Thank you again. Rounding out the Citi Industrial Tech and Mobility Conference, for the first time here, we have Valmont Industries. With me is Avner Applbaum, President and CEO, and Tom Liguori, CFO. Welcome both. Avner, I understand you have a few prepared remarks, and then we'll go into some Q&A. So look forward to hearing more about the Valmont story. Obviously, you're coming off of earnings two days ago, very strong market reaction, excellent 2024 results, and strong momentum going into 2025. Look forward to hearing the story, and then we'll get into some Q&A. Thank you.
Sounds great.
Thank you, David. First of all, we really appreciate the invite to the Citi's conference. You know, Valmont, we have a long history of innovation and execution, and looking forward to sharing with everyone here some of our strategies and the opportunities ahead. So just before we start, just to point out that our disclosures on forward-looking statements apply to today's presentation, and the discussions are included on slide three. So just to give everybody a little bit of a background on Valmont, so we were established nearly 80 years ago out of Valley, Nebraska. And basically, we founded the mechanized irrigation industry by buying the patent to the center pivot. 80 years later, here we are. So we're based today out of Omaha, Nebraska. You can see our sales were about $4.1 billion last year. We operate in more than 100 countries.
We have more than 80 facilities around the world, and approximately 11,000 employees. Now you can see here we have the split of the geography. It's still 2023. By next week, we'll have the 2024 numbers, but mostly out of the U.S. and Canada, around two-thirds of our, our business are U.S., Canada, and the rest, globally. You can see our, segments, our two main segments are infrastructure and agriculture, with, the about, again, about two-thirds and two and a third between, those businesses. While I will point out that while we did start out as a, irrigation company, today actually our larger segment is our infrastructure business. Moving on to some of the key priorities we have set for 2025, and I'd like to share them with everyone, on what our focus is. The number one is catching the infrastructure wave.
So there is very strong secular demand, growth drivers in our business, which I'll address just in a couple of moments in our utility business, our lighting and transportation, our telecom. So we have strength in those businesses, and what we're doing as a company, we're really focused on those businesses to make sure we can capitalize on the growth. We are adding capacity, adding flexibility to our footprint to make sure we could capitalize on this opportunity. The second one on agriculture. So agriculture is a cyclical business. Right now we're in the bottom part of the cycle, and we've managed the cycle very well on the downside. And what we're doing now is we're focusing on the business. We're reinforcing our market leadership position. We're the leader in this industry, and we're strengthening the foundation. We're working on our supply chain.
We're working on our operations. We're enhancing our technology offering, which I'm happy to share a bit more throughout our conversation here, but just adding more value to our growers and our dealers to make sure they can improve on their business. Third is around our discipline, resource allocation, making sure all our resources, our capital is all focused on the highest ROI opportunities for us as a business. Tom can share in a bit about our capital allocation, strategy and philosophy, which we also announced a couple of days ago. And then it's around our employees. The employees, the people are in the center of everything that we do. So how do we make sure we equip them with the tools and the environment to make sure they can be successful, drive a high-performance culture, give them the skills and opportunities to continue to innovate.
Of course, they always gotta stay safe with everything that they do. Then just finally, I wanted to share here some of these mega trends that are driving our business. We're very excited about some of these mega trends, secular demand that has very long-term drivers and strong impact on our business. Starting with our infrastructure around the multi-year energy transition, this is something you see maybe once in a lifetime. We're actually seeing energy transition using renewable energies, seeing electrification of the grid driven by electrification of houses, electrification. You see electric vehicles, so a lot more electrification, a lot more growth, which we haven't seen in decades. We're actually seeing growth driven by these factors, using, of course, more data centers to support data science and AI.
We're seeing a lot of growth in that area around the energy and then aging infrastructure and resiliency. A lot of the infrastructure around the world and in this country as they age, it could start from roads, bridges, and even other utility structures. They all need to be replaced and updated. We do see the unfortunate storms that are hitting in many places, and the grid can't sustain it. How do we make sure we harden the grid? How do we make sure we support the roads and bridges? On top of that, you have growing communities. We have growing population. As the population grows, they need new housing, and as they need new houses and communities, we're there to support them with our products and solutions and technology and data.
