Great. Well, thanks very much everyone for being here. It's my pleasure to have up next, Vontier Corporation, Mark Morelli, President and CEO, and Anshooman Aga, Chief Financial Officer. I think you've got a couple of minutes of prepared remarks, Mark, so please lead off and thanks for being here.
Yeah. Julian, thank you. We're really happy to be here. You may have seen that we announced earnings last Thursday. I think 2023 was a year of strong operational execution for us, as well as an opportunity to demonstrate that our portfolio is in fact transforming r eally, the power of VBS and margins as well. I will definitely say we are extremely excited to be past the EMV cycle, as we've now sunset that, having three full years of headwind. It's been a long time for us. W e'll be posting organic growth clean this year with operating margin expansion, and that's in our 2024 guide, as well as $450 million of cash flow this year. R eally excited about the momentum that we have entering the year.
For those of you that are new to the Vontier story, Vontier is a leading industrial technology company with solutions for the mobility ecosystem, which is roughly a $30 billion market, growing at mid-single-digit growth rate. The mobility ecosystem is the critical infrastructure which is responsible for the movement of people, goods, data, and energy. Essentially, we have technologies that enable mobility. I t's a very growthy space. There's a lot of investment that is going into this infrastructure, and we have leading positions within it. I n fact, when you look across the mobility ecosystem, there's a few players that have the kind of depth that we have on integrated solutions. O ur ability to leverage that and to grow the opportunities at high margin, and growing margins is something that we're really excited about. We have three platforms that we have for our business.
We re-segmented our business in March of last year to offer folks transparency. There are three secular drivers that cut across those three platforms. Let me just walk you through the secular drivers at a high level. The first one is related to the increased complexity of the mobility ecosystem. There's a lot of investment going in. There's regulatory drivers. There's industry consolidation that is occurring, and many of the larger players are building out their footprints. T his means that there's a lot of complexity and a lot of change that is in fact occurring in the mobility ecosystem. At the same time, the second secular driver is around labor challenges. Both the auto repair industry as well as the convenience store and fleet operators, they had labor challenges before labor challenges were a thing in the recent couple of years.
I mean, very high turnover, really low skill base, got a lot of assets to manage with a low skill base. T he opportunity to offset that through productivity is pretty huge. T hen the third, secular driver is the energy transition. It is a trilemma. T hat trilemma for the energy transition means that of course, people are thinking about sustainability and making investments around sustainability, both government-subsidized as well as companies stepping forward. A t the same time, you have to balance the cost of the energy, and you have to balance the access or security of that. W e believe that means there's a multi-fuel future. There's not one fuel future in one region or geography.
As a consequence, we are a leader in all of that refueling and we have stakes in the alternative energy, both compressed natural gas, renewable natural gas, hydrogen, as well as electrification and advancing the existing [audio distortion] infrastructure in more sustainable ways. We call our strategy the connected mobility strategy, and that strategy essentially enables productivity in the mobility ecosystem.
Perfect. Thanks very much, Mark for that backdrop. Maybe, you know, I'll start off by talking about some of the residual sort of areas of maybe demand softness from last year, the biggest headwind [audio distortion] , which is that EMV sort of hangover. I think there's parts of maybe car wash or repair tools where we get some sort of mixed signals from some of your peers. You know, how do you see that right now and sort of the rest of the year?
We don't have much destocking. We're through most of that headwind. We have a little bit of destocking on the environmental side, but that should clear up in the first half of the year. T hat was never a big exposure for us. We don't have China exposure, which is good. We are seeing some pretty good signals from our convenience store operators. The reason why is that we are selling the highest share to the leading players in the industry. These folks are making a lot of money off convenience store operations, but also refueling operations, so they're not as impinged by a higher interest rate environment. Of course, the cost of capital is up, but they have very successful business models. You may have seen the announcement of Wawa more recently this week.
