Very good. Good afternoon. We'll go ahead and get started. I'm Rob Mason, the senior analyst that covers advanced industrial technology for Baird. Very glad to have Vontier up next. Vontier is driving a leadership position in mobility technologies in the convenience retailing market in particular, delivering a broad range of integrated solutions. We think that's resonating well with that customer base. That customer base is increasingly becoming larger and more sophisticated as well, and they've got a strong position there. I've got Anshooman Aga with us to discuss Vontier, as well as Ryan Edelman with investor relations. Anshooman, of course, is CFO. We're going to just kind of dive right into Q&A if that works for everybody. We will take your questions. If you have any, send those up. We'll work those into the conversation. Either send those up via the iPad, or you can just raise your hand.
We'll go ahead and get started. Anshooman, thanks again for being here. Ryan as well.
Thanks for having us.
Maybe just to start, though, level set, kind of post-quarter, maybe if you could just do a quick tour around the larger portfolio. I think one thing that stood out to us really year to date is we've seen kind of core growth like 3%. The Matco Tools business is more like 6%, or that's kind of our math. Maybe a tale of two halves or tale of two cities there. Just kind of walk through what you're seeing as we got through the third quarter and into year end.
Yeah. Instead of talking about our segments to start off with, let's go at it slightly differently around our end markets. 2/3 of our revenue is focused around convenience retail. That's basically our Environmental and Fueling segment, and a large part of our Mobility Tech segment serves the convenience retail end market. That end market is continuing to perform really well. When you think of some of the dynamics in that space, whether it's the large national and regional players continuing to build out and expand the storefront. Also, if you look at their economics, their economics continue to get better as convenience stores are adding fresh food, expanded formats, additional dispensers. Also, the gas margins are good.
On top of that, when you look at the fact that we are really helping bring digitalization to this industry through our innovation and digitalization, both for enabling higher productivity, asset uptime, but also consumer engagement and revenue steering, that part of our business is doing well. You talked about the higher growth, ex-Matco, it is really off the backs of that. Our fleet business, again, this year has been pretty strong. We had a couple of big projects in the fleet business, fleet supported mainly by Mobility Technologies. That has been a good driver for this year. Repair, as you talked, while the long-term secular drivers are intact in that business, the buyers of our repair technology tools are technicians, which have been impacted by the overall macro.
Even there, we're starting to see signs of stabilization off the backs of a lot of initiatives that are under our control that we're driving.
I commented earlier, just around the core sales growth, I think year to date, core orders maybe down a tick, flat to slightly down. That was our math. Correct me if I'm wrong. I'm just curious if you've got any different perspective there. If you exclude the Matco business on that order number, how does that look?
Yeah. A couple of things on our bookings. One, our book-to-bill cycle is pretty short for most of our businesses. Additionally, if we do get a long-term contract, we only put 12 months of it in backlog or in bookings. When you factor that in, having a book-to-bill of roughly one keeps our backlog at healthy levels. Our book-to-bill is roughly one, was 0.99 in the quarter, roughly one for the year. Bookings remain healthy. Our pipeline continues to be healthy. As I talked about, convenience stores, customers in our convenience retail business, driving both point solutions, but integrated hardware, integrated solutions with connectivity is really making a difference for us. Our connected mobility strategy is really shining through out there.
Yeah. Just to park there a moment, just on that convenience retail market. Again, I mentioned upfront, the industry structure there is shifting, favoring more consolidation, larger players, more sophisticated, presumably, in that process. Where are you striking on their pain points with some of your solutions?
That's really a great question, Rob. When you really think of the industry, especially around the convenience stores, there are in North America roughly 150,000 convenience stores. More than 50% of them are owned by single-site operators, or they might own a couple of sites here and there. What's happening in the dynamic is the large national and regional players are growing at a faster rate at the expense of the single-site operators. We tend to have a higher market share with the large national and regional players. The other thing that's happening, besides the large getting bigger, the formats are getting more modern and bigger. They have bigger inside-the-store formats. You have fresh food, where you have almost a cult-like following for some of the convenience stores, like Wawa and Sheetz around their sandwiches.