I touched a little bit about it, but we are seeing a lot more data used around the globe. And as data is used and more technology used, you obviously need to create connectivity, support with the power, support with our telecommunication solutions. So in summary, at Valmont, we have the right products and solutions to support a lot of these mega trends from our utility poles, whatever, if it's a steel or concrete or a combination of them for our sign structures, traffic solutions to our lighting products, as well as our telecommunication business. So that's in a nutshell how we're feeling excited about the global mega trends in infrastructure. And then in agriculture, of course, there's food security. Countries want to take care of their people, and they want to make sure they have food.
That is a very strong drive for us, mostly in Middle East, Africa. And then population growth. I mean, the population's growing. If you look at the next decade or so, we're expecting to have 600-700 million more people on the globe that need to eat. And not only that, people are eating healthier, more protein. So we need to feed the world, and there is no more land. So how do we get more out of the land that we have today? How do we get more with less? And then, of course, how do we sustainability around conserving the resources that we have, if it's water or land? And we're the number one leader in the precision irrigation industry, Valley. We have the strongest dealer network.
We have the best product offering to make sure they can get more out of their land. So overall, in summary, at Valmont, we have very strong capabilities, core competencies around our engineering, around our global footprint, our product offering. And we're very excited about the future for us in this space. And with that, I will hand it over to Tom.
Thank you, Avner. David, again, thank you for having us. We really appreciate it. Thanks for everybody for coming. We know your time is valuable. So I'm going to start, just briefly. First is just on our financials over the last few years, and you can see we had some pretty good sales growth, going from 2020 to 2022. That was both price and volume, and as Avner said today on the exit side, it's a little soft. We're in a downturn in North America, but seeing some good things in international. Despite that, every year, if you look in the middle, our operating income has grown, and we've been able to expand our operating margins, so we're up to about 13% operating margin. Our goal is to be in the mid-teens, and we actually see a path to do a little better than that.
And the same with our EPS, pretty steady growth in our EPS. And we just had our conference call on Tuesday for 2025. We guided to $18 at midpoint, so another increase. And very happy to say that, you know, this is just the beginning. There's, there's a lot more to come. In our ag business, you know, while it is slow, we're working on initiatives that once the market does recover, we'll see some pretty good operating margin improvement. And that's things like looking at the cost of our, of our irrigation pivot, product, taking costs out of that, lowering the product costs, but also investing in aftermarket, which is higher margin. You know, you may not realize it, but a pivot irrigation, you can control it from your smartphone app. You can start, stop it.
We're adding some preventive maintenance features into it, and that's on a subscription-based model. And then we're also doing more on aftermarket, which is spare parts. We have an e-commerce system so that if the farmer's in the field, the pivot goes down, they can go on to our website or order the part, get it delivered in two days. And these are things that are going to keep expanding the margins and helping us with EPS. Really, the exciting part is on infrastructure. You know, on our call, we talked about, right now we're capacity constrained. We're investing in capacity. And we said that we're going to grow our CapEx from under $100 million a year to about $150 million a year, about two-thirds of that into growth.
What's important to know about that is if we invest $100 million a year into capacity, we will get annual revenue capacity in excess of $100 million. And we earn about a 30% gross margin. It's not going to take much SG&A additional cost, so that will just drop down to the bottom line. And that in itself is worth a $1 EPS per share going forward. So a lot of good things to come on here. What I did not tell you is we also have pretty good cash flows. So in 2024, our free cash flow was over 10% of our revenues. And because of that, we thought it was important on our call on Tuesday to explain our capital allocation priorities. And we want to keep it very balanced. This is all about investing for growth, providing shareholder returns.
So about 50% to growth, 50% returns. We just more or less told you the growth story with a capacity expansion. There's also a place for M&A. But really happy to say that, you know, our board approved an increase in our share repurchase authorization, another $700 million, which is about 10% of our market cap. And we increased our dividend 13, 13%. And we'd like to get on an annual cadence of increases. So that's, that is Valmont in a nutshell. We're really excited about the future. And I'm going to turn it back over to David.
Thank you, Tom. A few questions upfront and then open it up to the audience as well. Avner, you've taken the helm 18 months ago. You've driven a lot of deliberate change at Valmont. Really interested in you giving us a bit of a double click on how you've affected some of that change to what we've seen in terms of a very strong 2024.
Well, thank you. You know, so when I, I've been in the, in the company for about five years, started off as CFO, so I had a pretty, pretty good idea of the opportunities, and to me, it was, it was pretty straightforward, and as I shared so much excitement about these, the environment we are and the growth potential and what we've been doing very well over the last decades, it's just being in the businesses that, that work, that we know very well, utilizing our strong competencies around our engineering, a fantastic culture. I mean, it's a culture of, of employees that, that just love what they do. They love what we stand for. We, we conserve resources, we improve life.