We see a pretty steady drumbeat of these convenience store operators expanding their footprint, and they're thinking out, you know, several years with their buildouts. They're also not impinged by a fear of a recession, because they know their franchisees work pretty well in market downturns. T hey're not really scared off by what they see, and they continue to build out. Now, the fact that we have leading share with these folks gives us confidence. Now, we don't have bookings visibility into that because we book on a relatively short cycle, but those are strong indicators for us. On the repair technician side, the repair technician has never been healthier. There's about 1 million repair technicians out there. There's a labor shortage. They're at an all-time wage rate. You can track wage rates like we do every week. Vehicle miles traveled is up.
I t's a very healthy factor out for the technician. The issue though is , they are also a U.S. consumer. They're dealing with higher interest rates. A t the same time, you know, they might have competing priorities with higher costs of food to feed their families, things like that. I f there's a good lineup, we have found that they are willing to buy, particularly around productivity. We talked about the productivity needed, and there's labor shortage in the repair shops. If they can get a vehicle out faster with more productivity by having the right tools or better tools to meet those needs, they're going to be willing to spend money. We saw a great uplift in our power tool lineup this past year, which is a new lineup.
We were selling our new diagnostics that launched in Q4 of last year quite well, which is a higher-ticket item. T oolboxes have been on, which is kind of the first thing to go in a discretionary spending and been really strong. I think, you know, we're cautiously optimistic about that, because we don't know what's going to come with the U.S. consumer this year. A t the samet ime, we've dialed in something that seems to be working and we have the Matco Expo, which has about 6,000 of our distributors and their families in Orlando this week launching our new lineup. I think we're pretty encouraged by what we see.
Perfect. If we think about, you know, that sort of traditional dispensing business had the big up for a couple of years and [audio distortion] down, you know, what should people expect the kind of medium-term growth to look like there?
I think in our environmental fueling business is going to have a good growth year. We think that longer term, this is a low to mid-single digit grower and I think we'll be seeing mid-single digit growth this year. I t's really on the backs of the infrastructure buildout by the leading players, whether they're doing refresh, rebuild, re-site builds, or doing acquisition and integration of that. I think we have leading share there. I think , you know, a lot of times, you would get into what's the dispenser lifecycle?
I think what people miss is that the underlying fabric of the convenience store market is growing, and the benefits are accruing to people that are making those investments. Y ou see these very successful formats being rolled out, and that's really driving us. At the same time, we have an underground cycle in the United States for underground tanks. It's being replaced. Once we get through a little bit more of this destocking, I think we'll represent good growth this year as well.
Perfect. J ust the summary on the destocking is what? There's a few more months left, but the indicators you look at, those levels have come down decently.
Yeah, you know, only about 15% of our business was exposed to what people are referring to as destocking. N ot a high exposure, but we are through the aftermarket parts. That was an area that held us back at very high margin. Q4, we posted [audio distortion] 10% growth in that business. W e think that's back on the mend, a nd then environmental in the United States has been impacted by that.
We were flat overall in Q4 for environmental, because the decline in the U.S. market was offset by some of the international markets, such as Mexico, which is doing a vapor recovery trend, which will also continue into this year. We have a leading share in Mexico. T hat was flat overall in Q4. I think , you know, we'll be through that destocking on the underground within the first six months of this year.
Then that's sort of the volume side of things. Pricing, I guess, it can be, you know, tricky for people to think about because there's different businesses, the retail point of sale, repair tools, the dispensing. You know, aggregate price I think was up low single digits, the last few months. How are you thinking about that over the balance of coming this year? How much does the competitive discipline vary across the three divisions?
Yeah, so from an overall perspective, in 2023, price was little above 3%, so there was good volume growth also. For this year, we're expecting about 150 basis points price increase across the portfolio. The other thing to keep in mind, we always say pricing is dynamic. We always remain price-cost positive. We're very happy to say every quarter post-spend, we've been price-cost positive, so a lot of discipline around pricing. You know, markets are disciplined across the board, but also, we have a leading share in most of the markets we operate, which allows us , as a technology leader, also be disciplined on pricing and make sure we're getting our price-cost equation right.