Casey's is the fourth or the fifth largest pizza seller in the country now. Also, outside the store, the gas margins have been really attractive. Post-COVID, they've gone up materially, and they're staying at a pretty attractive rate. You have this phenomena of attractiveness of a site, sites getting bigger, larger players getting larger. You have the secular tailwinds around digitalization. As they have more assets, they need to have higher uptime, better remote management of their assets. They need to drive consumer engagement. This is where our connected mobility strategy with digitalization comes in and fixing one of the pain points. Regulation is another big secular tailwind. There's significant regulation in our space. Fuel is regulated, both from an environmental perspective and then payments through the payment card industry perspective. The complexity and the velocity of regulation is always increasing. It's not becoming less.
This is a global phenomena. Through our products, we're driving compliance with the latest certification, allowing connectivity so they can better remote monitor from a compliance perspective. We're making sure we're meeting the latest payment card industry standards and driving better solutions for our customers there. The final is energy expansion. While everyone can debate about what form of energy might exist in 15 years, what we can't debate is the need for energy for transportation is going up. With Vontier, we provide multi-fuel options for our customers, whether they're looking at traditional gas or they're looking at biofuels, compressed natural gas, renewable natural gas, or electric charging with us providing the leading EV charging software, where we are the second highest plugs under management globally. We provide multi-energy solutions for our customers in the right profit pools.
We're uniquely positioned to solve our customers' pain points.
Yeah. How would you describe the state of the capital decisions coming out of that convenience retail market right now? Have they been on a steady cadence? Have you noticed any shortening of capital decision, the extending of capital decision? I'm trying to get at maybe the kind of visibility that you have based on their plans that you can see right now.
Yeah. If you think of the market between the large national regional players, most of them are talking about 2027, 2028 CapEx right now. Pretty good visibility. They know what they're going to build. They're working on site permits. When you look at the lower end of the market from single-site to few-site operators, their decisions tend to be a little bit closer, especially around site refresh. Again, just because of healthy gas margins, because of the fact that inside the store, business is healthy. They're adding fresh foods. They're renovating sites. People have to stay relevant. If you have two convenience stores at an intersection, where does the traffic go? Traffic goes to the one that has a modern format, new dispensers, better lighting, better signage, fresh food.
Even if you're a single-site or a few-site operator, to stay relevant, you're going to continue to invest. That's what we're seeing in the space.
Yeah. How do those convenience store dynamics that we just talked about play across other geographic regions? Obviously, your revenue's more concentrated in North America, but you do serve other markets with those solutions. What's the state of the industry in those other regions or what are you seeing?
Yeah. If you look and let's break out some of the developing markets versus the mature markets like Europe or Australia. Europe and Australia are a little more stable, flattish, I would say. Emerging markets do provide a growth opportunity. Let's take one, for example, India. There's a lot of investment going in. The car park's increasing. The need for fuel is increasing. They're going from, let's call them, kiosks, which were maybe two dispensers, and are tending to more of a full-fledged U.S. format where you can go inside and buy food, et cetera. India and even markets in the Middle East, which are growing on a longer-term basis, tend to be a little lumpy in the sense that there'll be tenders in the market. Last year was a good year for tenders. We had some in the Middle East.
We had quite a few tenders in India. This year has been a little light on tenders. Now, usually when you win a tender, delivery is over 12-18 months. This year has been a little light on tenders. So far, discussion is more tenders coming into market next year. International can be lumpy, but when you look through a cycle, there is good growth in international markets, in developing markets.
Okay. I think some of the secular tailwinds that Anshooman walked through, whether it's digitalization or the evolving consumer preferences and things like that, there are a lot of similarities in some of the more mature markets like Europe or Australia, U.K. included, where you're seeing the build-out of these larger hubs leveraging more food convenience, food-venience is the industry term. There is a lot more technology advancement going in the mature markets versus some of the international markets as well.