And, you know, when you talk to our employees, like, how excited do you be that everything you do every day impacts so many people around the world? So we had all the ingredients to be successful. So to me, it's like, let's get back to the core. Let's focus on really good and supporting this market. So we started off with like, okay, let's streamline the organization. There were too many layers around the organization. So you couldn't be effective. You weren't close enough to your employees. You weren't close enough to your customers. So we streamlined. It was a double benefit for us. One, we did reduce SG&A significantly, but also we became more focused, more agile. So that was one.
And you know, like I shared with your five priorities, so the whole organization understands what we need to be focused on. You know, we're not going to chase growth. And sometimes, you know, companies do that. You see the shiny object and you want to go and chase it if it could be in technology or whatever. I'm like, yeah, we'll grow, but let's grow in the markets that we're very familiar. So just have the employees focus on the areas that we see ahead of us. And that is driving benefits. So I just kind of look at those two areas and very exciting to see where this is heading. So those were kind of the two big levers that we.
As you think about driving performance and margin in particular, maybe for both of you, the question would be, where do you see the trajectory of kind of what you've been building on that front?
Yeah. And I can start off, Tom, then you could just add some color around some of our long-term targets and where we are. But I still feel that there's a lot of opportunity still ahead of us as we still have challenges as there's significant growth in these businesses. Like I said, it's the first time in many years that we're actually seeing in some of these businesses significant growth. And look at our utility business where we're looking at some significant load growth, a lot of CapEx, 6%-8%, similar dynamics around our L&T and telecom. So we're seeing strong growth. And what we need to do in our plans is be more flexible, be more agile. So you're not building just very large structures. You're building large structures and smaller structures. We're building steel and concrete.
We're adding substations. So a lot of that is still early innings for us having to have that flexibility. So as we build the flexibilities, we're adding all this capacity that Tom mentioned. So once we pull that in and we put in our processes and our Lean into our plans and make sure we're more productive, that will be one of the significant levers I still feel is ahead of us. And Tom, maybe you want to add something around that?
I think that's well said, Avner, and you know, I would add back to your first question, you know, Avner is at our plants. We have 24 plants in the U.S., probably every week at another plant building on the culture. One thing I see is that everybody in the company wants Valmont to do well, wants Avner to do well. The strength of the culture, you know, you really can't underestimate. We all know agriculture will recover, so I think that will be a good momentum of growth as well. Infrastructure, you know, we talked about; yeah, we are capacity constrained, so we bring that on. But then, you know, we also have international businesses. We have EMEA and we have APAC, and if you know anything about those two economies, they're a little soft right now.
So, you know, I look at this as we're doing really well on the up and to the right graphs, but we get agriculture to come back. We get EMEA, APAC economy recovery. You know, we could see this all start to gel rather nicely in the coming years.
So maybe we'll transition into those indicators that you're looking at in your Tuesday earnings. You included in the presentation a number of points, the indicators that you're, you know, the data sets actually that you're looking at. I imagine that was intentional. Can you dig into both on the infrastructure side, what are you seeing, what are the tea leaves telling you? And then on the ag side, you know, for sure, I'm sure the audience would be very interested in what you're seeing on that front.
Yeah. So infrastructure, you know, we are in some diverse markets and some diverse geographies, but there are some very strong KPIs for us then. And we always do include it to your point and some of the appendix in our earnings call. So there's a lot of good information there around. So if you look at the utility business, you'll look a lot on the CapEx spending on the utility. There's some good data there just to show how this will continue to grow. And the indications are just extremely strong in utility for the next at least decade. We'll keep on seeing, like I said, load growth and spend by a lot of the carriers, of a lot of the utility customers. So we look at those indications specifically for utility, lighting and transportation, lighting, we look at single-family housing starts.
That's a strong correlation to our lighting business. It does lag about a year, but it is, you know, as you build more housing, you build more, there's more streets, there's more communities, there's more shopping centers, there's hospitals, there's schools, and a lot of those are driving, you know, and DOT side, we do look at some of the federal and government spending and some of the roads, the road builds, et cetera. Telecommunication, we look at, we stay closely to what the carrier spending is. But, you know, we're all following 5G and a lot of indications are, you know, by the next decade, we're going to have 85% of people using 5G. So there's a lot in that area. And then on coatings, we look at GDP mostly.
