Very excited to have you guys. Gio, maybe I could just ask you know, you've been the CEO for, you know, just a couple months here, and you've been head of the Americas for a year. What's been the biggest changes you've instituted in the Americas and/or at the company, and how far along do you think Vertiv is, you know, in the Americas versus where it could be?
Sure. Well, first of all, glad to be here, and thank you for the opportunity. Yes, also very glad to see the progress we have been able to share yesterday, the progress in the Americas, with margins over 20% on fourth quarter and the trajectory that I think was testament to the hard work that was, I can say, very broad reach. You know, we were working on everything, basically. The organization, the leadership processes, systems and capacity. We have built new capacity and made new capacity available, and more capacity is being made available. Productivity, that for me, is a big mantra and supply chain.
I would say in a nutshell, we worked on all axes of execution and very importantly, alignment. We needed to align the organization around common goals and rally everyone around a common culture, if you want. It's a lot of hard work. There are no single silver bullet, of course, everything around capacity, alternative sources, alternative materials and components play a big role. I would say the single biggest thing is the alignment and the ownership and the executional focus and rigor that we have driven. As you said, how much more to go? That's the very good news, that we are not done yet. There is more runway available for us.
When we look at the entire Vertiv, clearly a year ago, the Americas was in a very complicated situation, if you will. Other regions were as our numbers show, more robust in many respects. I think that sense of runway ahead is common to Vertiv as a whole. I think we have margins for performance improvement pretty much across the board. You know, early stage, of course, being in this role for hardly two months. We'd of course started to put my kind of a fingerprint on the organization during the transition here during Q4.
If you see and think about what we've done from a price perspective last year, with an easy to remember $365 million pricing achievement, if you will, that clearly shows that the organization starts to be indeed has learned to execute on the things that are important. A lot of work to do, but I'm very optimistic. Again, we have runway, and that's the good news.
No, that's very good, Gio. I know you've had leadership positions both in Europe and the Americas. Maybe compare and contrast the relative strengths that Vertiv has in the regions. Are there products or services or market share differences in the regions? You know, considering you tend to compete with larger Europeans in Europe, I know they're in the U.S. too. Stepping back, what do you think Vertiv's competitive strengths are as you take over the CEO role?
Yeah, I think let me start from the back end of your question. What the competitive strengths are, I think two elements. One is the fact that we truly have a complete portfolio in the critical infrastructure industry. We're really one-stop shop, you may say. But also we are really kind of at a highest, very high level interlocutor for all our large customers and the large players in the industry. That is very important, because it gives us also a lot of credibility in front of with our customers, but also a lot of visibility on what's going on in the industry. We are truly global.
If I have to compare and contrast the Americas and EMEA or Europe, there are definitely many similarities. More similarities than I expected, if you will, when I started my American adventure almost exactly a year ago. Both places we're pretty much market leaders in the sectors that we serve. In both places, and that's true globally, actually, many of the things I'm saying are true globally. You know, thermal, a strong differentiator for what we do. In both places now we have the ability with the acquisition of E&I to have a full end-to-end powertrain story. Let's say absolutely best in the industry service in terms of capability and presence, and in both cases, extraordinarily global.
In both, we are up and coming with everything that is channel, and you know, we offer our customers a truly global reach. So in that respect, very, very similar. The go-to-market models might be slightly different in different places, but nothing to kind of write an essay about, not in a situation like this conversation today. What I think was the difference is this the strength, the underlying organization, the organizational strength and the capabilities that were a little bit shaken in the Americas, given that the Americas was the hardest part of our business, the hardest hit part of our business from everything that happened positively on the demand side, but negatively on the supply side. And that's what we had to rebuild.
We have rebuilt, and we still are strengthening for the further.
Sorry. Go ahead.
I think that's really it. If we compare to our competitors, as you were saying, it really depends on what part of the market. If we talk about hyperscale colocation and large colos, I would say probably that the set of competitors, at least between Americas and EMEA, are not dramatically different.
Mm-hmm.
