question, and you could extrapolate this all sorts of different ways. In terms of thinking about how does that, and again, very broadly, change testing needs, I mean, on one hand, I guess you could think about, you know, things like digital twins, digital avatars, and maybe, you know?
Sure.
Digitizing, you know, testing. Just broadly, you know, how is AI impacting your business?
Yeah. I'm gonna let Ryan talk about.
Sure.
Productivity and AI, and I'll wrap it up.
Yeah. It will affect both the needs of our customers and our internal processes. You may have seen we've recently announced the introduction of a standard that helps define the development of products and processes that have embedded AI, and we've also announced the initial certifications awarded to parties. Jennifer, do you wanna speak to that service a little bit?
Yeah. I'm happy to do that. In fact, we had an announcement today of two customers embedding using our standard for embedding AI into their products. Hanwha Qcells has a product around controlling energy systems in data centers that is AI powered, and it's passed the UL certification. Then ONICON, also a provider of the broader built environment and energy management systems, has announced the use of our UL 3115 into their products. We see this. We're in really early days on this offering, but what I like about it is it demonstrates that when there is a complex technical need with a safety challenge.
Yep.
Our customers call us first, and our scientists and our engineers are there to, you know, rely on the science, do the research, and come up with good answers.
Yep. They're there to meet that need. Yeah.
On the internal process side, we've made substantial progress with enabling technology to support our employees, increase their productivity, and increase the usage of our physical assets. We actually grew organic revenue 6.2% last year and finished the year with slightly fewer headcount than the beginning of the year. In addition to that, we announced some expense reduction initiatives that will be completed through the first quarter of next year to further create some efficiencies.
Okay. No, that's a good, definitely a good segue. I know, you know, both of you, your background is very much on efficiency, right? You know, basic just, you know, well, efficiency, you know.
Yeah.
Productivity has been a bigger focus. It feels like at least you're talking about it more, right? Announced a restructuring, you're starting to see it in the margin expansion. You know, in terms of just, you know, the kind of on the ground focus on operational efficiencies versus deploying AI, you know, within the organization, yeah, how do we think about the margin expansion potential, you know, from there, I suppose?
Yeah.
Yeah. I'll let you.
Maybe just to ground in 2025 and how that theme came through in our numbers.
Yep.
How it carries forward? You can see we grew our Adjusted EBITDA last year about 21%, $179 million of incremental organic revenue, and we're able to fulfill that, which is $37 million of incremental organic expenses. We're very focused on efficiency initiatives, supporting our employees with enabling technology, and producing better outcomes for our shareholders. That led to about 300 basis points of margin expansion in 2025.
We've guided in our outlook for 2026 for additional margin expansion of between 60 basis points and 110 basis points, with largely similar themes, focusing on operational execution, continuing to grow our relationships with our customers, achieving operating leverage, continuing our trends of pricing our services for the value that we provide, and continuing to drive profitability improvements.
Okay. Very good. Global company, the majority, slightly majority in terms of, U.S. versus international split. But thinking about the UL Mark, I mean, the brand recognition, I'm not sure could be stronger, right? You know, 110-year lineage, you know, thereabouts.
32.
You know, particularly in North America. Again, understanding, you know, a wide-ranging, you know, global company, but thinking about, I guess, that premium brand and, you know, what that. I guess exporting that to the rest of the world and using that as a lever for growth, you know, where it might not be as well-known. I guess, what is the importance of the UL brand on expanding its, you know, more globally, I suppose?
Yeah, there's two points on this. One, our brand is, you know, unequivocally recognized as the premier safety brand here in North America. We do have opportunities to continue to expand that recognition outside of North America. A key piece of that is our relationship with UL Standards & Engagement, not-for-profit, and UL Research Institutes, not-for-profit. We started as a singular organization. They're now three distinct organizations, but the same mission, working for a safer world. Having UL Research Institutes, which now has a you know significant endowment to basically you know create a safety science university, is focused on some of the most pressing safety challenges of the day, fire safety, electrochemical safety, mapping the chemicals in the human body, so chemical insight safety, AI safety, and new material sciences and safety of new materials.