So those are kind of the main areas we look externally in the regions. In the irrigation side, the agriculture, so several. One is North America. It's really net farm income. And what drives for our growers is mostly the price of corn. And, you know, we watch that very closely. It's around $5 now. So farmers are making a little bit of money at that level, but not significant. So it's still an impact. It impacts growers significantly. Net farm income, corn. And then there are other KPIs we look at, stocks-to-use ratio, how much grains are out there, et cetera. So that's North America, Brazil, very similar, but we're more focused on soy. They're the largest producer of soy.
So we look at that, we look at the farmers' soy, we look at their EBITDA, so similar to net farm income, their soy EBITDA. And then again, it's a little challenge. Brazil, we do really like that there's a lot of land available and they have three growing seasons if you use our pivot irrigation. And then, food security is the third one that we look at, that's more from Middle East, Africa. So those are the kind of high-level external KPIs we look. But I will mention as we are the leader or the number one in most cases, sometimes number two in a lot of these industries, we have a lot of knowledge in the industry. We have a lot of hooks into a lot of these companies.
So we get a lot of information from just sitting at the table with our customers and being their trusted partners on how we solve their biggest challenges. So we do get a lot of intel from that. Our coatings business supports the entire economy. So we get to see. We got a lot of data points. And so we actually have some leading indicators through our coatings business and is an example. And of course, dealers, we have the strongest and the number one dealer network. So we're with the dealers all the time, actually spend time with our in our national sales meeting earlier in January and had an opportunity to talk to all the dealers. And they're actually pretty positive seeing a lot of the farm consolidation.
They like our value proposition with our technology and happy to expand on that in a bit. But overall, so we have a pretty good feel for the market in those areas that we focus on.
Let me ask one more question before I ask the audience if they have any. With those indicators and with your increase, your announced increase in CapEx spending, how and where specifically are you looking to add capacity or, as you said, technology, to prosecute those KPIs that you're seeing?
Yeah. So our largest footprint is in North America and the strongest market that we're seeing right now are in North America. So we do have 24 manufacturing plants in the U.S. and we're focusing on those to support a lot of the utility business. But a lot of our plants can do utility and lighting and transportation. So we're adding capacity, we're adding flexibility. Our big two projects now are in our Brenham, Texas facility, and our Tulsa, Oklahoma. But then we're investing a lot of these facilities. But it's not just in North America.
We are looking across the globe as well where we have strong presence and those areas that we could drive a strong ROI if it's in our low cost, if it's in our Poland plant to support Europe or in India to support some India market, but as well as other markets. So we are looking at the areas where we get the highest ROI and it's a very much focused approach on a lot of these investments.
Any questions from the audience? Yeah. So start here.
Yes. I'm just wondering if, as you look at F25 and F26, as you mentioned earlier, it looks like the ag irrigation has been riding a little bit of a downturn with the greater agricultural industry. It looks like your infrastructure business has offset that. Any sort of forecasts on when ag irrigation might turn for you and how are you looking at that business going into the future?
Yeah. So it's, even though I've only been with the company for five years, I already learned. I mean, I'm not going to try to predict the cycle and, it's hard to tell. We could look at indication and say, you know, it looks like there's not a lot more to drop, but it's very hard to know. And you could look at historical trends, but they're always all different. And usually it's an event that's going to, you know, a drought or something along those lines that's going to kind of peak or make that change. So it's hard to know.
I will say to your point, when it does come back and we're going to be hitting on all cylinders, it's going to, you know, get us very close to our mid-single digit target on operating income. So it's hard to predict. But what we're doing now is, we always still have a very steady replacement business, right? Pivots need to be replaced. So that is one thing. And we're focusing on our foundation. So what we're doing now is, investing in technology. So it's really important for the growers to be able to be very effective, efficient with the use. So some examples of just some exciting technology we just came out with is, you know, for our dealers, e-commerce system, you know, parts are broken, you need to replace parts. It's very easy for them to replace the parts.
Use very cool technology around AI to build 3D models so they know exactly how the part looks and fits. So, a lot of good feedback I got in a national sales meeting. That's one area. Our AgSense, which is the leading monitor and control, you know, how do you control your pivot from your phone? We just came out with AgSense 365 and you could sit in your office and you could make sure you're watering the watering when you need to, as much water that you need to. It gives them a quality of life. And then we're even taking it one step further, like, how do we make sure we could provide them with predictive analysis on, you know, when the pivot's going to stop working.