Asia may differ a little bit further. Where we face truly different competition, more local is on the more run rate enterprise part of the business where we may have local players. Again, I would say that in general, our focus in critical infrastructure, the fact that we are, you could say a pure play in critical infrastructure and everything data center and telecom makes us particularly focused, nimble, but also a very credible interlocutor for all relevant customers.
Gio, just one follow-up on that. Like, I think you kind of alluded to it, but like it does take time to change culture, you know. Like if you look at the Americas sales force, you know, they might have had one culture that was different than the European sales force where you came from. Do you think the Americas sales force is kind of where they need to be in sort of are their incentives in the right place now, the price? Like, obviously we see it in the numbers, right? Like one of the issues if I sit here a year ago was it seemed like there was too much discounting, all that kind of stuff. Like is that stuff kind of, you know, I don't want to say taken care of, but has it evolved like the company wanted to?
I think the culture in general of the organization is evolving towards a more, you know, execution-focused accountability and making sure that with execution also we put incentives in the right place. This is definitely true for our sales force. Definitely true for our America sales force. We have aligned incentives. We are much clearer and much crispier in setting objectives that not only reward top line, but also account accurately of our ability to deliver margin and price.
Mm-hmm.
Also we have reinforced, and this is true globally, but, very important here in the Americas. We have reinforced everything that is our pricing capabilities. Two items. One is setting the right price. Making sure that we can translate into price, the value, and have also a quick feedback loop that, with everything that is cost evolution. Again, there is reaction to cost. There is a embedding value into price. We have, I think, stepped up our ability to manage both. This is something that badly needed strengthening, everything that is project specific price deviations. I'm pretty confident that, we are now robust there.
You know, all these three elements, is what I call, the pricing muscle. Are we from zero to 10 a 10? No, but we score way higher than we did a year ago. And we get a good grace there, at least in my playbook.
Helpful color. I just want to ask you about Dave Cote, 'cause obviously, you know, this time last year, he took a more active role in the company day-to-day management and operations. What's he doing now, and how has he helped you, Gio, as you've sort of transitioned to the Americas role and now the CEO?
Of course, Dave needs no introduction.
Of course.
We need that. He is a very active type of person to start with, and certainly a very active Executive Chairman. I would say that not only is he that, but he's an amazing mentor and a very demanding one. You know, there's times I say, "Oh, damn it, Dave." So angry that didn't occur to me, you know. Why did you have to tell me that? It still happens. Still, it still happens. I think we have a very, very good relationship, and he is tremendous help. He's also tremendous help because, you know, he gives us all attention. Having said that, of course, I run the company, and he's a tremendous support.
Tremendous support, and someone who is involved on the main strategic areas. I think it's a very, very healthy relationship and amazing help, help to Vertiv and quite honestly also to me. Very pleased with that.
Got it. Then let me ask you a couple more near-term questions. You know, you reported earnings yesterday. Markets seem to be holding up quite well. You know, orders are kind of in line with your expectations. You've got a ton of backlog. You know, enterprise cloud, you know, maybe slowing a little bit off of, you know, how good they were last year, but still pretty good. I think you just changed one of your bubbles, you know, to yellow in Europe around cloud. You know, obviously you did have that one cancellation. I think somebody asked you about it, said it was, you know, it was kind of more of an anomaly. Maybe talk about like the overall markets. It seems like, am I characterizing them correctly, Gio?
Is that like, you know, again, maybe a little slower but still pretty strong and you're watching markets like enterprise, but they really haven't faltered too much yet? Is that the right way to think about it?
I think you're not too far from the way, the way we put it as a matter of fact. I think we will need to separate two dimensions. The dimensions of the market itself, the investments in the industry, and the dimension of what we will see as bookings going forward. We were, I think, elaborated quite a lot on around a normalization yesterday during earnings call. We're serving an industry or industries that clearly are on a strong secular trend. That ain't changing. If anything, everything artificial intelligence, ChatGPT, et cetera, are going in the right direction. It is funny also. I was thinking about this morning while I was coming to work.