Got it. I think probably you know, the least well-understood business is probably, you know, that convenience retail element within the mobility division. Ma ybe just help us understand, you know, what does the competitive landscape look like? What's your market share? I t seems from the outside like it must be extremely competitive, a lot of players. I think obviously, that payments market is very fragmented depending on the vertical and the application.
Yeah, so the best way maybe to understand that is how the convenience store operators manage that today. Y ou can imagine there's dozens of workflows that they have to manage on their footprint. Y ou can also imagine that as the situation is dynamic, regulatory changes are happening all the time. The security payment one is happening. There's vapor recovery. There's all kinds of issues that are impacting that network. We live in a more regulated world, not a less regulated one. T hen of course, through acquisition and store-front buildout, you have a changing dynamic. T he way they manage this today is they stitch this together, normally through their internal IT department, by creating all this to work together. F or a period of time, that's great until regulatory change happens.
T hen they will have , let's say, fiscalization one or security payment one. Then they have to requalify the entire monolithic system, and they have to get the whole thing recertified. T hat takes a lot of time and effort. Sometimes it could take them up to 18 months just for one change in the system. T hen they have to roll trucks as part of it. Sounds like a very archaic infrastructure in a contemporary sense.
We have a modern microservices-based offering with NFX that we just launched. W ith that fabric, we now have an application base. W e sold to Shell 13,000 sites in one order. We sold to Chevron 8,000 sites in one order because of the massive productivity benefit of having the security of payment, or the payment application as a microservice. Now, every time there's a payment security, could you imagine how many security updates you get on your iPhone? It's an over-the-air update. Now, you can do an over-the-air update. You don't have to roll trucks. You're just qualifying that application. You're not having to stitch the whole system together. Can you imagine a site management platform that is now microservices-based?
A ll of these applications that are running there are managed on the edge, and you could then change each application a nd you could plug and play those applications. It 's a contemporary architecture that doesn't exist for convenience store operators today. W e think that we're probably a couple of years ahead of other folks that may be able to do this, a nd there's not as many. We also have many of those other touchpoints, whether it be car wash or electric charging or you know, for fleet operators. We do compressed natural gas, renewable natural gas. W e can do this because a lso, we can do it better because we have many of those other touchpoints as well.
Got it. W hen we think about kind of operating leverage in that business, you know, it sounds fairly high top-line growth. How do you think about kind of penetration rates there, you know, what your market share might be and then what sort of leverage or incremental margin should people expect?
Yeah, so on the NFX that Mark just mentioned, with the two large wins, we have about 15% of the U.S. convenience store market. A t the same time, we're in discussions with other customers, both U.S. and international. W e're doing already a few pilots, so this is going to continue to expand. Also, with Shell and Chevron, what we've provided is the first set of microservices, which is around payments. T hey have other pain points, other connectivity that over time will continue to expand.
The edge device that we have, which provides the cloud connectivity, won't change, but you'll have additional microservices that you bring in. T hen other things that we might just open up APIs and get a fee for opening up the APIs, they could integrate a third-party application also in there. Re ally, what we're providing is the site management platform now, which is going to be very compelling and is going to drive a lot of recurring revenue over the future years.
Perfect. I guess when we think about, you know, Vontier overall, I think you know, there's a lot of businesses offering good secular growth inside it, not particularly appreciated, you know, from the outside yet. I f you sort of added up, you know, telematics, EV charging, clean energy applications, kind of in aggregate, what portion of the business does that comprise today?
I think it's about 10% of the total revenue, s o it's relatively small but experiencing very high growth rates.
I n telematics, you know, a few years ago, it was struggling. It was maybe undermanaged. Attrition was pretty high. Seems like that's been turned around the last couple of years. I guess what should we expect, you know, the growth rate at least? A lso, that seems a fairly competitive kind of space. You know, how do you think about allocating R&D and so on to keep ahead?
J ust to put a little color on your comment, the attrition you're talking about is churn.
Yes.
It's a SaaS business, 95% SaaS. Obviously, you measure churn, and we were churning at 25% in the early quarters of 2020. Y ou know, we had gotten off track on the technology side. I t is a competitive market, no question about it a nd that's indicative. If you make mistakes in that marketplace, it's really unforgiving. W e put the product line on, and we reinvigorated it with TN360, which we've launched.