It could be devastating for a grower if you're ready to water and it's very critical and it's not working because you didn't have pressure in a tire or a tower. We're going to help them out with that. So we're investing in the business in technology to make sure when it comes back, we're going to be ready to capitalize. Don't know when it's going to be. Is it 2025, 2026? Hard to tell. Long term looks great. We'll be ready when it comes.
Thank you. Just to follow up on agriculture, can it be that like Europe and APAC or Latin America must be mostly agriculture, I guess, less infrastructure?
Yeah. So for us, I'll address that. So actually, APAC is actually more infrastructure. We have strong presence there in our kind of L&T and coatings and APAC. We do, of course, have an irrigation business in Australia and New Zealand, but the majority is infrastructure. Europe itself is still more heavily into infrastructure. We have strong lighting business there. Our irrigation business is smaller. When you add kind of the Middle East, Africa, then irrigation is much larger. But Europe and Asia-Pac is more infrastructure than agriculture.
Okay, and as I see from your presentation that you do have like 10% margin on agriculture and around 16% on infrastructure, so that's what you just published on Tuesday, so if agriculture comes back, do you expect to have higher margins in the recovery or do you stay at 10%?
No, if you look at ag through the cycles, actually margins do go up and down through the cycle. So when ag comes back, we expect higher operating margins in agriculture. But we also think the work they're doing now with their aftermarket business, as well as the product costs will be additive to that.
100%. Yes. Yes. It's a very strong business for us in the upcycle. It has very strong margins.
Okay. Tom, you've come into Valmont six months ago. We saw a much sharper pen just now on capital allocation going forward. Could you continue? You addressed it at a high level. Could we take one level deeper in terms of how you came to kind of some of those allocation components that you've recently articulated?
Yeah, we spent a lot of time on that, Avner and I, and we talked to the board a few times. You know, it always comes back to you want to put your cash to the highest return opportunities. When we looked at capacity and I kind of took you through the math, the math said, well, that is very, very high return. It's going to help with our growth, our operating margins, our profitability, our cash flows. That was really the priority. We, you know, are in secular growth markets. We also felt that there was an opportunity for M&A. When I say that, you know, Avner was, you know, is very clear with everybody across the company, staying close to the core. What does that mean? Infrastructure, agriculture, other products that may be offerings to our customers.
So it could be products, services, geographies that we could be stronger in, either the U.S. or abroad. And that's a major component. I think one of the things I love about we don't have to do M&A for growth, right? Our markets are growing. So the way we view this is we're going to be very selective as we go. And if we don't find M&A, we're not going to be disappointed. We'll probably put money back into our share repurchase. But getting back to highest return, share repurchase is very high return. If you just look at it, you know, by achieving our goals, our net income is going to go up. That will drive a higher share price and that in itself will be a return.
So we wanted to make, you know, we're fortunate that we have very good cash flows. We wanted to make the repurchase meaningful to an investor. And, you know, we thought 10% and, you know, we worked with David and team as well and had really in-depth discussions about this. We thought the $700 million was a meaningful area to be on the dividend. You know, we wanted to give some predictability to our shareholders. And we have the cash flow history that would say we can be a company that increases our dividend every year. That said, are we going to be a 2% dividend company? No, I don't think we'll be a 2% dividend company. And we're not trying to be. We just want to be a reliable. We're going to be part of the return, is such.
Now, on the 50% shareholder returns, the key was to make it predictable. So when you look at the $700 million of repurchases, we plan to do this over three to four years. And in our view, it's a return of capital. So we will, our intent is to be buying back every quarter in periods where the price is low or refill is low. We'll lean into that more, but it'll be more of a regular cadence of buybacks as well. Hope that helps.
And then could you also just comment on leverage, right? We're seeing kind of, I think, one times leverage now.
So yeah, we're at one times leverage. And, you know, we used to say our goal was one to two and a half times, but now we're at one and we don't really need any more debt. So we took out the bottom range. Our intent is to be, you know, two and a half times. We're in a fortunate position. We have good cash flows. Everything I just talked about, we feel we can fund internally, but we do know, you know, there's going to be ups and downs with working capital periodically. We'll dip into our revolver, you know, if we found a really strong acquisition, one that, you know, you read it and said, that makes perfect sense for Valmont. Well, then we would not hesitate to take on some level of debt. But investment grade to us is very important.