Now we all talk about artificial intelligence, ChatGPT, et cetera, but we forgot the enormous gaming market. Enormous and growing gaming market that is also quite demanding. Enormous market. The demand is there. Capacity is being built. Now, there are always fluctuations, so I'm not here speculating exactly how things fluctuate. One thing we know is that we're just like about a year, a year and a half ago, the way we saw orders come in, and not just we Vertiv, the industry as a whole, particularly us, so order come in was kind of unnaturally stretched to cover very long demand periods, out a year, a year and a half, two years worth of orders.
That was customers and the industry getting ready for lengthening lead times, kind of going after scarce capacity in terms of supply capacity and hence wanted to secure. The situation, if you will, is normalizing in the sense that lead times on the supply side are shrinking for us and then eventually for our customers. Customer understand that that type of behavior is no longer required. Of course, they go back to a more normal six, nine months lead time for at least a large hyperscale core or cloud, so that, you know, everyone can maintain the flexibility that is natural in the market. Should not view this as demand slowing down. Well, demand may. Demand will continue to grow, may grow at a lower speed. That should, that we will see.
We're thinking in terms of an 8%-10% more or less. That's what at least analysts out there tell us for what the hyperscale core cloud is concerned. We will see this kind of a different pattern in bookings for us going forward. When it comes to enterprise, you know, there are many dynamics there. There's certainly a data center enterprise and we're there trying to exactly understand what the macros will, how they will play. It is, we continue to expect it to grow. Maybe again, there could be an adjusting growth speed.
You know, there are other applications, especially in the enterprise that might move in accelerated fashion. We're very much, as I mentioned yesterday, very keenly watching all leading indicators of demand. So far we feel pretty good.
Gio, that's very helpful. Let me ask you the kinda same question, but kinda by region in the sense like, you've got different things going on in different regions, right? Like in the U.S., for example, you know, how much of it all is onshoring helping? Europe, you've talked about data sovereignty is really driving growth, you know, in individual countries. Is that still continuing the early part of the game in that? You know, China, like obviously Q4 was, you know, a little slower given COVID. Like, you know, how has China progressed, you know, through Q1 so far, and what do you expect for the year?
What I was describing earlier in answer your previous question was pretty much general in the world.
Yeah.
If anything was probably more weighted towards Europe and the Americas. In North America in particular that combined represent anyway, the biggest market. As data sovereignty, that was a big theme a few years ago, seems to be less of a huge theme. It's more latency. It's more proximity to the load or, you know, follow the geopolitics in many respects. That is generating interesting dynamics in Europe, and not only, and dynamics that I'd say are not unfavorable dynamics that from a pure, you know, business standpoint, will have.
I think if we look at APAC, certainly China is gonna, you know, move the needle quite a bit. Not only our industry, but all industries expect China after New Year's Eve, sorry, Chinese New Year, to re-accelerate and/or accelerate quite a lot. I would say that thinking that our space would behave differently would probably be wrong. I would say that our business, our space, our industry will follow the rest of the macroeconomics in China.
Gio, can I just ask you quickly about, like, communications? You know, cause we often talk about data centers. Is it kinda the same trends there? Cause you mentioned latency, so I think immediately communications. Like, you know, you have a lot of, I think, yellow on your bubble chart, but generally speaking, like, would you expect growth in that area for you guys?
Again, that's a slight difference because communication telecom goes in different technology waves.
Yep.
If you will. Now we went through in many, many jurisdictions, many, many regions through the 5G wave and the yellows that you see, if you will characterize the post big 5G rollout and the stability that always follow. That fluctuates. That's represent that. We do not expect many changes. We do not expect a particularly kind of a vibrant environment when it comes to telecom. It's just I think the yellow across the board character speaks volumes if you will, on the telecom situation right now.
You know, just focusing on backlog for a second, you know, you've dialed in pretty strong growth for 2023, you know, mid-teens, I think, you know, 10% pricing, you know, 5% pricing, right? 10% volume.
Yeah.