Understood. Do you think that just does that lumpiness come into play next year around some of the tenders or the revenue, the shipments on that? I only raise that question, just as I looked at your, at least as it's defined, as you report high-growth revenue, it had a tick up for several quarters, and then in the third quarter, it maybe stepped down. I don't know if that's just the third quarter perturbation or if that's the tenders kind of cycle.
Yeah. Quarter to quarter, it's a little bit lumpy. I'd look at it in aggregate and look at it over the year. I think for the year, the growth will be roughly in line with our fleet growth. Again, next year, I think there'll be growth in international markets. Quarter to quarter, there might be some lumpiness, but I think we take that into account. We feel pretty good about the overall convenience retail market growing next year globally. Quarter to quarter, the noise in the international markets will be material to move the needle for Vontier as a whole.
Fair enough. The Invenco business, it's a key part of at least what goes in store as well as what goes on the pump. A couple of drivers there that were focused on FlexPay 6 and the iNFX. FlexPay 6 in particular seems like that's given you some nice tailwinds. Why is that relevant? Why is that the unified payment aspect of that? Why is that important to your customers?
Yeah. If you think of our Invenco business, really, the set of products that we call Invenco, you can really think of two things. They're driving either payment, unified payment, or they're driving enterprise productivity. FlexPay 6 is part of the payment suite of offerings we have. And it's connected hardware with software, which is really driving both consumer engagement and driving productivity for our customers. Just starting off with productivity, better remote monitoring, remote management. While all of us are used to remote updates for our electronics in our space, every time you used to have a software update, you used to roll a truck to site. This is the first product that's brought remote software upgrades to our customers.
Also, when you start thinking of a site which might have different payment technologies, every time you have a change in, especially a monolithic architecture that a lot of our customers have where they've stitched together, think of a complex ERP for a large business. Every time you have a change, you have to go through certification. The more payment devices you have, whether it's on the pump, whether it's inside the store, whether it's on the car wash or on the EV charger, it all adds complexity. By having one payment, a FlexPay 6, which we're the only one which provides all of these assets, you drive down complexity. Having iNFX on top of it, which is modular in architecture, if you're changing something like a loyalty, it doesn't change the architecture of your system, so you don't have to get your payment recertified.
A lot of benefit from a productivity automation perspective out there. But really also, when you start thinking of consumer engagement, whether you're charging or you're getting your car gassed up, you can put media on the dispenser, and you can get media revenue by a third party, or you can start looking at how do you improve conversion. We have a great customer of ours who experimented with free coffee on that screen. People, they saw the conversion rate increase and the average basket size increase and their profit increased. But when you also think about, let's say you're going at lunchtime to get gas, that's one transaction. You go inside the store to buy a sandwich. You go up to the kiosk. It's probably five screens to configure your sandwich. Then you have to go pay somewhere else. That's probably not the best consumer experience for you.
What would be a nicer consumer experience could be you're at the dispenser. It recognizes you because of your loyalty. It comes, a pre-configured turkey sandwich comes up just the way you like it. One click to buy, one swipe fee instead of two. By the time you're done getting gas, your sandwich is ready. Either you go pick it up or they bring it out to the curb at the preassigned spot. That's what the power of FlexPay 6 can bring. It's order at the pump. It's better loyalty. It's better engagement of the consumer. That's why we're pretty excited about what this can do for the industry.
Yep. How are customers adopting that? Is it just through new dispenser sales, or is there a retrofit opportunity that you're attacking?
Yeah. It's both. Obviously, our customers at the dispensers, they're replacing the dispenser, and a lot of them are buying FlexPay 6. Also, we sell payment kits where you don't have to replace the whole dispenser, and you can just upgrade the payment from FlexPay 4 to FlexPay 6. It's really an opportunity of both selling a new dispenser with payment kit with the payment embedded in there or upgrading your payment.