We've fixed many of the issues, so churn is now much more manageable. We flipped the business to profitable ARR growth in the year before. L ast year, we grew at a high single-digit ARR. I t was the first time we grew organic growth in the business, low organic growth. It was the first time it flipped to organic growth in a couple of years. Turning technology-intensive, you know, once you get behind that power curve, i t's very difficult to turn SaaS businesses. I think we've successfully turned it.
I think we have a, a runway of growth in front of us, so w e're pretty excited about that. It is competitive, no question about it. W e're looking at ways that we differentiate ourselves by, also leveraging our alternative energy capabilities on fleets and having linkages on that too. because we're a leader in the alternative energy management there. W e think that that can offer some differentiation, b ut you do look at differentiation.
We have great differentiation in Australia, New Zealand. We have a high leading share there. T here are real pockets of differentiation, but you look to find those because it is a competitive space. I think we're really proud of the turnaround. We're proud of the management team's capability to do that. S ince it's under fleet operating margins and growth rates, it's a runway opportunity for us.
That's correct. You know, it should have multiple digits growth. A verage fleet growth margin, so as we continue to expand, there's runways to improve margins.
Perfect. R einvestment needs there, is the competitive landscape kind of settling out now? You know, it seems like a business that would need a little R&D. There are some big rivals there.
Yeah, there are some large companies that have done really well in that space. I think the opportunity for us is to continue to offer differentiation, where, you know, in the markets that we've competed really well, you know, it's really tough to compete in a market such as Australia, New Zealand, where, you know, all about the tax code, t here's a lot of barriers to entry to that market. It has not been easy, a nd then, you know, continue to build out. We also have a construction footprint that has been doing quite well.
I think it's important to find your niches, and where can you help manage? I think that leverage from the alternative energy side can also be quite helpful. I think we've been really happy to be able to turn that business around and demonstrate our capability to do that. Y ou know, it's a very strong market growth economy, b ut you have to be a really good operator in that market a nd I think we are.
Then the small challenge is I suppose, of the EV space, you know, maybe to flesh out a little bit, you know, kind of Vontier's approach there.
Absolutely. W e have about 55,000 ports under management or plugs under management, which is probably one of the leading in terms of number of plugs that are out there, strong leading share in the Nordics, in Europe, in the U.K., growing presence in the United States. W e have an asset-light model. W hat we offer is somebody who wants to be a charge point operator, the software network to be able to manage their fleet of chargers, the uptime, the payment facilitation, the backing into the grid, the consumer app. I f you want to be a charge point operator, you have a decision to write your own software o r you can leverage our network, which is a leading platform out there.
I t's on the rate of doubling plugs under management every year, s o a very high uptick. W hat tends to work best is folks that are trying something for a little while and understand how difficult it is to manage the uptime, consumer interface, the energy management. W hen they run into those challenges, those are our best customers. W e're also adding folks at scale, s o we've been really happy about the progress we've been making in that. W e've been making some investments clearly in the network platform, but i t's not capital-intensive because we're hardware-agnostic.
We leverage the dropping price points of the hardware network hardware that's provided on site, and s o we think that's a really strong business model. It's interesting, you know, folks that maybe didn't see themselves as charge point operators, they're now understanding they can be their own charge point operator, like a convenience store such as, let's say, Circle K or even Shell. You know, they originally had invited charge point operators on their site, but the consumer benefit doesn't accrue to them.
Yes.
It accrues to the charge point operator. Then they're like, "Well, our business is really serving consumers, a nd they can integrate it with the rest of their offerings." T hey can manage conversion. Conversion is going from the pump or from the charger into the store.
Yeah.
They can do that all on the same point of sale and the same loyalty program. If you want to own that consumer experience, then they decide, "Well, hey, I can now become my own charge point operator." T hen our solution for them is really the right thing.
Where are we on that sort of profitability curve for that business, just as with investment upfront early on ?
Really high growth margins.
Yeah.