Like, I guess my question is, even at the end of this year, isn't backlog gonna stay still reasonably high? What does that mean for visibility into 2024? I know you don't want. We gotta get through 2023.
Yeah.
How should we think about?
Yeah, yeah.
How should we think about that?
I think your question is very pertinent as a matter of fact. You know, if you go back to my comments about normalization of booking rate or a normalization of, you know, lead times, you know, requested lead time when we get a PO from a customer, in fact, that is shrinking.
That's naturally, even if we have constant, you know, the 10% volume growth that we project 2023, even if ideally just for the pure math there, you project it going forward and you overlay on that, kind of, this wave on the booking side, you will see us getting out of 2023 with a lower backlog than the $4.8 billion that we shared yesterday. I would say that $4.8 billion or 70%+ coverage is a natural. I mean, we like it don't get me wrong 'cause it reflects an industry that is not well yet. Not saying Vertiv. I'm saying an industry.
Yeah.
That is not well yet. We think about an industry that is well, it's probably an industry that goes back to coverages that were probably on the 50% or below in the past on a given or lower in any given year. I cannot say where we will be at the end of 2023, but again, think about also an industry and Vertiv in this case in particular with a much more capacity, much more flexibility and resilience from a supply chain standpoint.
A company that is able and an industry that are able to work on much shorter lead times than today, and lead times that are, again, more normal for the industry. You have a recipe of going back to normality in terms of backlog coverage. At what speed the industry will get there, at what speed we will get there, it's hard for me to tell now.
Sure. No, that's helpful. Then, I wanna ask you about margins. I'll ask in a couple different ways. You know, first, you know, why can't Americas' margins sort of reach, you know, EMEA? You know, any sort of, you know, structural things that would stop it from doing that. Then I'll ask you about E&I, just 'cause we're talking about margins and, you know, obviously we saw what you did in Q4. Like, what is the risk, Gio, that E&I execution still is something that we're talking about in 2023?
How many questions are these?
Sure.
I think I heard three questions, but I'm not sure.
They're all related. They're all about margin, Gio.
Okay. The first was around margins.
Yeah.
In the Americas. If you think historically, our Americas margins were higher than EMEA. I, you know, find no reasons why we should not get back to that situation over time.
Okay.
Again, yesterday, we talked to some of the profit improvement programs, of course, of course, price first and foremost, but not only, definitely not only. Those profit programs, profit improvement programs will indeed have a positive impact across the board, regardless of the geography, regardless of the line of business. When it comes specifically to E&I, we are accelerating the integration process of E&I. I mentioned at the beginning when you were asking us about our strengths and our competitive advantages, I'd absolutely call E&I now and the ability that it enables to offer the entire powertrain for the digital infrastructure and an enormous asset are there.
We are very pleased indeed, to a certain extent I was almost surprised by how well sales synergies are playing. But again, there is a lot of integration, a lot of rigor that we have to ensure is injected in how the whole thing is run and really align the way we run every part of the company, including E&I. That's something that we have started to do.
Gio, is it kinda just like, you know, for parent Vertiv in the sense that you get this capacity up, and it gives you a lot better sort of chance of, you know, hitting that $80 million of profit that you're talking about for 2023 in E&I? Is that part of it?
It's capacity up, but also it's everything. Procurement, management process, intelligence, how we leverage intelligence, business intelligence, how we run the business more generally speaking. That can, that will, you will see improve.
Got it. No, helpful. Then, you know, maybe just to get David involved, like I wanna ask about cash.
I know.
Yeah. Sorry, Gio. Take a drink, relax for a second, you know. David, let me ask you about cash. You know, cash has lagged Vertiv's recovery a bit, as you know. You know, obviously, there was a nice step-up in Q4, but still below your guidance. Maybe talk about, you know, we all know that supply chain has been an issue for everybody. Talk about what Vertiv specifically is doing to improve cash to hit your target, you know, for 2023 that you have, and maybe longer term, you know, where do we go from here on cash conversion?