Yep. If there's any questions, feel free to raise your hands, and we'll keep going here. Just around maybe it's iNFX. You've kind of referenced some larger deployments may occur in 2026, maybe second half of 2026. What's kind of the cycle there in terms of the sales cycle, the pilots that may be going? I don't know if you can give us a sense of how much activity is underneath that expectation.
Yeah. Just stepping back on iNFX, our iNFX win so far, we did Shell and Chevron for all the U.S. sites, and we did Costco Canada, which was unified payments, which was both FlexPay 6 plus iNFX. We have a pipeline of opportunities, which includes some pilots ongoing. These are a little longer sales cycles because you're dealing with payment. If payment isn't working, their site is down, and they aren't generating revenue and profit. Typically, it goes into a lab for a while. They'll evaluate it. You're going through testing with. Then you might roll it out for one or two sites. If they're moving from FlexPay 4 to FlexPay 6 at the same time, you're going through your payment certifications with your payment processor.
After you've done a few sites, you'll do a smaller district, maybe 20 sites, and then you'll go into a rollout with us. We continue on our pilots with our customers. The pipeline's good. We think we have good potential for growth in this for a few years to come.
Yeah. DRB, the vehicle wash system, is the other bigger piece that's in the mobility tech segment. The new build activity, I think we've deduced, has stabilized now. Maybe that's stabilized going forward. How do we think about the growth profile of the DRB business if, say, new builds are at a flattish level for the next few years? What's driving the growth on that side?
Yeah. I think where we've seen a significant uptick recently has been on the Patheon conversions. Patheon is our new point-of-sale automation software that we offer in car wash. We have had that out for about a little more than a year or so. That conversion rate was slow to start, slow to adopt, but we've seen a big ramp in that recently. I think that will be a big driver of growth for us going forward. As you mentioned, the new build side has stabilized. Still probably down a little bit this year versus 2024 levels, but should continue to stabilize through next year. As you said, 60% of this portfolio is recurring. That has been growing sort of low single-digit rates. The system side is the other 40%. We will get some benefit from Patheon into next year.
Something mid-single-digit-esque is probably the right growth rate for this business longer term, most likely including next year as well. Still working through the final plans on that, but.
You know, Brian talked about Patheon. Some of what I was talking about on the convenience store side from a technology perspective, that plays out. Patheon is our cloud-connected, moving from on-prem to the cloud drives higher automation and productivity for our customers, but also higher revenue. You're incorporating things like loyalty, customer relationship management, where you can do targeted marketing and drive and steer higher revenue. A lot of the same themes from a technology perspective playing out.
Yep. Maybe just real quickly, just to touch on the Matco, the tools business, you said some kind of self-directed efforts to drive, stimulate demand there. Can you touch on what you're doing there?
Yeah. While the backdrop, secular drivers are intact in that business. If you think miles driven is up, age of the car park is up, size of the car park is up, complexity of the car park is up. In the shorter term, technicians are impacted by the macro conditions, but we're very focused on stimulating demand in this environment. When you think the focus is around higher productivity, lower price point items from an innovation perspective and product vitality perspective, we also have some initiatives. We do have 30% of the territory unserved through franchisees, so potential to add. We're being more targeted on the persona of people to target, where to target, how to target. We're also looking at stuff like store layout versus what's selling.
Obviously, as the mix of what's selling changes, how do you design the stores better to dynamically and to help improve sales? The team's working extremely hard on initiatives to try and stimulate demand and try and stabilize the business and turn it around even in this environment.
Yeah. I mean, to the extent our administration has introduced plans to try to improve spending, capital spending, tax incentives, etc., maybe that flows to Matco, maybe it does not. Any areas of the business, though, that you would identify that you might expect to see some benefit from stimulative measures?
Yeah. First of all, the depreciation, sorry, the R&D capitalization versus expense helps us from a cash tax basis. We definitely benefited from a higher cash flow because cash taxes are going down. We'll probably see the benefit split between this year and next year a little bit. Accelerated depreciation going to that. For the large national regional operators, whether they're on the convenience store side or on the car wash side, their plans remain intact. I don't think it makes a huge difference, but really when you start looking at some of the smaller operators where they're more focused on cash on cash returns, quicker paybacks, accelerated depreciation definitely helps. Now, if you're planning a new site, you're looking 12-18 months out before it translates into an order for dispensers or our point-of-sale system on the car wash.