It's great, you described some of the economics issues on this.
Yeah, so really, the two large revenue streams for that business are both recurring. We get a fixed fee per port under management, a monthly recurring revenue from the ports under management. T hen, since we're also doing a lot of the transactional billing and f inancial settlement, we also get a transaction fee. A s our current customers continue to add chargers, the revenue increases. As the utilization on those chargers goes up, revenue increases. Then we continue to win new customers and bring them on. When you bring them on, you get a one-time fee for bringing them on, which is a small piece of the overall pie. A s Mark said, Driivz software, gross margins, recurring revenue, i t is burning cash from an R&D perspective right now.
Yeah.
As we continue to double this business over the last couple of years, it'll continue to increase in scale. We see a path to break-even over the next few years and profitable after that.
On the portfolio kind of overall, is it fair to say most of the heavy lifting on divestment is sort of behind you, and t hen it's really about acquisition from here? You know, should we accept the mobility division gets [audio distortion] ?
Well, I think we're always in the market, doing market work, strategy work, and cultivation across our businesses. I think we love everything we have. We do revisit the portfolio every year, as you know, changes occur. Y ou know, we're really happy with what we have at the moment. The largest market out there, out of our $30 billion is the mobility technology segment. I t's also pretty fragmented, pretty growthy. We see opportunities also to cross-fertilize with our different businesses. Once you have an integrated leading integrated solution, other ways to do M&A that bring things together, that enhance productivity for our customers or enhance our ability to attract consumers.
W e think it's a really, really great space to do M&A in, b ut we're very disciplined on our M&A front. I think you've seen us say no to a couple of things that have been quite visible if you've followed the story. A t the same time, the acquisitions we've done, I think we're showing really strong returns. You know, DRB and Venco in particular are showing, you know, returns ahead of what we've articulated the models to be for double-digit for DRB in four years. T hree years, we'll be at 20% returns for Venco, a nd so we're really pleased with the attempts we've made on M&A a nd we're constantly looking at it.
When we think about sort of buyback versus that, because there's an imperative at keeping the portfolio up to get that, you know, ICE share down when the valuation's very low. Do we assume it's kind of balanced between the buybacks and M&A from here?
Well, we have a dynamic model t hat we're deploying.
Yeah.
You want to describe that?
Yeah, w e always deploy capital to the highest return for the shareholders. We model the buybacks. We model M&A. Over the last couple of years, we bought back $400 million of shares at average price of $25 a share. We did in Venco, which was a 20% ROIC over three years. You know, share buybacks are still attractive for us. If you look at our growth rates going forward, look at our EBITDA margins and free cash flow conversions, we're definitely up there from a multi-industrial perspective. F rom a valuation perspective, we're probably at the bottom end of the spectrum.
Yeah.
Just a three-turn expansion of multiple as we post our growth, as we post our margin expansion, and now it's clean growth past EMV , you know, three turns is about $13-$50 a share. A t the same time, we'll be balanced. We'll be disciplined. We really focus on the markets, a nd then cultivate properties. We've said no before. Last year, there were a couple of deals we were looking at, a nd we did not transact. A ctually, neither of the properties transacted because the seller-buyer bid spread was just too high, s o we'll remain disciplined. We have lots of time. We have a great portfolio. The depth and breadth of the portfolio is unique in this space, a nd we'll generate a lot of cash flow.
Perfect. Well, I think with that, we have to switch to the audience response survey. T he first question is around sort of ownership of the stock.
Not much yet. Question 2 is around sort of general perspective to the stock right now. A positive but not much ownership yet, which is good. Number three is around through-cycle earnings growth for Vontier against the sort of multi-industry average, s o about the middle of the pack. Number four is around sort of uses of excess cash. There's a broad list there. G enerally, buybacks on the whole. Number five is around the valuation of Vontier in terms of, you know, year one P/E. G enerally, a sort of mid-high teens multiple. T he last question is kind of, what's the main barrier holding people back from owning more of the stock? M ostly core growth still. W e'll see how the year plays out.
Well, great. Thanks very much, Mark.