Yeah, absolutely. And just to kinda reiterate what you said and what we mentioned yesterday, you know, cash flow is critically important to us. I think we spent a lot of time and effort in 2022 fortifying the P&L. As you mentioned, the balance sheet has lagged, and that's gonna be the absolute, y ou know, everyone has multiple priorities, but I can tell you it's my number one priority for 2023. You know, our leverage isn't where it needs to be. I think, you know, mechanically at 5.6x debt to EBITDA at the end of 2021 or I'm sorry, at the end of 2022.
When we execute upon 2023, including generating $865 million of EBITDA and generating $350 million in cash, we should exit 2023 closer to 3x , which is, you know, within the range that we've mentioned historically. To do that, we have to execute. As you mentioned, inventory has been a challenge, not only for us, but across, you know, just about every industrial. Particularly acute for us, I think inventory was up, you know, almost $250 million during the year. There's opportunities to be had across all working capital, you know, components. I think the AR, our DSO is probably up five or six days. That is primarily administrative, mechanical.
There is no fundamental change as it relates to the terms that we transact business with our customers. We do have more complicated orders, which has created some delays in payments, but all very much fixable. The inventory is a little more complicated, right? Because it touches the operations with two challenges. Number one, the supply chain is much better, but it's not totally clean. We, you know, are heading into a year where we're gonna have continued record sales. Those are, you know, three things that are challenging to manage. We have specific plans developed and sometimes it's easier to develop plans to execute. We feel good with what we have assumed in our guidance as it relates to working capital reductions. I would say it's not super aggressive.
We feel good with what we have in our guidance, and we would hope to do better.
Dave, let me ask you just, you know. I'll relate a question that I have here with this discussion, right?
Yeah.
Like a year ago, we were talking a little bit about your ERP system as you know, and, you know, like you put in a new ERP, gave you better visibility about supply chain, all that kind of stuff. You know, one thing that people ask me, you know, is for a relatively new public company like you guys are still relatively new, do you have the systems you need to sort of monitor and see the cash, you know, as it's coming in, or you, do you still need to improve that? You know, like, do you have the visibility that, you know, we hope you do? When you give us, you know, a target on cash that you can do it, you know what I'm saying?
No, very fair. Just to remind everyone, the system implementation, it wasn't a global system implementation. Our systems in both EMEA and APAC are very mature and very good, and we have very good visibility in both those regions. The implementation was in the Americas and certainly it was a challenge when we initially launched. I would say we're much improved. I don't think you ever get to a point where you're totally satisfied, but much improved. I would say visibility into mechanics of daily collections and daily disbursements, that's not an issue. You know, I would say the visibility is related to operational things, right?
If there's a delay in the supply chain and we can't, you know, produce and ship a product, you know, that's certainly gonna impact, you know, cash flow 60 days from now. I would say we can always get better, but I think we've identified the main issues, and from a visibility perspective, I think we're covered. You know, the dynamic with the fourth quarter, it's a fair question. You know, didn't we see this at the end of October? You know, I always hate giving cash flow guidance for a quarter, right? You're kind of forced to do that at the end of the year 'cause you have a full year target out there.
Yeah.
But you can have fairly significant swings just with one check run moving $40 million-$50 million just, you know, 48 hours difference. That was a little bit of the dynamic in the fourth quarter. We had some large receipts that we anticipated in December. They moved into the first quarter. That type of thing's always gonna happen, but I don't think it's a macro issue as it relates to what we think we should do from a, from a cash flow perspective quarter to quarter, and certainly for the full year.
Very helpful. Gio, I forgot to ask you one thing about when we're talking about backlog that I just wanna go back to for one second, 'cause I think just to avoid confusion, you know, over the next couple of quarters, right? Like, you've talked about bookings again being down double digits in Q1. You do think that's more sort of normalization of supply chain versus some, you know, bigger weakness in demand. Is that fair or, like, how would you characterize, you know, the orders environment? I know you have your bubbles, but I think we need to be clear about that.