You know, we have large scale utilities. I think it means something to them. Part of the reason we get strong pricing is because we have scale and we're reliable. And I think the financial strength to our customers.
Perfect. So at the conference, a number of buzzwords. Let's just fire them off. Interestingly, on tariffs, you were somewhat unique in terms of incorporating your expectation of tariffs into expectations for 2025. Would love to hear how you think about that in particular around steel, aluminum, you know, those, those elements.
Yeah. So we're, you know, a diversified industrial company. I use a lot of steel. So we thought it was important to tell investors what we saw as the cost of tariffs and what it would do to our EPS. And we also wanted to say it because, you know, it's not the end of the world. We're going to still grow and have EPS growth even with tariffs. But the way we looked at it was, you know, the 10% increase in tariffs on China, that's pretty easy to calculate. The 25% tariff on imported aluminum and steel, a little more complicated, but those both of those tariffs, you know, there was a directive that you could read and understand and calculate.
So fortunately, even though we have a plant in Monterrey, Mexico, a lot of the steel comes from the U.S. We ship it to Monterrey. They do the fabrication. It comes back in. So we're in a good position from that point. What we are doing, if you looked at the steel futures markets last week, it went way up. So the other thing we did in our guidance is we made our guidance as of the steel markets last Friday. So we have the higher guidance in there. But what we will be doing is buying ahead. You know, there's a very interesting dynamic when you buy steel, which is often your price is linked to an index and the index changes the next month.
So we have an opportunity this month and next to be buying ahead and we have good cash flow. So we think this is a good thing. You know, that said on tariffs, we did our best to you know put a fence around it, so to speak. But you know things like reciprocal tariffs, there's no information. We don't really understand you know what that will look like. You know the belief of 25% tariff on everything from Mexico and Canada that was here, it was moved out. I know there's a lot of discussions on it, but even that it's not really well defined. Does that mean on the full value coming in or just the non-US content? So you know more to come.
I would just say on tariffs, you know, tariffs are disruptive, but tariffs are not going to change our strategy or our financial ability to grow margins and EPS.
Perfect. Another key buzzword for the Citi conference, of course, has been data center energy use, and those elements clearly are a driver, but I'd be very interested in expanding on how you see that flowing through and impacting Valmont.
Yeah. Well, data centers is also exciting for us, for many reasons. One, you know, just for the utility business. So data centers, the direct impact is when you need to connect a data center to the grid, you need a substation. And we're a leader in that space. And it's one of our strong product offering. And when you're bringing these high hyperscale data centers, not everybody could be these large substations. So we're very excited about that, but overall, it's not just that. Then you can connect it to the grid. So you're going to need your transmission and distribution center poles. And actually we do more for data centers as well. We do a lot of galvanizing for the parts. We do lighting for data centers, even telecommunications. So it is just one additional driver.
I mean, some data, which I found very interesting, one of these very large hyperscale data centers could consume the similar to 80,000 households. So I mean, think about the, the strain it puts on the grid. So we're, that will be just one more driver that we're, we're excited about that has an impact on our business.
And AI has also been a key buzzword. So thinking about how you're using AI, internally, how it's supporting you, you know, where you're seeing levers.
Yeah. So like everybody else, we're using AI in our business anywhere from the safety of employees to make sure the employees are wearing the right gear and the right spot. Using our whole sales and operation planning, how do we make sure we get the right job in front of the best operator that can actually execute on that job as well? We're putting AI into our engineering systems. We're putting it into, of course, in our pivot offering, how to make sure we could some of the examples I gave a little earlier around maintenance. So it is something you kind of do now on your day to day, making sure everybody's taking advantage of those tools. I think they will transform many businesses and they're a strong enabler for us, across the whole business.
Of course, there's the things you use in your back office anywhere from, you know, how do you collect to processing, et cetera. It's going to be across the entire business.
Terrific. Well, look, we'll leave it there. Great momentum. Really appreciate you coming to the conference and, we'll leave it there for now, but it's really exciting to see the progression of the business.
Yeah. One last comment, which I neglected to share, like what got us here and I'll take 30 seconds. I did forget, you know, one key thing was bringing this very experienced team, you know. I forgot, I was sitting here next to Tom, like, how did I not mention it, but having a very experienced Fortune 200, you know, CFO, Daryl Matthews is leading our agriculture with a lot of experience, elevating our head of HR. So we have a great leadership that's ready to execute on these mega trends and we're ready to execute. We're excited about the future.
Great team.
Perfect.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you, David.