The more work that they do and the more standards that UL Standards & Engagement writes and the more global that they become, and they are now funded in a way that they can become global, that also helps reinforce our brand and our work reinforces the importance of what they do. It's a, it's a great ecosystem that we have going between the three sides.
Okay. Very good. Switching to software. Last year, yeah, I think it was last year.
Yep.
... The EHS software business, focusing purely on the ULTRUS platform. I guess, you know, how does this sharpen your go-to-market strategy in terms of, you know, risk and compliance software, you know?
Yeah.
Within the near cycle?
You know, it helps in a couple different ways. One, in addition to selling off the EHS, we're moving the piece of software and advisory that was focused on advisory back to our tech businesses, and that's because our hypothesis when we put these together was that there would be cross-selling between software and advisory, and it turns out that there's more.
Mm-hmm.
You know, interaction between the advisory and the tech services. That frees up our software team to become laser focused on their product roadmaps and potential M&A for in the world of, you know, governance, risk, and compliance software. We're focused on the risk and the compliance side. The risks around is a product compliant and remaining compliant in markets that have ever-changing regulations. You know, a couple of years ago, Minnesota announced you can't have nickel or cadmium in your products anymore. Well, we've got the ability to help our customers know where they would be out of tolerance on that and what they might need to re-engineer and retest. Supply chain risk management is traceability into the chemicals supply chain that largely is for products going into the retail environment.
There are strict regulations around transport, storage, sale, and disposal of chemicals in a retail environment, but really in any industrial environment. We help our customers trace through that and maintain compliance, and have other derivative uses of the data that we have about the chemicals in their supply chain. A natural output of that is all of the reporting that's going to be required for sustainability Scope 1, Scope 2, Scope 3, and you trace those all together. We've got the information about what's in those products and can help our customers do that.
Okay. Very good. Maybe just a last one, Ryan, just basic question in terms of capital allocation, rock-solid balance sheet, low leverage, priorities in terms of where bolt-on M&A might focus and then capital return?
Yeah.
As we think about that.
We're fortunate to be a highly cash flow generative business.
Yeah.
High cash flow from operations, and our largest priority is to reinvest back in the business for the growth and the evolution. That's organic capital investment. Last year, we deployed just under $200 million or about 6.5% of revenue back into the business. Over our history, we complement that growth with acquisitions, typically in more technologically differentiated areas with teams and sometimes in geographic markets that accelerate our market entry. In addition to that, we maintain a strong balance sheet. We're investment grade. We intend to continue that rating. Given the strength and stability of our cash flows. We pay a cash dividend. We've recently increased that cash dividend, and we're a newly public company, less than two years, but over time, we'll evaluate share repurchases as a potential capital allocation.
Our business generates high returns on invested capital, so we continually look for opportunities on the left side of this page to reinvest back into the business.
Strength of the business. Makes total sense.
Thanks.
Maybe one last from me, and then I'll see if there are any questions from the audience. Just a quick word association.
Sure.
Lightning Round. UL Mark.
Strong, solid growth.
Strong, solid growth. Okay. Electrification.
Everything.
Oh, everything.
Everything. All right, I like that. Margins.
Expanding.
M&A.
Renewed focus.
Renewed focus. Interesting. Okay. Just a very high level one, AI.
Opportunity.
Opportunity.
Opportunity. Love it.
Exciting.
All right, before we conclude, any questions from the audience that we can take? All right. With that, Jenny, Ryan.
Thank you very much.
Thanks, Curtis. Appreciate it.
Really appreciate it.
For doing this and-
Great to be here.
Thank you for joining us.
Thank you very much. Yeah.
Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Curt Nagle, the senior business and information services analyst here at BofA. This session is Verisk. Very pleased to have CFO Elizabeth Mann with us. This is gonna be structured as a fireside. Time permitting, we can field any questions from the audience. With that, welcome, Elizabeth. Thank you for joining us and looking forward to the conversation.
Thanks so much. Thanks for having me here and thanks everyone for joining.