Well, absolutely. As I said, what we're seeing, what we see today is anyway a market and an industry that continue to have demand. It's actually worth be clear about the fact that when we talk to customer, we talk two, three years out. We do not talk necessarily the month or the quarter. Well, of course, depends on the type of market. The channel is much more short-term. If we take the part, the biggest part of market, the data center called cloud, to a good extent also the telecom are have a much longer horizon, if you will.
What we see today is demand continuing to do that.
Okay. Very helpful. You obviously, you stood up Monterrey. It seems like it went reasonably well. You know, maybe you can talk about, you know, what else, if anything. Like, I think you have your fan supplier in place, all that kind of stuff. Anything in terms of resiliency, in terms of capacity that you're still working on, or are you kind of, you know, with understanding you're never done, like, are you mostly done with resiliency?
In this changing world, no one will ever be done, as I say.
I said that already.
Exactly. Exactly.
I agree.
Never, never done.
Yeah. Yeah.
In our case in particular, I think we have to separate two things. One is capacity and making the capacity available. You know, Monterrey is definitely an example. We are investing in India because we see opportunity there, but also because we can think of India as a source of, you know, global supply. We're investing heavily there. We are expanding our capacity for everything E&I, leveraging our kind of a legacy presence in Slovakia, in UAE that came with the E&I acquisition in Mexico. We see a lot of opportunity. Clearly, the long term, the industry continues to grow, as we were saying. Wanna make sure that we have capacity available.
Of course, it helps us in the short term to secure that, to make us robust for the short-term demand and the backlog that we have in our belly, so to speak, right now. We have moved from a reactive type of re-resilience, resiliency programs to we are moving to kind of a proactive, longer long term. This very morning, example, I was in my regular meeting with the global procurement leaders and ops leaders, in which we really take stock of where we are. For example, fans, we now have multiple fan suppliers.
We are working very with a lot of focus on everything power semiconductors, because another area, the not just us clearly, and certainly the entire industry and many industries are struggling with. I am very, very confident. Well, first of all, what we have done has made a difference, and you see the difference in our Q4 numbers. I'm confident that the things that we're doing right now are going in the right direction.
Again, this transition from reactive, we do not have component X, let's make sure that we have other providers to proactively look at everything that could go wrong and make an early move in that respect to, okay, maybe sourcing from country X in a year and a half now will be problematic. We have to have a plan B and a plan C. More of, or a kind of a geopolitical aspect to that. If we do X, Y, Z, we can have kind of a, we can ease our tariff situations. That is a structured approach that we now have in place. We have, again, a lot of runway, but structure it is. I think we're heading in the right direction. Again, a lot to do.
A lot to do.
Yeah, we've got about one minute left, we've got one question here in the audience if we could.
Hi, Gio. Just to tie together a couple of Andy's points on pricing and backlog. With all the price that you guys have taken for store margins, how are we confident that the degradation we're seeing in orders and the cancellation in the backlog isn't a function of the higher price and it's market share loss and there's pushback, and we're dealing with some price elasticity issues that we're unaware of? How do we have confidence the pricing isn't resulting in some of that?
First of all, we always have to be extraordinarily vigilant, about that. One of the things that, for example, we've strengthened in the Americas, that is really strong in the other parts of the world is, a much more robust, management of everything pipeline, commercial opportunity pipeline. An ability to, connect the dots between, price, win rate. Let's say we are getting much better equipped at understanding where the elasticity thresholds, lie, relative to where we were before. Again, just like we were saying with the resiliency here, you know, the job is never done.
It's a day-to-day, transaction by transaction at times, assessment of what is the right position vis-a-vis making sure that market shares are, you know, stay very, very well in focus. That's a balance that we have to strike day in, day out. I start to feel confident in the tools that we are using for that type of assessment.
We really appreciate the time, guys. Gio, David, thank you so much for joining us, and next year you'll hopefully be here.
Thank you.
We'll miss you, but we'll see you soon.
Thanks a lot, Andy. Thanks a lot.
Thanks again, guys. Take care. Bye-bye.