If we start seeing some benefit from it, I'd expect we'd start seeing it later next year in 2026 and in 2027, but it definitely helps us accelerated depreciation. Also, there's talk about tax payments or tax refunds being a lot higher. Rob, I think we were discussing it last night. As there's more discretionary money or if there's more discretionary money, that should help the technicians and hopefully help Matco a little bit also.
Yep. Just on the fueling business, environmental and fueling segment, does the growth profile, do you think that looks next year, would that look much different to the demand dynamics? I guess I'm not asking for guidance specifically, but do you see anything different in the demand dynamics next year that would be different than this year?
No. I think if you look, demand is pretty healthy and constructive in the C-store convenience retail space. On top of that, our innovation is reading through. Also, if you think what we've been doing with our 80/20 program around simplification, it enables us to focus on the areas where there is growth with the customers that are growing, the products that are growing. Really simplifying a portfolio through 80/20 is also an enabler for growth for us.
Yeah. Just on that point, you've talked about a lot of confidence just in terms of being able to deliver some margin expansion next year. Could you dig a little deeper into what's driving that to the extent it would be over and above maybe a normal incremental margin level?
Yeah. Our Vontier business system is built around a culture of continuous improvement. Part of that is our 80/20 process. Internally, we call it focus and prioritization effort. We're still in the earlier innings of the 80/20 effort. If you really think, we started off with 32 global dispenser platforms, we're down to 15, and we'll be down in the high single-digit range, 8-10 range. What it's allowed us to do is improve our standardized components from 2% to 30%. It's allowed us to take out about 20% of our square foot from a manufacturing perspective. It's lowered our sustaining costs, allowing us to invest more in new product development and to return to the bottom line. We're doing similar things with our software platforms. We're simplifying the organization. All of that, along with strategic pricing, gives us significant runway for improving our margins.
Also, from an R&D perspective, we feel we'll have better leverage as we continue to grow. R&D is not going to grow at the same rate as sales. It'll probably be held constant. We are also seeing benefits in R&D from the deployment of AI, where cogeneration of code, 80% of our Invenco product engineers are using AI for cogeneration. We are doing a lot of automated testing with AI, which reduces or improves the cost of quality by 15% or so. We continue to optimize. We went from 18 R&D centers to nine. We have over 1,000 software engineers now as a business, but the average cost of engineering has come down materially as we've gone to these engineering centers. A lot of work already done, but a lot of work ahead of us to continue to expand margins, and we feel pretty good about it.
Yep. One thing I wanted to touch on real quick, you made an announcement, I think it was last month, just around Salesforce, kind of commercial go-to-market unification, I guess is the term I'll use. How impactful do you think that can be? How quickly? It seems like a big deal, but I know it's early days as well.
Yeah. Something I'll start off with, what really matters is the customers. And our customers are extremely happy and positive about the change. In the old model, when we went to market as each business, you could have four different people calling on the customer in the matter of a week with four different products. To some extent, our customers might buy siloed, but as you start thinking of integrated technologies and digitalization, all of these assets do need to come together. An individual buyer might not be thinking of it at an aggregate level, but I can assure you for larger customers, the C-suite is thinking about it that way. The CIO or the CTO is thinking about it that way. So really what we're doing is bringing our sales together, our go-to-market together, which allows for key account management, trying to drive a better share of the wallet.
Also at the same time, as you're talking about our whole portfolio, you're also learning and getting that constant feedback on what the customer's pain points are across the portfolio, across their integrated set of products or assets, which allows us to be better and solve the high-value problems for our customers.
Yeah. We need to break there. We're at time. There is a breakout session in Levante, so if you have any questions to direct at the team, meet us there.
Thank you, Rob.
Thank you, Rob.
Thanks. See you.